Annihilation of history and fear of the past Oya Baydar’s the general of the garbage dump

Abstract

The General of the Garbage Dump [Tr. title: Çöplüğün Generali] is a novel by a prominent Turkish novelist, Oya Baydar. It is set in a dystopian future in an imaginary country where a scientist finds the lost manuscripts of a novelist who vanished fifty years ago without publishing his novel. Baydar’s protagonist is in the midst of a politically oppressed society in which a collective social memory is created by the state. To create this illusionary political reality, everybody is given a pleasure pill that annihilates memory, in order to enable the whole society to remember and acknowledge an official history of the country after a so-called “big bang”. The history before the “big bang” is deleted from the social memory. After finding the manuscripts about the history before the big bang, the protagonist begins to find out about the “deleted past” and rejects having the pleasure pills every day to keep his memory active. Baydar’s style and her novel’s gloomy atmosphere invite a direct comparison of The General of the Garbage Dump to George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in terms of the elements of dystopian novel, illusionary reality and state oppression. This paper, therefore, aims to present a comparative reading of these novels and question whether “fear” is a tool for state oppression to re-create history.