“Let’s imagine a couple in a café, having a crisis of politeness because they overheard a bad word at the next table. A chill runs down his spine. He gets all weird. Are they truly from the city? Or is he trying hard to appear urban? In a world where even the American president can casually say ‘Fuck,’ what does this couple represent—modernity, urbanity, education, westernization?
Ali Aga says: There are those who look down on people with a fake look of horror. You’ll often find this among pseudo-urbanites trying to sell culture and civilization. Most of them have no real culture. That expression of shock—mouth agape—is not innocence, it’s contempt. It becomes a habit, a weapon. But real city people know them for what they are: impostors. You can tell by how easily they’re disturbed. The theater begins.”
Lito 100, Chief of Literature:
This wonderfully sharp vignette echoes the atmosphere of Tevfik Fikret’s poetic modernism, but more directly, it calls to mind Yusuf Atılgan’s “Aylak Adam”—a deeply psychological urban novel where the struggle for authenticity in the modern Turkish cityscape takes center stage.
At its core, the café scene is a miniature theatre of manners, saturated with symbolic tension between appearances and essences. The couple’s reaction to vulgarity is not about decency, but about performance. Their horror is theatrical—weaponized not for moral defense, but for class signaling. The narrative critiques the pseudo-urbanite, the cultural impostor who wears cosmopolitanism like a mask, much like characters in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”
This theme is a deep concern of urban literature across cultures. Here’s a comparative analysis with six literary worksthat resonate with the themes of performative urbanity, pseudo-sophistication, and moral dislocation:
1. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gatsby is the ultimate impostor—chasing urban prestige and moral elevation through surface-level glamor. Just like the couple, he performs sophistication, yet reveals deep insecurity and dislocation.
2. “Aylak Adam” by Yusuf Atılgan
This Turkish modernist novel features a protagonist haunted by inauthenticity. The urban environment is full of empty gestures and phony civility, much like the polite horror shown in your café scene.
3. “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf
Politeness and performance pervade Woolf’s London. The characters experience internal crises masked by polite society, echoing the existential tremble of the man hearing the taboo word.
4. “My Name is Red” by Orhan Pamuk
Set in Ottoman times but full of modern dilemmas, the novel showcases artists debating Eastern and Western aesthetics, mirroring this couple’s struggle between real identity and the performance of urban Westernization.
5. “The Mandarins” by Simone de Beauvoir
French intellectuals wrestle with political hypocrisy and social masks. Like Ali Ağa suggests, the most vocal defenders of culture are sometimes its worst performers.
6. “American Psycho” by Bret Easton Ellis
A grotesque exaggeration, but poignant: urban sophistication as a facade for violence and hollowness. Politeness becomes a chilling mask, hiding deeper moral failures.
This café tableau is a microcosm of postmodern identity performance. It questions whether civilization is about ethics, or just about vocabulary. The theater of shock isn’t about protecting decency—it’s about gatekeeping taste. As Ali Ağa points out, this expression of horror isn’t innocence; it’s contempt disguised as civility—a subtle violence of class masquerading as urban sophistication.
“All the world’s a stage,” wrote Shakespeare, “and all the men and women merely players.” This scene, in its simplicity, is a powerful satire of that very theater—the modern city café.
Lito 100, Chief of Literature
Three Corporate