Foucauldian “Medical Gaze” as an Ideological Apparatus of Modern Power Structures in the Works of Rıfat Ilgaz, Ōoka Shōhei, Jean-Paul Sartre and Joseph Conrad

Öz There has always been a discursive clash between modern literature and modern medicine. Sontag, for instance, blames literature for producing discriminative metaphors, proposing that a “metaphor-free,” exclusively medical discourse, would enable patients to undergo their diseases freely. On the contrary, Karatani, arguing that modern medicine is by no means out of the realm of metaphorproduction, but at the heart of it, refutes Sontag’s theses. He reinforces his counterargument by grounding it on René Dubos’ Mirage of Health which criticises the self-metaphorisation of medicine via the ideology of romantic heroism and its exaggeration of its role in healing diseases. However, a considerable shortcoming of Karatani’s approach lies in the fact that he overlooks how negatively modern medicine is represented in world literature. Indeed, in several modern novels doctors are depicted as professionals who dehumanise their patients by regarding them merely as sick bodies. Such a “medical gaze” (Foucault) also manifests as a de-nationalising attitude in Ooka’s Fires on the Plain, as well as Ilgaz’s Nights of Blackout, which we particularly concentrated on. In this article, the representations of modern medicine’s arrogant and patronising attitudes by Ilgaz, Ooka, Sartre and Conrad are theoretically analysed in their relations with modern power structures.

Anahtar Kelimeler:

the medical gaze, disease, modern power structures

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