New Gods Forbidden
Good Fit
- Readers who like to think about myth, science and modern people's beliefs
- Those interested in 1970s Turkish intellectual life and press history
- Anyone who enjoys short, provocative essays that invite disagreement
Not a Fit
- Readers uncomfortable with openly political writing — the author's left-wing views are no secret
- Anyone looking for a direct introduction to Anday's poetry or literary criticism
- Those unwilling to read without notes on the names and events of the period
The opening essay starts with a question from Anday's years teaching mythology: how do students see the polytheistic age? Do they find it laughable that people once believed in human-shaped gods with superhuman powers? At first they say 'we have no such beliefs', then, little by little, equivalents of those old beliefs surface. Anday goes a step further: the strongest age of myth is our own. Comic-book heroes like Spider-Man, 'Star Trek', flying saucers, treating computers as 'thinking machines' — this is a new mythology that puts Zeus and Poseidon in the shade.
The essay draws on the French physicist Pierre Auger's study 'Science and Myth': popularizers explain complex, abstract theories through analogies, and those analogies breed new myths in people's heads. Bohr's atom, pictured as a little solar system, was abandoned by science but stayed in the popular imagination. Anday's conclusion is harsh: ancient people invented gods to explain nature, while modern people invent 'in the name of science' and so hold a far less coherent picture of the world. The ancients could occasionally rebel against Zeus; we are ready to efface ourselves before computers. Given that this was written in 1973, it sounds startlingly relevant in the age of AI.
'War and Peace' opens at a dinner in Bursa during the Mudanya armistice: when Yahya Kemal recites his poem 'A bloody rose in her mouth', Mustafa Kemal Pasha laughs, 'Ah, these poets — they're incorrigible!' Anday asks: poetry always looks like 'make-believe' next to war — but isn't war itself make-believe? The 'Great Greece' idea and the dream of 'Turan' were both distortions of history in the service of interests. The essay is memorable for its ironic comparison of the First World War to a saloon brawl in a cowboy film.
The title essay of the second part, 'Forbidden' (1978), is the book's most political piece. Starting from a placard carried at a May Day march, Anday argues for repealing Articles 141–142 of the Turkish penal code, which banned communist organization. His case rests on freedom of thought: these articles served to silence any free idea under the label 'communism', and poets and writers were put on trial — Anday himself was prosecuted under Article 142 for his poetry book 'Yanyana', with the prosecutor demanding seven and a half years. Readers need not share his politics, but the piece is valuable as first-hand testimony about freedom of expression in 1970s Turkey.
A friend refuses to read Schopenhauer's 'The Metaphysics of Love' because he 'already knows the ending'. Anday shows how absurd this excuse is: works of philosophy and science are read not for their conclusions but for the path that leads there; even Bergson's outdated biology and Freud's unprovable hypotheses are valuable. If everyone read only the authors they agreed with, philosophy and literature would come to resemble religions. The essay ends with a short plea: 'Let us read, even if we know the ending.' The book's overall weakness is that these were written for a newspaper column and sometimes repeat the same idea.
- Each essay opens with an anecdote, memory or news item and moves to a general idea
- Rich examples from mythology, the history of science and poetry
- Every piece is dated, making it easy to follow the mood of the era
The same author's essays from 1994–95 — same style, calmer tone
Anday's book pieces from 1987–91
Develops on a grand scale the idea that humanity is built on shared myths
A friend refuses to read Schopenhauer's «The Metaphysics of Love», saying «I know the ending». Anday shows the absurdity of this «excuse»: books of philosophy and science are read not for their conclusion but for the road that leads to it.
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