Feyyaz Kayacan's Surrealist Storytelling: "Dislodge the dark, undo the grip of decreed silence"

Abstract: Feyyaz Kayacan's (1919–1993) distinctive articulation of the surrealist imagination, though rooted in his dialogue with British Surrealism, ultimately diverges from central European models to cultivate a unique literary voice. As a Turkish writer living in England amid wartime chaos, Kayacan deploys the marvelous in his works as a means of affirming creativity and imaginative regeneration in the face of despair and solitude. His short fiction in the 1950s converges themes of isolation, displacement, and personal and collective trauma with the realm of wonder to offer a literary cosmology in which the marvelous emerges as a vigorous force of resilience against the pervasive desolation, reclaiming a poetics of regeneration, transformation, and liberation. This study argues that Kayacan's short prose advocates a mode of surrealist storytelling that transmutes alienation, confinement, and trauma into creative possibility, standing as a testament to literature's capacity to revitalize life despite the ever-present destruction.