The Aesthetics of Decay in Elif Shafak’s ‘The Flea Palace’

Abstract

This study is an attempt to investigate the aesthetic of decay as a seminal feature in Elif Shafak’s ‘The Flea Palace’. It is to argue that decay operates not merely as an atmospheric backdrop but as a substantial critical lens through which memory, history, and sociocultural elements are apprehended. In ‘The Flea Palace’, Elif Shafak portrays physical elements which are metaphorically and symbolically in line with social, psychological and moral decay and decline. The study that foregrounds decay as a motif intends to trace how deteriorating environments, eroding memories, and crumbling institutions yield narrative contact zones and how voices reflect belonging, memory, and identity. Through close readings of symbolic and metaphorical decay, this interdisciplinary analysis reveals the writer’s revalorization of decay as a productive archive rather than a mere sign of physical decline. The aesthetic of decay thus facilitates an ethical reflection, a social perspective and a psychological scrutiny on the notions of intergenerational responsibility, migration, and the destabilization of grand narratives of modernity. The findings which highlight Shafak’s distinctive method of turning loss into an instrument of meaningful imagination, would contribute to contemporary debates on the aesthetics of ruin, narrative time, and the politics of place in world literature.