Everest My Lord is a novel/play text written by Sevim Burak, which she began in 1983. The text lacks a sequence of events and a dialogic structure. Place, time, and even characters are ambiguous. Thus, the work liberates writing from its representational function. Burak’s novel introduces a new style of writing that parallels Gertrude Stein’s landscape text, which she developed in the early 20th century by transforming language. In Gertrude Stein’s texts, which Martin Puchner describes as “theater of reading” (Puchner, 2002, p. 101) there is no clear cause4and4effect relationship between sentences and often between words, nor do they adhere to grammatical rules (Erdal, 2023, p. 36). Stein’s writing does not reflect the existing reality of life but rather creates it.

In her overall writing style and particularly in Everest My Lord, Sevim Burak also avoids established grammatical rules, akin to Stein. This reflects a shared purpose of not adhering to a fixed perspective on reality. For Burak, there is no singular, stable reality. This is primarily due to the absence of a clear subject in the text. The lack of a definitive subject means abandoning character, which, in turn, means relinquishing the explanation of situations through cause-and- effect relationships. As a result, the diachronic continuity and coherence that follow one another are disrupted. Instead, an atmosphere of simultaneous situations juxtaposed on stage is created. In this atmosphere, one can speak of “an attempt to construct a landscape scene in Gertrude Stein’s sense” (Güçbilmez, 2011, p. 54).

Stein developed the concept of the landscape text under the influence of Pablo Picasso’s landscape paintings. According to Stein, Picasso created his landscape paintings “based on visible objects” (Stein, 2019, s. 26). However, Stein believed that Picasso’s paintings were not mere copies of the objects or people he saw. Instead, Picasso painted objects or people as they existed in his imagination (Stein, 2019, s. 26). The purpose behind Picasso’s paintings was to “create and narrate the present moment,” or in other words, an “effort to capture the moment” (Kasap, 2018, p. 14). Picasso’s effort to capture the moment stemmed from the use of a multiple/reverse perspective technique in his landscape paintings.

Inspired by Picasso’s transformation in painting, Gertrude Stein sought to achieve a parallel transformation in the language of writing. Stein’s landscape texts are composed of fragments of a situation. These fragments are heterogeneous and exist together on equal footing. The role of language has changed. In a landscape text, narrative is formed by “the play of linguistic signifiers freed from meaning” (Lehmann, 2006, p. 64). The emancipation of linguistic signifiers from meaning stems from Stein’s abandonment of the pursuit of conveying a specific meaning or representation. Instead of expressing something directly, Stein describes it. She does not use signifiers that directly represent the object in the reader/viewer’s mind. In doing so, Stein eliminates the dramatic form between action and audience (Puchner, 2002, p. 107).

Everest My Lord is arguably one of the most distinctive texts within Turkish theater literature. This distinctiveness arises from its dismantling of the aesthetics of representation upheld by classical dramatic structure. Burak dismantles the aesthetics of representation in Everest My Lord in two ways. The first is through its content. The reality within Everest My Lord is ambiguous, as the play consistently questions ‘what is real’. This interrogation of reality is reflected formally in the play. Turkish grammar rules are violated. Verbs are conjugated in different tenses. Burak rarely uses punctuation marks. Sentences written in accordance with Turkish grammar rules are interrupted by deliberate word repetitions. 

Consequently, the play does not progress on a diachronic plane as in dramatic structure. Instead, the use of these word and sentence clusters transforms the play into an atmospheric description constructed on a synchronic plane. At this point, the aesthetics of representation is disrupted. As such, there are no longer narrated events but rather described phenomena. The phenomena the audience observes have no exact counterpart in the external world. This is because the determinant of representational aesthetics the relationship between signifier and signified is broken. Every signifier in the text holds a different and constantly changing meaning for each audience member. Meaning becomes infinitely plural. The plurality of meaning is created by phenomena that are interconnected. With these characteristics, Everest My Lord resembles a landscape text where the character is fragmented, phenomena are formed synchronously, and these phenomena are interconnected. Ultimately, despite the likelihood that Sevim Burak was unaware of Gertrude Stein’s writing style, her play can be considered an example of a landscape text due to its similarities to the features of the landscape text Stein developed against dramatic structure in the early 1900s.