Tanpınar's attempts to go beyond the temporal reality: ‘The Dance’, a bergsonian analysis

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In this essay Tanpınar's short poem ‘The Dance’ is explored against the background provided by Bergson's ideas on intuition and intellect as it is based on the dichotomy between intuitive awareness of reality as a flow and the fixed form of it. It is not only an aesthetic account of the movements of the dancer but also Tanpınar's intuitive experience prompted by the dancer who leads him to fleeting contacts with the endless flow. The poem enables the reader to cross the border between the conventional understanding of reality and its intuitive apprehension; and when this border is blurred, one is immersed in the significance of glimpses. This essay also seeks to lay out how Tanpınar employs these momentary flashes coming from the dancer as a source of both formal and content organisation; and how the analogy between these flashes and the non-verbal realm becomes a reservoir of images which recur with changing connotations.