Can Literature Bring Back the Illness to Life: The Case of Peride Celal’s Novel Three Twenty-Four Hours

In this article, firstly, I propose that the illnesses that have been trapped into medical language and
have moved away from life for a long time, can be brought back to life through the potentials of
literature. I trace this argument in Peride Celal’s novel Üç Yirmidört Saat (Three Twenty-Four Hours)
written at the end of 1970s. Literary texts can do things which medical reports, medical imaging
techniques or medical course books cannot achieve. They can put the human experience, body, memory,
identity, class positions, personal and social history surrounding an illness into words. They can situate
an illness in the network of historical, spatial, personal and emotional relationships. In this novel,
Peride Celal situates an old woman’s illness in the middle of a network of relationships among three
women that entirely runs in a hospital room. The author narrates the patient woman’s whole life, class
belonging, anger, and aspirations altogether with the disease. Secondly, I propose that the literary texts
have difficulties in describing and putting into words the pain caused by illness. In this novel, Peride
Celal overcomes this difficulty by telling the nightmares of the patient in her deathbed. As a result, in
Üç Yirmidört Saat (Three Twenty-Four Hours) the author takes an illness beyond a biological body, a
deathbed, and a limited time. She extends the illness over the lives of three generations of women. In
order to portray the physical pain, the author excavates the depths of the patient’s emotional world via
her nightmares.