The Spectral and Grotesque Mechanisms of Power in Ümit Kıvanç’s Macbeth: Muhitimize Uyarlama Denemesi [Macbeth: An Adaptation Attempt to Our Political Landscape]

This study focuses on Ümit Kıvanç's Macbeth: Muhitimize Uyarlama Denemesi (1991), a Turkish adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth that explores the spectral power behind the military coups that occurred in Turkey in the twentieth century. The study aims to examine Kıvanç's rendition, which has thus far been overlooked by academia, and reveal the visible and invisible threats that dare to challenge the discourse of the politicians in power and the mass-media culture. Informed by Derrida's spectropolitics and the concepts of grotesque and carnivalesque, as outlined by Kayser and Bakhtin, this study argues that Kıvanç creates an unnatural, distorted ‘real' by introducing excess of haunting and, by blending the ludicrous and fearful, dislocates the familiar world to make the readers laugh and recoil in horror from the awareness of the way the power structures function. Kıvanç's Macbeth reveals the anxiety and dread that emerge as a result of the grotesque spectral disturbance of a world haunted by the traumas of past coups and ghostly democratic ideals. However, Kıvanç's principle of derision and deformation, which aims to create a parody of the Turkish political culture in the ’80s, allows laughter to erupt, conferring a temporary freedom from the unsettling immediate political and social concerns.