Günce Filoloji ve Sosyal Bilimler Çalışmaları I
SOME EVALUATIONS ABOUT ÖLMEZ OTU AS A NOVEL OF THE DISSOLUTION OF THE COLLECTIVE MYTH
It has not been easy for Turkish literature, in interaction with the West, to make itself accepted by the world with the literary production strategies that have been tried before them. There are not many worldrenowned artists whose works have been translated into multiple languages. One of these few writers is Yaşar Kemal. In his trilogy, Dağın Öte Yüzü, the first volume of which was published in 1960, Yaşar Kemal describes the difficult living conditions of the people living in a mountain village, which he designed as a microcosm, their migration to Çukurova in the autumn to pick cotton in order to make a living, being unable to pay their debts to the town's grocer, Adil Efendi, when they returned to the village in the winter because they had to work in the unproductive fields, creating a saint among themselves in desperation and gave up on the person they had mythologized the next year when they were no longer needed. This study focuses on Ölmez Otu without completely excluding Ortadirek and Yer Demir Gök Bakır, where the conditions that led to the birth of the collective myth are explained. Although the trilogy, Dağın Öte Yüzü has other narrative features, this article examines the problem of how the myth-making adventure of the collective consciousness is fictionalized in the novel. Ölmez Otu is generally interpreted as a novel that tells the story of the collapse of the collective myth. This article identifies Yaşar Kemal's non-bookish perspective on the problematic. It is also claimed that the collective myth faded away when there was no need for the Immortelle,but contrary to popular belief, it did not disappear completely. Another claim of this article is that Yaşar Kemal did not transform anthropological material into a narrative in a schematic way, he transfers the complex inner worlds of some characters that make up the village society, his own individual myths, concerns, fears and hopes to the fictional world by using modern narrative techniques