THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY ANKARA UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF WESTERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE (ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) ALIENATION AND FICTION IN THE NEW ZEALAND POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL:

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THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY ANKARA UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF WESTERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE (ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE)

ALIENATION AND FICTION IN THE NEW ZEALAND POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL: TOWARDS ANOTHER SUMMER BY JANET FRAME AND THE

SILICON TONGUE BY BERYL FLETCHER FROM A POSTHUMANIST PERSPECTIVE, AND MISTER PIP BY LLOYD JONES WITH

POSTHUMANIST ELEMENTS

PhD Dissertation

Özgü ŞEKER

Ankara,2021

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PhD Dissertation

Özgü ŞEKER

Supervisor

Prof. Dr. Ufuk EGE UYGUR

Ankara,2021

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PhD Dissertation

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ufuk EGE UYGUR

EXAMINING COMMITTEE MEMBERS

Name and Surname Signature

1. Prof. Dr. Ufuk EGE UYGUR (Supervisor) ………

2. Prof. Dr. Gülsev PAKKAN ………

3. Prof. Dr. Nazan TUTAŞ ………

4. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Seda PEKŞEN ………

5. Assist. Prof. Dr. Nazlı GÜNDÜZ ………

Examination Date: 02/02/2021

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TO THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY ANKARA UNIVERSITY

I hereby declare that in my PhD dissertation “Alienation and Fiction in the New Zealand Postcolonial Novel: Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame and The Silicon Tongue by Beryl Fletcher from a Posthumanist Perspective, and Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones with Posthumanist Elements (Ankara,2021)” prepared under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ufuk EGE UYGUR, all information has been obtained and presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct. I also declare that, as required by these rules and conduct, I have fully cited and referenced all materials and results that are not original to this work.

24/02/2021 Özgü ŞEKER

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Dr.

Ufuk EGE UYGUR, for the patience, guidance, and great advice she has constantly given to me during this process. As a supervisor, she has not only provided full support of her but also encouraged me to meet new fields of study and made me a better learner.

I am also thankful to the members of the monitoring committee of this dissertation, Prof. Dr. Gülsev PAKKAN and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Seda PEKŞEN for their invaluable advice and guidance. I also want to thank my colleagues Dr. Funda HAY and Dr. Emrah ÖZBAY for their friendship and support.

I am indebted to my master’s supervisor Prof. Dr. Metin TOPRAK, Dr. Gülbin Evren KIRANOĞLU ERGÜNEŞ, and Dr. Zümrüt ALTINDAĞ, whose inspiring words have contributed to my academic life to a large extent. My special thanks go to the Director of the School of Foreign Languages of Kocaeli University, Şule KILCI, and my dear colleagues at the School of Foreign Languages and at the Department of Western Languages and Literatures for their help during this process.

Special and sincere thanks go to my dear family for their unconditioned love, support, and encouragement. Without them, I would not have succeeded both in my personal and education life.

Lastly, I would also like to thank my husband for his help, support, and encouraging words from the years of our university lives till now.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKKOWLEDGEMENTS ……….………... i

TABLE OF CONTENTS ……….……. ii

INTRODUCTION ………. 1

CHAPTER I: TOWARDS ANOTHER SUMMER, BY JANET FRAME 1. Alienation and Other: Search for Recognition and Other as the Constitutive of Self ………..… 28

2. Alienation and Fiction: Double Colonisation, Search for a Unified Self, and Lack of Belonging ………. 40

3. Alienation and Posthumanism: Defamiliarization, Self-Recognition, and Self- Expression ………... 54

3.1. Posthumanism and Animals ………. 61

3.1.1. Animals in Science ……….... 61

3.1.2. Becoming an Animal and a Posthuman ………... 66

3.1.3. Posthumanism in Towards Another Summer ………. 72

3.2. Posthumanism and Language: Towards Another Summer ………... 96

3.3. Posthumanism: Cyborg and Animal ………... 101

4. Relations between Postcolonialism, Fiction, Posthumanism, and Defamiliarization in Towards Another Summer ……….…..…….. 102

CHAPTER II: THE SILICON TONGUE, BY BERYL FLETCHER 1. Alienation and Other as the Constitutive of Identity Formation ………... 113

2. Alienation and Fiction: Self-Expression, Self-Revelation, and Potentialities in the Life and Self ……….. 130

2.1. Trauma and Fiction ……… 133

2.2. Narration and the Fiction of Trauma ……….. 144

2.3. A Silken Tongue and The Silicon Tongue ……….. 148

2.4. Fiction and Criticism towards Class Divisions and Gender Inequality …….. 154

3. Alienation and Posthumanism: Cyberspace as a Medium to Lessen the Sense of Longing for the Mother/Motherland ………..… 157

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3.1. Posthumanism and Cybernetics ……….. 159

3.2. Posthumanism and Animals ………... 166

4. Relations between Postcolonialism, Fiction, and Posthumanism in The Silicon Tongue ………... 169

CHAPTER III: MISTER PIP, BY LLOYD JONES 1. Alienation and Other: The Perception of the Other, Mimicry, and War ………... 184

1.1. Mimicry and Alienation ………. 192

1.2. War and Alienation ……… 199

2. Alienation and Fiction: Bildungsroman, National Identity, Detachment from War, and the Possibility of Change ……… 208

2.1. Fiction as the Cause of Alienation: A Work of a Colonial Power, and Frantz Fanon and the First and the Second Phases of Attaining a National Identity..210

2.1.1. Fiction and Otherization and the First Phase of the Attainment of a National Identity ………..……… 212

2.1.2. The Concept of Home, Writing, and the Second Phase of the Attainment of a National Identity ……….. 229

2.1.2.1. The Concept of Home ……….. 229

2.1.2.2. Writing ………. 238

2.2. Fiction as a Medium to Detach the Self from the Harsh Consequences of the War, and the Possibility of Change ………...………. 242

3. Alienation and Posthumanism: A Means to Preserve Racial/National and Personal Values ……… 249

4. Fiction as the Tie between Alienation and the Other ………...………. 254

CONCLUSION ……….. 259

BIBLIOGRAPHY ……….. 267

ÖZET ……….. 283

ABSTRACT ………... 285

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INTRODUCTION

In Orientalism (1991), Edward Said criticises the conception of the Orient and/or East as “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said 1991: 1), and this work of Edward Said, relating this notion of the East and the Eastern countries, put forward by the Western ones, to the dominant discourse and power of the Occident/West has been the triggering point of the postcolonial criticism. It is not only the East but also the South attracting the Northern and Western countries and becoming mostly the setting of postcolonial works. The novels in this dissertation, Towards Another Summer, by Janet Frame, The Silicon Tongue, by Beryl Fletcher, and Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones, deal with the influence of the other/Other on postcolonial characters and on their alienation, the relationship between alienation and fiction, manifested as literature/cyberspace, and the relationship between alienation and posthumanism. The dissertation aims at depicting different functions of fiction in relation to the alienation felt by postcolonial characters, how fiction becomes a medium to get rid of the alienation felt by postcolonial characters, how it becomes influential in the alienation of postcolonial characters, and how fiction and posthumanism have similar functions in regard to the alienation of postcolonial characters.

As literature uses mostly people as the mediums of social issues or it observes people and reveals their feelings, perception, ideas, and identities, literature becomes a medium and reflection of the social issues. Therefore, it reflects the social interactions and relations of different communities, countries, nations, and cultures. The interactions and relations of the coloniser and the colonized are foregrounded both in the colonial and in the postcolonial texts. Some critics and theorists like Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak along with many others deal with different aspects of colonialism and/or postcolonialism. These critics and theorists

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mostly depict their criticism towards the hegemonic and dominant discourse of the colonisers, the Western and the Northern countries considered to be the First World, over the colonized, the Eastern and the Southern countries deemed to be the Third World. As settled and politically, economically, and religiously exploited lands, colonies become the places inhabited by people of different origins, races, colours, religions, and cultures, and the tasks of postcolonial critics and theorists are to highlight the discursive contexts and forms of the colonial discourse, to foreground the experiences and feelings of an individual exposed to colonialism, decolonization, and/or post(-)colonialism, and to propose a different and alternative reading of the colonized- coloniser relationship. To delve into the details, imperialism, as the ideological background of colonialism, brings forth the ideational acceptance of the so-called racial and cultural inferiority of the colonized and superiority of the colonisers who assume themselves to be civilised and the colonized to be uncivilised. Criticising the concept of the Western countries’ task of civilising the Eastern ones, the postcolonial critics and theorists delineate both the unfavourable and favourable features of being a postcolonial and a postcolonial human being. People of a post-colonial country, either in a home-country or in a host-country, are at times marginalized and otherized, and they are made to feel in-between and/or alienated, too. Also, it is possible to observe that they feel that they are not understood, they lose the sense of belonging, and they have some problems in self-recognition, self-perception, and self-identity, as well. However, people experiencing colonialism and post(-)colonialism also favour multiculturalism and hybridity at the same time because postcolonialism “allows [them] to understand and critique the West as both insiders and outsiders.” (Innes 2007: 12) Upon questioning the colonial discourse, the colonized can notice and foreground the peculiarities of their own culture, language and literature in the process of celebrating

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the hybridity. Therefore, they can find the opportunity to define who they are; namely, they can have the opportunity to speak and verbalise their feelings and opinions.

To give the theoretical background briefly, colonialism refers to an act of Western/Northern countries’ acts of settling in the Eastern/Southern countries and ruling them politically, economically, religiously, and socially. The colonial acts started with Greece and Rome, and the 15^th, 16^th and 17^thcenturies saw the colonial acts of Portugal, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, French, and Britain with the aim of finding a market for the raw materials they had as a result of geographical explorations (MacQueen, 2007: 1, 2). In the 19^thand 20^th centuries, however, colonial acts of the Western countries were performed with an ideological background, which is imperialism (Osterhammel, 2009: 23). The Eastern and Southern Third World countries, including the settler colonies like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, and the exploitation colonies like America and India, were regarded as uncivilized when compared to the Western and Northern countries (Osterhammel, 2002: 11, 12). As the subject matter of this dissertation, the colonial history of New Zealand dates back to the 17^th century. In 1642, as the first European man, Abel Tasman and his crew landed on Golden Bay, or Taitapu in the Māori language – the Māories refer to the indigenous people of Aotearoa or New Zealand whereas Pākehās refer to the colonial settlers in New Zealand. After Abel Tasman, Captain James Cook went to New Zealand in late 1700s, and Abel Tasman and James Cook became the earlier colonisers of the island. The 19^th century onwards saw the invasion of the land by many Europeans. The year 1840 was significant in the colonial history of New Zealand as it was the year when the Treaty of Waitangi, the treaty showing that New Zealand was British annexation, was signed. The problem in the treaty was that what was written in the Māori language was different from the English version of the treaty. In the Māori version of the treaty, the annexation was called as British governorship whereas in the English version of the treaty, it was

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called as sovereignty (Keown, 2007: 56); that is the “five hundred Māori who eventually signed the Treaty were therefore effectively misled” (56) because “the British government subsequently recognized only the English-language version” (56).

Therefore, the years after the treaty, saw many Pākehā settlements in the Māori lands.

After some conflicts between Māories and Pākehās on “land wars”, a peace agreement was signed in 1881 (57), and the nationalist movements of New Zealanders began. In 1907, New Zealand gained the status of a dominion rather than a colony. It was after the Versailles Peace Treaty (1919) New Zealand acted as a sovereign country that was still in control of Britain, and it was in 1947 that New Zealand became a fully independent country.

The post-colonial period – that is, political independence, referring to the condition after the time when the colonized gains its independence as a result of nationalist movements, did not offer the colonized lands, such as New Zealand as the subject matter of this dissertation, full economic and social independence. Therefore, some of the people of the former colonized countries began to migrate, especially after World War II, to the European and Western countries which they were dependent on.

Postcolonialism, the word without the hyphen, refers to the social and cultural consequences of post-colonialism. That is, while post-colonialism refers to the historical period of gaining independence from a former coloniser, postcolonialism refers to the social and cultural consequences of the historical independence. It is for this reason that a former colonized can be post-colonial after the independence but still be dependent on the former coloniser economically, socially, and culturally. The idea is propounded by Innes as follows: postcolonialism, unlike a historical condition of post-colonialism,

“tends to embrace literary and cultural – and sometimes anthropological – studies, [and]

the term is more often used to refer to the consequences of colonialism from the time

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the area was first colonized.” (2007: 1-2) Thus, when one refers to the literature of a post-colonial country, he/she can talk about the postcolonial literature in which the former colonized countries’ people find a place to themselves, their voice, and identity, in which a former coloniser’s and a former colonized person’s alienation, loneliness, longing for the motherland, lack and loss of belonging, hybrid and mimic nature are observed, and in which criticism towards colonialism is expressed with a new and differing viewpoint.

As this dissertation encompasses the concepts of otherness and other and Other both with the small and capital letters and also some postcolonial concepts like hybridity, ambivalence, mimicry, national consciousness, it is appropriate to touch upon them for their instrumental function to understand the characters’ alienation in the novels under scrutiny. In a social context, the concept of otherness refers to the psychological interpretation of exclusion that has physical and verbal representations, as well. It is generally associated with not being accepted by a group and not being included in it. As Nina Rowe argues, the other, as a concept of binarism, is notion of difference to refer to outsiders or people at the margins of a dominant society (2012:

131). Bearing both Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in mind, the psychological background of the concept goes back to the birth; when one is born, the physical separation from the mother ends in the psychological separation from the mother especially when the child is a male one especially after the Oedipus Complex; and whether the male or the female, the child becomes a different and another entity that is separate from the mother. As the child is a different entity, people around the child are other entities for him/her. The child in the Mirror phase is alienated because the body and the soul do not encompass one another; they are the others, with a small letter, of each other. This otherness gets deeper when one enters into the Symbolic domain because the Symbolic domain is the domain of power, authority, rules, expectations that

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are discursively, socially, and culturally formed. This domain is, therefore, the domain of the Other, with a capital letter, to refer to its function of rule-giving. Rowe argues, within postcolonial framework, the psychological understanding of the other and Other delineate the social representations of the colonized and the coloniser: “the other serves as a shorthand for the colonized, the exotic, and the alien”, and also dark-skinned people and the native (133), while Other refers to the colonisers. As the Other is the domain of language for Lacan, it includes the dominant discourse that situates different groups of people at different poles. The colonized and the colonisers speaking different languages are made to accept the superiority of the language of the colonisers, that is, the language of the Other as the people of having the hegemonic position over the colonized. Feeling the need to express themselves, the colonized uses the language of the Other and serves imperialism as they become open to be constituted by the colonial discourse of the Other.

This colonial discourse of the Other is influential for postcolonial critics and theorists in forming the bases of their criticisms towards colonialism as the colonial discourse makes them be aware of the dualistic positioning of the colonized and the colonisers, question the binarism in colonialism, and propose different and alternative readings of the colonized-coloniser relationship. Concepts of hybridity, ambivalence, and mimicry are the consequences of such criticism towards the colonial discourse that aims at a stable positioning of the groups and the universal acceptance of this positioning. Because hybridity, ambivalence, and mimicry refer to the transnational, transcultural, and even translational relations of people of different groups, the colonized and the colonisers within postcolonial framework, they inherently reject the notions of stability, fixity, and universality. Therefore, they offer different readings of the colonized-coloniser relationship. To speak about each concept individually, Arif Dirlik describes hybridity, or hybridness as he calls the concept, as a situation that is

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““in-betweenness” of the postcolonial subject that is not to be contained within fixed categories or binary oppositions” (1994: 336). Hybridity does not contain fixity as it includes the inherently indispensable merging of both the coloniser and the colonized since they are in contact with each other in their transcultural relationship; without the colonized, the coloniser cannot define not only themselves but also the colonized, so the existence of the one determines the existence of the other, and they are in contact with one another. To be more precise, the colonized and the coloniser are interdependent on one another in the individuation process of the person exposed to migration/emigration/immigration; hence, s/he is inherently hybrid. Hybridity, then, refers to such intermingling of different nations/cultures that brings forth the concepts of in-betweenness and of third space, a space engendered as an alternative to at least two different spaces of the nations/cultures that both disavow and necessitate each other in the binary oppositional system. As Homi K. Bhabha argues, “the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire (Bhabha, 1994: 112). As the formative concept of the third space, hybridity is a favourable case for especially an emigrant/immigrant or a person exposed to emigration/immigration as it offers alternatives to stereotypical set definitions of people of a nation. “The presence of colonialist authority is no longer immediately visible” in hybridity (114) because “the knowledges of cultural authority [are] articulated with forms of ‘native’ knowledges” (115). It is for this reason that hybridity is mostly a concept that is celebrated in postcolonial texts as it emphasises the connectedness of the colonized and the coloniser and their fluid relationship in which

individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more than one culture (for instance, that of the coloniser through a colonial school system, and that of the colonized, through local and oral traditions) (Barry, 2002: 199).

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As another representation of criticism towards the fixity and universality in the colonial discourse, ambivalence refers to the situation of both desiring and disavowing of a stereotypical definitions and descriptions. Within postcolonial framework, there is the sense of incisiveness of the colonial subject about his/her attitude towards the colonial discourse. In this regard, the indecisive colonial subject is “in-between, where the shadow of the other falls upon the self” (Bhabha, 1994: 60). That is, the colonial subject is an in-between situation where the shadow of the colonisers falls upon him/her. This condition of ambivalence has favourable outcomes for a postcolonial person as s/he finds the chance of looking back into himself/herself, his position in the colonial discourse; therefore, he has the chance of deciding his/her attitude towards the colonial discourse and questions it as both an insider and an outsider as in hybridity, which is, in fact, an outcome of an ambivalent situation. “The analytic of ambivalence questions dogmatic and moralistic positions on the meaning of oppression and discrimination.” (67) Hence, the colonized questions the stereotypical categorizations like the superior coloniser and inferior colonized.

As for mimicry, it necessitates the existence of both the coloniser and the colonized to define a mimic situation in which the colonial discourse is questioned by the same fluid and transcultural nature of the relationship between the coloniser and the colonized. As Homi Bhabha argues,

Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power.

Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’

knowledges and disciplinary powers. (86)

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As argued by Bhabha, mimicry is both the affirmation of the power of the Other and a threat to that power in the sense that the colonized mimicking the coloniser accepts and affirms the power of the Other as s/he desires to become like the Other; however, the act of mimicking the Other unravels the idea that the dominant and powerful Other can be reached and one can become like that Other although s/he cannot become exactly the same of that Other; therefore, the stable positioning of the colonized and the coloniser in the colonial discourse is challenged with mimicry as it depicts that it is possible to transcend the borders between the colonized and the coloniser. In this regard, mimicry poses a threat to the understanding of the superiority of the colonisers and of the inferiority of the colonized in the colonial discourse. Mimicry is not only a concept that is celebrated in the sense that it questions the colonial discourse and paves the way for alternative identities more aware of the impositions on them but also a condition that causes one’s alienation from his/her own nation and culture because in mimicry there is the colonized desiring to act and seem like the coloniser and creating some detachment between himself/herself and his/her own culture. As the act of mimicry is a “partial”

resemblance to the colonized (86), a “metonymy of presence” (89), there is no exact unification with the colonized; there is just a resemblance that both challenges fixity and causes alienation.

National consciousness is also a significant issue to be discussed in this dissertation due to its relation to the alienation of characters and especially the protagonist in the last novel, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. As a concept, it is significant because it enables the characters to have an understanding of their own. To be more precise, if a nation is aware of the need to preserve and maintain its own national and cultural values, people belonging to that nation become more aware of the need to have a national self and identity, which is also a challenge to the imposed notion of a self and identity. In “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power” (2019), Stuart Hall points at

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the meaning-making process and its relation to how the West forms a national self and identity: for Hall, “meaning always depends on the relations that exist between the different terms or words within a meaning system” (2019: 144). That is, meaning is achieved through a process of various elements coming together; there cannot be a single element that makes up a meaning of an event or a situation, for instance. Meaning is formed as a consequence of an element’s relation to other elements and the interactions between them. Hall goes on explaining the relationship between meaning- making process and how the West forms a national self and identity first by touching upon how an infant forms its self and then by relating the idea to the meaning-making process of the West in relation to “the Rest”: “an infant first learns to think of itself as a separate and unique “self” by recognizing its separation – its difference – from others (principally, of course, its mother)” (144); likewise, the West forms a self and an identity describing the western European people as the West and people who are non- Western as the Rest as a consequence of “Europe’s sense of difference from other worlds – how it came to represent itself in relation to these “others[…]” (144). Then it can be interpreted that a person needs to be in relation to other people, and a nation needs to be in relation to other nations for a national identity to be formed. Within colonial and postcolonial framework, Hall’s argument explains the ideological background of the colonial understanding of the colonized claimed to be inferior, under- developed, needing to be civilized and the coloniser claimed to be superior, developed, and civilized: these binary oppositions are formed by the West in relation to “others”

stated in the quotation: the West needs the East or “the Rest” to define itself and situate itself to the favourable side of the oppositions. In this regard, a Western national identity is formed based on a dualistic relationship between the West and “the Rest”.

Considering postcolonialism, the concept of national consciousness is, therefore, significant not only for the Western and/or Northern colonial powers but also for the

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Eastern and/or Southern colonial people to define themselves and determine their positions. For the attainment of national consciousness and in the process of defining the self and determining the position, literature is used as a tool by the Western/Northern colonisers “to educate citizens as to their duties, to inculcate national pride and moral values” (Habib, 2005: 740). Literature, as a tool to provide the sense of national pride for the colonisers, is also a tool used to impose the notion of inferiority of the colonized and the superiority of the colonisers; literature, then, becomes a medium to convey the ideological background of colonialism, that is the colonized needing to be civilized. However, it is also a tool to challenge the imposed notions of inferiority, under-development, “superstitiousness, backwardness, barbarism, moral incapacity, and intellectual impoverishment” when compared to “Europe’s self-image, resting on the Enlightenment project of rationality, progress, civilization, and moral agency” (740, 741). As part of the culture of a nation, literature, therefore, becomes a medium to reflect national values, as well, and the literary works of the former colonized become mostly national allegories, as Fredric Jameson argues, to depict the call for nationalism in their delineation of limited numbers of characters representing for the whole nation.

Frantz Fanon touches on the tie between the culture of a nation and nationalism in relation to national liberation in The Wretched of the Earth (2004): for Fanon, “[o]ne cannot divorce the combat for culture from the people’s struggle for liberation” (2004:

168). That is, both Jameson and Fanon argue the significance of culture in the formation of a national identity. “To fight for national culture first of all means fighting for the liberation of the nation, the tangible matrix from which culture can grow.” (168) It is for this reason that when the colonized challenges the stereotypical impositions like inferiority, backwardness, intellectual impoverishment on them, they represent their fight for nationalism and the attainment of national culture and identity. In its relation to the attainment of national identity, the representation of national “culture is the

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expression of “national consciousness,”” (Habib, 2005: 744) so national consciousness is a concept that includes the interrelations between national culture and national identity, which come out by means of and as a consequence of national consciousness.

It is not an easy process or task to have national consciousness. As long as the national bourgeois class of the colonized follows the Western bourgeois values, they make little progress in having “economic power or knowledge” as they are “not engaged in production or invention or labor” (742). For the attainment of national consciousness, culture, and identity, this bourgeois class needs to change its attitude towards the Western bourgeois values “with the aid of the “honest intellectuals” who truly desire revolutionary change for the mass of the people” (743). That is, thanks to the intellectuals, the national consciousness can be achieved for the colonized, and as a consequence of that they can have national culture and identity. The process of achieving national consciousness is related to Peter Barry’s definitions of the three phases of postcolonial writers’ attitudes towards literature; Barry argues that postcolonial literatures includes the Adopt, Adapt, and Adept phases (Barry, 196). In the first phase, the postcolonial writer adopts the cultural values of the coloniser; in the second phase, the postcolonial writer adapts these cultural values of the coloniser to the cultural values of the origin; and lastly in the adept phase, the postcolonial writer becomes an adept, a skilled writer and an expert that does not imitate the values of the coloniser but forms and reflects his/her own literature and literary values (196). Passing through these phases, the postcolonial writer achieves national consciousness as s/he forms and reflects his/her own values as a skilled writer in the end.

To recap, the other and Other are constitutive factors of self and identity: just like the child differentiating himself/herself from the others around him/her and trying to achieve a self in the domain of the Symbolic Other, the colonized tries to achieve a self and an identity among the people of his/her own race, among the others, and as a

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reaction to the colonisers, the Other. These constitutive factors pave the way for such postcolonial conditions as hybridity, ambivalence, and mimicry, which foreground the interpretation of fixed and stereotypical binary impositions from a different, differing, and a new perspective, and this, as a consequence, enables the colonized to have national consciousness and a national identity by preserving cultural values.

Offering new and differing viewpoint, postcolonialism is in relation to posthumanism and the defamiliarization technique in Russian Formalism in the sense that they both aim at challenging the preconceived conceptions of human beings and events and offer new and differing look at them. To begin with posthumanism, it refers to the theory that challenges Western anthropocentric concept of human being. It is not the total rejection of humanism but a challenge to that in that it does not see the man as the measure of all living beings. Within the postcolonial framework, a Western/Northern and a white man is not the measure of all living beings and the Eastern/Southern and a black human being challenges the Western anthropocentric man in a manner that the Eastern/Southern and a black human being celebrates his/her transformation into another living being, either an animal, or a cybernetic organism, or an inanimate entity, and change in his/her form and identity. To delve more into the details, transhumanism is the passage from humanism to posthumanism. As stated beforehand, humanism regards the man as the measure of all living beings because it prioritizes the reason and the rational mind in the man and rejects dependence on superstitious and supernatural beliefs because the man has the reasoning capability to determine right or wrong (Wolfe, 2010: xi). Transhumanism, similar to humanism, foregrounds the human beings in that it tries to prolong the life of the human beings by means of technology.

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Transhumanists are keen on the enhancement of human intellectual, physical and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of life span. (Garreau, 2005: 231)

Foregrounding human beings, transhumanism also hints at the coming of posthumanism since transhuman is “in the process of becoming posthuman” (232) with the belief that

“it [is] naïve to think the human condition and human nature will remain pretty much the same for much longer” (232) due to the changes in technology (232).

Posthumanism, unlike humanism and transhumanism, does not foreground the idea that man is the measure of all living beings thanks to the reasoning capability peculiar to the man; instead, posthumanism calls for the integration of living beings and their relation to one another, and it offers a new and different look at what a human being is. Thanks to the advancements in technology, posthumanism enables people to reconsider the relationship between body and information: the wall between information, operating through the metaphysics of absence, and bodies, depending on the metaphysics of presence, begins to collapse, and bodies and information come together and merge with one another in different cultural domains (Mitchell and Thurtle, 2004: 1). That is bodies as solid entities and information as a non-physical construct merge in posthumanism, and the idea of what a body is changes. Body is no longer conceived to be just a naturalist, an animal, or a cultural body: it is a phenomenological body that is as it is perceived and experienced (4-5). Then body is a construct that can be non-physical at times, which enables the fluid transformation of human bodies into different entities.

The non-physical and fluid forms of the body also bring forth “mobilities of human beings in social and political contexts” (Thacker, 2003: 79). These mobilities welcome transformation of human beings into cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs, animals, the Earth, and even another human being that is not prioritized in the Western humanist discourse. Related to the criticism towards Western humanism, the patriarchal

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dominancy is also challenged in posthumanism as well as the anthropocentric nature of human beings. In this regard, posthumanism is in relation to the fields of study like feminism and ecocriticism that challenge the dominance of the male sex or humanity on the female sex or on the Earth. A posthuman, therefore, celebrates this challenge to anthropocentrism and patriarchy by looking at an individual from a defamiliarized perspective that does not approve of and repeat the stereotypical definitions of sex and gender that situate the male sex over the female, that determine the man as dominance and power and the woman as weak when compared to the man. Besides, a posthuman criticizes the understanding that human beings can exploit the nature and the Earth for his/her own sake. Just like postcolonialism, then, posthumanism enables an individual to look at himself/herself in a different and defamiliarized way to understand his/her position among other entities, to reinterpret his/her relations to other living and non- living beings, to search and find an identity for himself/herself, and to express the self by means of the identities found for the self.

In the search for the ways to re-evaluate the self, its position, its relations to others and the Other, and its expression, defamiliarization is a technique that correlates with postcolonialism and posthumanism in the sense that they all enable a human being to have a look at himself/herself with a different viewpoint. Defamiliarization, for the Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky, means making the unconsciously and automatically formed familiar and habitual structures, sentences, and expressions unfamiliar so that the objects or feelings described via these structures, sentences, and expressions can have an artistic value. For the Russian Formalists, the artistic value of a work is not achieved through the expressions or forms serving a meaning. Instead, the work gains its artistic value thanks to the defamiliarization and foregrounding processes. These defamiliarization and foreground processes are emphasized especially by the Russian Formalists Victor Shklovsky and Jan Mukařovský, who point at the

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differences between the poetic language and the standard and everyday language. For them, the standard and everyday language aims at communication and the transmission of the true and real information shared in the everyday language. However, the poetic language does not aim at conveying a true message to the receiver; instead, it focuses on the literariness of that language and the ways to make a language artistic. That is, the language used in daily life serves the aim of communication whereas the poetic language includes some defamiliarized and foregrounded elements that enable the reader to perceive the object or feeling described as an artistic and aesthetic one. In this regard, the poetic language does not carry the aim of conveying a meaning; instead, it makes the readers focus more on the form so that they can perceive the objects or feelings in their new forms. Therefore, the habitual and automatic perception of these objects or feelings is removed. For the Russian Formalists, the defamiliarized expressions that are used for the literariness of the work itself are the ones to be analysed for a scientific approach to the work considered. The literariness of the work can be achieved by understanding the essence of an object rather than seeing it as an object. For the Russian Formalists, the object is there to be perceived rather than seen.

This perception happens via the defamiliarization technique. The defamiliarization technique foregrounds the peculiar preference of the lexical and syntactical usages. In verse and in poems, the language is used in a different way than in the standard and everyday language. In verse, the use of literary devices, enjambments, and bringing together images that are not normally used together are some uses of the defamiliarization technique. In prose, defamiliarization is achieved through the scheming of the story of the work. In this sense, the plot of a work is the defamiliarized expression of its story. A work has one story, the chronological order of events; it may have, however, hundreds of plots, different organizations of the events. Thanks to these different organizations, a prose has its artistic and literary value. The literary devices

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used in prose can also be a way to foreground the expressions in it. Therefore, novelists, as prose writers, can use such foregrounded and defamiliarized expressions besides some other techniques making the work more artistic.

In Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer, Beryl Fletcher’s The Silicon Tongue, and Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip, there is the use of the defamiliarization technique that makes these novels artistic and literary in the poetic use of the language used in them, in their non-linear and non-chronological choice of the expression of events and feelings, that is in their plot structure that disrupts the linearity of the narrative through the use of stream-of-consciousness technique, through flashbacks, through repetitions, and through the expressions of the same events from the perspectives of different people. Here it has to be noted that this does not mean that the novels are not artistic and literary without the use of the defamiliarization technique. The use of the technique reflects the artistic nature of the language used in these novels. That is, as well as the contextual, historical, and theoretical approaches to and interpretations of the novels, the forms of the language used in the novels make them artistic. Both the content and the defamiliarized use of the language reflect postcolonial characters’ alienation. Because all the novels under scrutiny focus on alienation of postcolonial characters rather than the reflection of what happens to them in a chronological order, they include disruptions in the narrative because the characters in the novels reflect their memories while depicting their alienation. As memories are non-linear and come to the conscious at any time by disrupting the chronological passing of time, the narratives in the novels are non-linear with flashbacks, and the use of ellipsis and incomplete statements reflect the fragmented memories of characters in the novels. Beside the plot structure, the use of literary devices in them also makes them more artistic. First, the use of metaphors and personifications reflecting alienation of characters from their human forms and from the environment deautomatize the familiar and habitual perceptions of human beings: a

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postcolonial person expresses his/her migratory nature by becoming a bird, and Grace in Towards Another Summer can fly with her bird identity, for instance (Frame, 2009:

104). There is a resemblance between the mind of a postcolonial person and a bird as they can both fly (Fletcher, 1996: 25). Nature and human beings are alike in the sense that they can be disrespectful, dumb, and shameful (Jones, 2007: 34). These literary devices help the readers think on the alienated nature of the characters by the defamiliarization technique: as the readers are familiar with birds’ flying, a human being’s flying is a deautomotized expression that makes them think on human beings and their migratory nature and the act of flying itself. The readers focus on how nature can be like a person by use of personification. Second, repetitions and repeated ideas are also used by the writers to emphasize the depth of the alienation: to emphasize the similarity between a bird and an immigrant, Grace in Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer repeats her new identity as a bird many times; for instance, she ceases being a human (Frame, 2009: 16), she flies towards another summer (104, 167), she does not feel she belong to the human world (105). Grace’s repeating the pronoun “I” in “I matter. I. I. I matter. Philip, Anne, Noel, Sarah, listen to me. I matter” also unravel her alienated nature from the human form and the world as a bird (167). The repeated idea of the hypocritical nature of Christians for Alice in Beryl Fletcher’s The Silicon Tongue depict her alienation from the white race while making the readers interpret Christianity from a different perspective than their habitual perception of the religion (Fletcher, 1996: 38, 67, 68, 116, 195). Alice’s alienation from the human form can also be understood from the repeated use of various pronouns for a singular entity to express her posthuman nature as well: her own image on the cyberspace is expressed with different pronouns like “her/me” (230), and the guide in the virtual world is expressed with all the singular pronouns: “He/she/it” (231). The use of multiple pronouns for a singular entity in several cases makes the readers question identity and gender. “How

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sick he was with malaria. How sick of everything he was. How sick of being a human being” depicts the use of repetition in Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip (Jones, 2007: 178), and the repetition of the expression “how sick” unravels the alienated nature of the redskin commander from his human nature. To recap, the use of repetitions and the ideas repeated several times in the novels enable the readers to focus on the use of language and how it leads to defamiliarization in readers’ perceptions while depicting characters’

alienation. Last but not least, all the writers under scrutiny use the defamiliarization technique by bringing together some expressions and concepts that are not brought together in their habitual use: a person’s being able to fly like a bird (Frame, 2009: 104), one’s living in a human body or inhabiting the human world while feeling himself/herself a bird (105), “the limitations of [...] failing body” (Fletcher, 1996: 25), the mind’s being free to fly (25), being “lost in a desert of snow-plain of reference”

(97), one’s completing the act of finding his/her true bird identity by losing the human identity (157), the distance looking the way of a person (194), one’s becoming invisible to himself/herself (Fletcher, 1996: 54), “the roots of [...] homelessness” (66), hating living in a human body (111), squeezing into an old life (Jones, 2007: 13), losing a person to a historical time period, to Victorian England, (30), feeling flat (80) and bare (104), one’s sinking into oneself (148), a human being’s being sick of a human being (178), and his/her turning off the living part in the body (181) are some of the defamiliarized expressions and concepts that are related to alienation. They reflect the sense of alienation by focusing on their own literariness. In this sense, they are not the productions of habitual and automatic perceptions. It is either through the use of literary devices or through the unfamiliar conceptions that make the readers question the automatized perceptions defamiliarization is used in the novels to create the aesthetic and artistic effect of the notions like alienation, being lost, flying, feeling non-human. In this regard, these defamiliarized expressions and conceptions pave the way for

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interpreting actions and people in a different way that criticises the preconceived understandings of these events, colonialism, and who/what a human being is. It is for this reason that the dissertation depicts the relationship between postcolonialism, posthumanism, and the defamiliarization technique in Russian Formalism in relation to alienation and the use of fiction. All the concepts pertaining to postcolonialism, the posthumanist elements, and the defamiliarization technique indicated above are, therefore, used in the dissertation to depict both the alienation of postcolonial characters and their relation to fiction.

As the use of the concepts pertaining to postcolonialism, the posthumanist elements, and the defamiliarization technique are used to depict both the alienation of postcolonial characters and their relation to fiction, it is also essential to discuss what alienation is. As the main theme discussed in the dissertation, alienation refers to detachment, isolation, and keeping the self away from environment, society, people, human form, institutions, cultural values, war, work, and the like. Alienation of a character can be observed both as a positive and a negative consequence of one’s encounter with the other/Other. That is, the encounter with one’s other/Other leads to alienation. Within the postcolonial framework, the encounter between a colonized and a coloniser and/or a former colonized and a former coloniser leads to alienation of individuals. It is not an easy process to get rid of alienation, so individuals can find themselves in search of the mediums to recover from alienation and to have the sense of wholeness lost with the encounter with the other/Other. It has to be also noted that alienation is at times a willing conscious feeling and behaviour. In such a case, it is a reaction to some disturbing conditions; for instance, it is a criticism towards colonialism and the colonial understanding of labelling people with dualistic expressions such as superior-inferior, developed-under-developed, illuminating-needed to be illuminated. It is through alienation, either experienced as positive or negative, that people undergo

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changes and become open to evaluate situations and people they are alienating themselves from or they are alienated from in a different manner.

To recover the sense of alienation or to alienate the self from undesired events and conditions, people make use of some mediums, and fiction is one of them. As postcolonial critics and theorists focus on colonial and post(-)colonial social issues and literature reflects people as the mediums of social issues, some literary people have reflected post(-)colonial people in their works. They have reflected them both with the favourable and unfavourable consequences of being a post(-)colonial human being. This study will focus on the sense of alienation post(-)colonial human beings experience by means of three novels: Towards Another Summer, by Janet Frame, The Silicon Tongue, by Beryl Fletcher, and Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones. Therefore, the dissertation will include different representations of alienation in these novels. As the sense of alienation comes out as a consequence of an individual’s encounter with and relation to his/her other/Other, alienation of the characters studied in the dissertation will be discussed in view of how their other/Other becomes influential in them. The literary works to be discussed in this dissertation lay bare how fictional characters in these postcolonial works are in relation to different types of fiction, like literature and cyberspace. In general, the dissertation will, therefore, touch on the relationship between the real and fiction, and how fiction or literary works can be a social and psychological representation of the social issues experienced in the real life and whether being in relation to and being interested in it can be a help to reach the wholeness of the identity lost as a result of the interactions with the colonisers and/or with the Other. As the alienated person’s being in relation to and interested in a type of fiction has not often been studied before, this dissertation aims at revealing the relationship between fiction and the alienation of a post(-)colonial person. In Towards Another Summer and Mister Pip, the fiction will be literature whereas in The Silicon Tongue the fiction will be both

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literature and cyberspace. Moreover, the criticism towards colonialism and the Western anthropocentric conception of a human being will also be delineated in the dissertation in relation to the alienation characters feel. Therefore, the dissertation will also draw the resemblances and relationships between the postcolonial theory, the posthuman theory, defamiliarization, and fiction in regard to their offering new and alternative ways to the conception of how people and events can be interpreted in different ways and who/what a human being is by relating these concepts to alienation.

To elaborate in a more detailed way, in the first chapter of the dissertation, alienation in Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer will be discussed. The first part of the chapter will dwell on the relationship between alienation and other/Other and how other/Other becomes influential in identity formation and self-recognition. In the second part, as the woman of a former colonized country, the protagonist’s relation to fiction will be revealed in consideration of how fiction is used to attain a whole and unified self. The readers will read in the third part of the dissertation a posthuman approach to the protagonist and how posthumanism will be a medium in her search for an identity. Finally, in the last part, the relations between postcolonialism, posthumanism, defamiliarization, and fiction will be delineated in relation to the theme of alienation.

Similar to Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer, Beryl Fletcher’s The Silicon Tongue dwells on the theme of alienation, yet in this novel, more emphasis will be given on a settler rather than a former colonized character. In the first part of the chapter, the relationship between alienation and the other/Other will be elaborated in view of the other/Other’s effect on identity formation. The second part will unravel how fiction becomes a tool for the protagonist to express herself and to comment on events and people in a different way with a different viewpoint by means of her

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deliberate alienation from the colonial values and practices of her motherland, Britain.

The third part will depict the posthuman interpretation of the protagonist within a postcolonial framework and touch upon, besides a book about herself, cybernetics and cyberspace as a fictional space where she will find the chance of being together with who/what she misses in a foreign land. Finally, the relations between postcolonialism, posthumanism, and fiction in the novel will be elaborated.

As the last novel discussed in the third chapter of the dissertation, Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones, also depicts the theme of alienation in its positive and negative reflections on people. In the first part of the chapter, the positive and negative reflections of alienation will be given in relation to the concept of mimicry and a war against colonialism. In the second part of the chapter, the relationship between alienation and fiction will be depicted in consideration of the Bildungsroman genre, the attainment of a national identity, detachment from the war, and possibility of change both in character development and in understanding the underlying reasons of events and people’s behaviours. Lastly, the interrelations between postcolonialism, fiction, and alienation will be depicted in the novel in view of how fiction is a tie between the Other and the theme of alienation.

The reason why New Zealand and these novelists are chosen is that in the wake of a research, it has been seen that postcolonial studies have mostly centred on the notions of hybridity, mimicry, and multi-culturalism observed in India, Caribbean, South Africa, and America although there are also some studies on Ireland and Australia. This dissertation, however, will depict the alienation of New Zealander novelists. Therefore, it will centre upon New Zealand, a post-colonial country, which has far less been studied than the countries stated earlier. In this respect, it will introduce Janet Frame, Beryl Fletcher, and Lloyd Jones as postcolonial novelists to

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more people because it has been seen that the works of Frame, Fletcher, and Jones have hardly been studied than the works of other postcolonial novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, John Maxwell Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Rhys, and Doris Lessing. According to today’s data in Türkiye Yükseköğretim Kurulu Başkanlığı website, Frame and Fletcher will be the first and Jones and New Zealand literature the second to be studied in Turkey. The first study on Lloyd Jones is a comparative analysis of Victorian and Neo-Victorian works in relation to time and space, and the first study on New Zealand literature is on the literature of war. Therefore, the dissertation may be a guide for the Turkish people studying on New Zealand postcolonial literature and these New Zealander novelists.

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TOWARDS ANOTHER SUMMER, BY JANET FRAME

The first novel dealing with postcolonial alienation and its relation to fiction is Towards Another Summer (2009), by Janet Frame. It centres on a New Zealander novelist, Grace Cleave, living in Britain. The narrator of the novel depicts what Grace Cleave feels before, during, and after her weekend visit to the Thirkettle family, who are also New Zealanders living in Britain.

The novel, which has two sections and several chapters in these sections, is narrated by a third person selective narrator who focuses on the thoughts, feelings, and the mind of Grace Cleave. At the very beginning of the novel, the narrator gives the description of Grace as a grown-up migrant woman working as a writer in London. One day, she receives a letter from Philip Thirkettle, by whom she is previously interviewed and to whom she says in the interview that London has been her home for a long time.

In the letter, she is invited to Relham, where the New Zealander Thirkettle family lives, to spend the weekend. As a person for whom being with people needs courage even for five or ten minutes, Grace is represented with her anxieties to be among people who she does not know. It is the first time that the narrator reveals Grace’s comparison on her mind: she compares herself to a migratory bird. At the night of the arrival of the letter, Grace goes to bed early, takes a sleeping pill, and sleeps, yet she wakes up at midnight, feeling feathers on her body. However, she recognises in a very short time that there are no feathers, yet she feels happy to find her identity although she feels anxious since she will be lonelier. Grace is a writer who is not visited often; one day an American medical student and his girlfriend visit her. Grace, who does not feel comfortable among people, becomes happy after they leave because the interview with them ends without any problems. On another day, on her way to Overseas Service of the BBC for an interview,

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Grace passes New Zealand House, where people without their “distinguishing mark”

(Frame, 2009: 31) sit and where she feels she is an “intruder” (31). Grace is unhappy at the end of the interview with BBC because “she couldn’t speak” (32). The narrator then reveals that Grace sets off for Relham, yet she is worried about the visit because she does not know the daily routines of the Thirkettle family and she does not know how to

“make sentences, link words, subject, verb, predicate, while they are listening” (39).

Arriving Relham, Grace meets Anne, Philip’s wife, and Sarah and Noel, Philip and Anne’s children. At their home, Grace sees books about New Zealand. While sitting with them, she feels “tired” and wants “to go home to London” (54). In Relham, she repeats her new identity as a migratory bird many times and expresses for the first time her longing for New Zealand. Thanks to the stream-of-consciousness technique, the narrator depicts Grace’s past, and her first and second places that are solely hers. The first section of the novel ends with Grace’s remembering the lines, “The godwits vanish towards another summer. / Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring / Shadow of departure; distance looks our way” (59). The section two of the novel opens in Relham with Grace’s memories that belong to New Zealand. She remembers her childhood years and her being a jackdaw and a beastie in the games. Meanwhile, she remembers the family’s moving to different places due to her father’s job as a fireman and an engine-driver. The song about the First World War is sung by her father, as the narrator expresses; the song also focuses on the significance of the concept of home as understood from the lyrics, “I don’t want to die, / I want to go home!” (75). Among these memories, the description of an Australian writer before and after her years in England are given in the narration, and, for Grace, the writer is more like English people after she moves to England. On Saturday morning in Relham, Grace thinks of the dualistic concepts of the north, the south, up, and down, and the birds Philomela and Procne considering the difficulty of survival as a bird. She wants to tell Philip and Anne

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her new identity as a migratory bird, but she does not reveal her new identity. In fact, the narrator reveals Grace’s thinking of revealing her new identity and desire to be heard many times in the novel. On Saturday night, Grace says that her country is the sky where there are clouds (157). The window in the attic of Thirkettle’s house makes her think that the attic is a good place to write, and the mirror in the attic makes her question the concept of identity (177). She tells Philip and Anne that in her childhood she wants to be a teacher, and the narrator reveals that she does not tell any person that she wants to be a poet, in fact. Right at that moment, Grace’s questioning the words

“poet” and “poetess” is given (195). Then on Sunday afternoon, she departs from Relham for London by repeating the similar lines stated at the end of the first section:

“Distance looks our way; the godwits vanish towards another summer and none knows where he will lie down at night¹” (213).

Before beginning the postcolonial analysis of the novel, it is more appropriate to briefly portray the colonial movements of the 19^th century that has great influence on the New Zealand history: it was the time when New Zealand explicitly became one of the colonies of the British Empire (Habib, 2005: 737). Only after World War II, the colonized countries, the first of which was India, experienced decolonization (738).

After India as the paradigm of decolonization, New Zealand followed decolonization movements and became decolonized in 1947 (Uygur, 2018: 9). The New Zealand literature, therefore, commonly resonates its colonial history via a postcolonial criticism. Towards Another Summer (2009), by Janet Frame, is an evocation of such resonation and a depiction of alienation, which, in turn, is influential in the search of identity by the novel’s challenge to the understanding of Western humanism. This

1 The italicized expression in the quotation is Janet Frame’s own emphasis.

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chapter, therefore, deals with such postcolonial issues by means of a postcolonial character called Grace Cleave.

In the first part of the chapter, the novel will be analysed in relation to how the other/Other becomes influential in the sense of alienation and how it leads to alienation.

As the constitutive of the self, the other/Other defines a person’s identity and brings forth his/her process of self-recognition, so the first part will touch on the influence of the other/Other as the constitutive of identity and the process of self-recognition. In the second part, postcolonialism will be scrutinized in its relation to how characters need to express themselves via fiction; that is, literature in the protagonist’s case in this novel.

Fiction is a medium to cover alienation, and it also has a relation to posthumanism because both enable the postcolonial characters to find a true identity for themselves.

For this study, therefore, postcolonialism is a core between fiction and posthumanism.

Thirdly, the novel will be interpreted in view of posthumanism and animal studies as well as the relationship between alienation, fiction, and posthumanism.

1. Alienation and Other: Search for Recognition and Other as the Constitutive of Self

Other, as the constitutive of self and identity, becomes influential in the identification process of the protagonist, Grace Cleave, in Towards Another Summer. In her work on realism, Ufuk Ege Uygur scrutinizes what “Other” is in relation to both Lacanian psychoanalitic theory and postcolonial theory. She firstly explains what “other” is for Lacan: the “other” with the small letter “o” refers to the child’s illusionary perception of identity for himself that is experienced in the Imaginary Phase (2016: 206). “In postcolonial theory, the “other” is the colonized other that is marginalised by the

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colonial discourse and defined as the one that is different from the center”² (206). The

“Other” with the capital letter, however, refers to the language, rules, and social norms pertaining to the Symbolic Order, and this “Other” is vital for a person to attain identity because identity is attained through this “Other” (206). In an individuation process of the colonized, it is both the other and the Other that determine one’s identity, and if the conflict between the two is resolved on behalf of the Other, the colonized feels alienated from his/her own country, nation, and/or culture, as observed in Grace Cleave.

In her identification process, Grace feels alienation, lack of belonging, and the need to be recognised and heard. It is for this reason that she looks for places that solely belong to her so that she can have an identity that truly defines who/what she is. In this identification process, she is portrayed by the narrator as a character who is affected by the influence of the Other much. To understand how the Other becomes influential in her identification process, one has to bear in mind that even before her moving to London, she feels that she does not belong to any place, and her father’s job is influential in this feeling. To be more precise, moving from one place to another is not easy for her. Because of her father’s occupation on the railway, she has to live in different places; therefore, she does not feel the sense of whole belonging to the places she moves to, and she does not thoroughly forget about the places she leaves although she sometimes states that she does. The narrator underscores what moving means for Grace and how she feels after moving:

Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal

2 All the quotations that belong to Ufuk Ege Uygur and that are used in this dissertation are translated by the author of this dissertation.