Delineating Life Stories through Embedded Narratives & Polyphony: An Aesthetic Sailing into Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love

Abstract

Considered as a historiographic metafictional work, The Forty Rules of Love (2010) by Elif Shafak stands as a window throughout which history can be glanced at, from an imaginary side. Through the employment of embedded narratives, a multi-directional shuttling between historical biographies and realities, and metafictional stories, have been made. These stories drifted apart in time and place, but they coalesced in context, i.e. human life, and the human condition. In other words, Shafak’s bestseller plunges into life stories through the use of disrupted and nested narrative techniques. The narrative layers unveiled that the thirteenth century and the twenty-first one share common maladies resulting from political turmoil, religious crises, and social unrest. In times like these, East and West, diagnoses end up questing for similar remedies for collective symptoms of alienation, dualities and existential crises that people suffer from. Past and present, Neoplatonic love and taking a leap of faith are believed to be the principal elements in the curing recipe. Withal, the narrative was unfolded through multiple voicing, offering equal chances for characters to unfold what the story holds in its pleats, based on their individual engagements in it and what appeared to them from the angle they occupied. This narrative democracy was employed by Elif for the purpose of stitching cultural ruptures with the thread of New Sufism, an ideology that came to existence to ‘universalize’ Islam and to pave its way up to the West, utilizing Rumi’s (mis)translated works as an instrument. By and large, the Turkish writer’s narrative thrived at penetrating the Western literary market and proved to be capable of wavering out of the Oriental cocoon; Nevertheless, doing so, a resulting internal binarism was created, splitting the Sufi minority from the non-Sufi majority, inside of the same social platform. Through the postmodern loop, using Bakhtin’s theories on polyvocality, Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism, and multi-layered tellability approaches, this thesis aims at unfolding the mysteries of the juxtaposed life stories being laid down in The Forty Rules of Love out of motivation for measuring the capability of globalization to blur what is local. For this, an aesthetic qualitative in-depth data analysis is going to be conducted, based on Jung and Sinclair’s definitions and project on modern Muslim subjectivities, to locate the contributions of Shafak’s work to the Rumi phenomenon. Eventually, conclusive results would unveil the aforementioned narrative’s successes and flaws regarding universalism, narrative vocal democracy, and intra-faith pluralism.