Pamuk's Istanbul

The Self and the City

Pallavi Narayan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000572056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur des Nahen Ostens

This book reconstructs Istanbul through the prism of Orhan Pamuk's fiction. It navigates the multiple selves and layers of Istanbul to present how the city has shaped the writings of Pamuk and has, in turn, been shaped by it. Through everyday objects and architecture, it shows how Pamuk transforms the city into a living museum where different objects converse along with characters to present a rich tapestry across space and time.

Further, the monograph explores the formation of communal and literary identity within and around nation-building narratives informed by capitalism and modernization. The book also examines how Pamuk uses the postmodern city to move beyond its postmodern confines, and utilizes the theories and universes of Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Foucault to open up his fiction and radically challenge the idea of the novel.

The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, literary theory, museum studies, architecture, and cultural studies, and especially appeal to readers of Orhan Pamuk.

1 Imagining Pamuk’s Istanbul

DOI: 10.4324/9781003172314-1

Then, little by little, the mist dissolved, as though someone had pulled back a curtain. The city, now clearly defined, opened up before him, burning bright. Light and shadows, crests and slopes. Up and down through hill after hill, covered here and there with groves of cypress, she seemed like a wen of opposites. Denying herself at every step, changing disposition in each quarter, caring and callous at once, Istanbul gave generously and, with the same breath, recalled her gift. A city so vast she expanded left and right, and up towards the firmament, striving to ascend, desiring more, never satisfied. Yet enchanting she was. … one could fall under her spell.¹

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul encapsulates the binaries of beauty and conflict, asynchronous and simultaneous, the longing lover and the elusive beloved. Over the last couple of decades, Pamuk’s works and Turkey’s efforts to gain membership of the European Union turned the spotlight on Turkey, and particularly its port city Istanbul which has been the historical capital through the centuries.² As the narrator states in Pamuk’s The Red-Haired Woman, “These were the years when factions that favored Turkey’s entry into the European Union clashed in the street with nationalists and Islamists. All sides employed the national flag as both an ensign and a weapon, and so enormous Turkish flags billowed over military garrisons and all across Istanbul.”³ Situated as Turkey is at a crucial crossroads between prescribed categories of East and West, tensions between tradition and modernity, secularism and Islam are constantly highlighted. Its location, which can be situated in the complicated Middle East and Asia as well as the equally troubled European Union, has for centuries been of tremendous economic and social significance. Turkey’s dominant discourse until recently cultivated a Westward-looking politics articulated in literary works that are increasingly being translated. The literary point of accessibility for many readers has been through Pamuk’s work—which has been extensively translated and is available in 60 languages all over the world⁴—and having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, he is easily the global literary face of Turkey. Encapsulating in his work the Constantinople/Istanbul of the late Ottoman period through to the mid-to-late twentieth century, he provides a literary intervention into a charged region that he frequently portrays as a dreamscape. Straddling two continents, Constantinople/Istanbul has functioned, over the centuries, as a conduit of exchange between various cultures and has been a point of congregation for intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire’s, and then the Republic of Turkey’s minority groups, such as Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Kurds.⁵ Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan states: “Languages, dialects, accents may be different, there may be borders and distance between us, yet we are in the same heart and body with our family community, Kazak, Turkmen, Kirgiz, Uzbek, Tatar, Anatolian Turks and Balkan Turks.”⁶ Pamuk and his contemporaries have challenged the state’s monolithic presentation of Turkish society by presenting a post-empire hybrid society, and their work has charged Turkey with an identity crisis of multiple belongings. The local, transnational, cultural, and global all find a place in the landscapes he creates, and they operate within the modernizing city.⁷

Given this context, this book explores broadly the formation of communal and literary identity within and around the narratives of nation building which, combined with secularism, is determined by the forces of capitalism and modernization. The methodology is of being attentive to shifts in the makeshift city through the mode of architecture and the transforming individual in a volatile urban terrain. “Whereas industry expanded outwards, becoming international and bursting the bounds of the nation state, nationalism extended inwards, affecting progressively smaller and less viable ethnic communities.”⁸ Significant in the particular selection of Pamuk’s novels for this book—his works up until 2014—is my belief in the urgency of examining an urban landscape that has not had a part in the modernization and industrialization that the West went through, partly by virtue of never being colonized, and displaying an emergent and contentious history of the same.⁹ While this decision excludes A Strangeness in My Mind and The Red-Haired Woman, both published after 2014, because their protagonists are from the working and migrant classes¹⁰ which takes the reader to a different mental landscape of Istanbul, I have included some examples from both novels to bolster my arguments where the book demanded them. The situation has been particularly compelling as Turkey has been re-evaluating its role with regard to its geographical location. Not only is it at the juncture of East and West, it is neither fully East nor West. Indeed, “in this epoch of globalization, it can be suggested that the personal and the political, and the intimate and the foreign, are so enmeshed and entwined with one another that it is not possible any longer to know what is Eastern or Western.”¹¹

This book focuses on Istanbul’s city spaces, and on how the city serves as a source of inspiration as well as a marker of loss in individuals and communities with regard to cultural and literary production. I site these interactions within the state’s narrative framework and interpret them in terms of Istanbul’s changing urban landscape and the social spaces produced and recreated therein.¹² Nuances in the city’s transforming face may be seen at play in how Pamuk’s fiction engages with the city. What he has done for Istanbul through his writing is what James Joyce did for Dublin—he has determinedly put “his beloved Istanbul on the world’s literary map …”¹³ Interestingly, Pamuk is labeled as primarily a postmodern author. Does this category, however, limit the scope of his work in readers’ perceptions? Have his experiments with the cityscape been theorized imaginatively enough? How does locating Istanbul as place engage the larger themes of spatiality and corporeal/commodity materiality? How does viewing the city through Pamuk’s writing assist in furthering the comprehension of fiction and the city in general? Does it result in a shift in theory as well as perceptions of city architecture? These are some of the questions this book addresses.

1.1 City Writing

At the thought, the thought of a selfless state, she had a moment of ecstasy. To be free of herself at last, the self she had so passionately defended from attack! What use had it been to her? It had been the cause of all her troubles. Oh, to be free from it! And free of the collective self, … ¹⁴

Modernism gave a fresh thrust to the tradition of city writing. As explicated in the Western philosophical tradition, modernism dealt with man’s alienation not only from the world but also from his self, and at the core of the self was an objectification of reality. Modernity sought to govern “the way individuals thought and made sense of their surroundings, alienated from it.”¹⁵ As the metropolis was filled with momentary impressions, it intensified nervous stimulation, “protecting man against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him.”¹⁶ The principles, concepts, and categories that resulted, “erected barriers against conscious selfhood and … were obstacles to individuals’ self-awareness.”

Postmodernism, as a movement, consciously purported to “overturn ideas integral to modernism, in particular those of narrative and representation.”¹⁷ As a practice, it provoked a sense of rootlessness that was instrumental in restoring conscious selfhood; the individual, confronted with the depthlessness and fragmentation of his world, had only his self(ves) to depend upon. The characteristics of twentieth-century modernism included a propensity toward experimentation, rejecting the traditional narrative framework to emphasize stream-of-consciousness presentation.¹⁸ Postmodernism checked this drift toward dehumanization by focusing on the individual’s humanity. It stressed detail and cultivated a sophisticated tone and ironic humor.¹⁹ Pamuk begins his novels with a narrative framework that appears to be traditional, that has all the trappings of the traditional. But what he ultimately “represents” is a simulacrum of the city, not its representation but a version of a representation of a representation. Daniel Bell sees postmodernism as a new sensibility that broke down all genres and denied distinction between art and life.²⁰ Pamuk too appears to view the city in this way; The Black Book, for instance, merges art and life, literature and praxis.²¹ Following Zygmunt Bauman, Pamuk’s writing appears to flow with the notion that in the postmodern age traditional ideologies become meaningless, failing to exert any moral or persuasive power over individuals.²²

Michael Drolet mentions that in architecture, Joseph Hudnut’s “characterisation of the postmodern ideal was diametrically opposed to the modern ideal which he believed had mechanised and standardised contemporary life,” a belief shared by Robert Venturi. Modern architecture, expressed by the state in Pamuk, claimed that “its aesthetic principles were universal, ahistorical and timeless,” a sentiment that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s construction of Ankara aimed to prove. It resulted in “uniform and oppressive buildings and cities. … [and] created a built environment that suppressed individual expression and enforced social uniformity.” Ankara became an inversion of Istanbul, a horrific but sublime giant of a capital. It was a question of scale: although Istanbul is undoubtedly the larger city, Ankara is the “purpose-built capital of the modern Turkish republic.”²³ Modern architecture used a “self-assured, intimidating and elitist” language that “reinforced its tendency towards hermeticism, formalisation and unidimensionality.” The modernization project gained dominance and value in artistic and theoretical productions particularly in London (Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf), Paris (Le Corbusier, Guy Debord, Tatiana de Rosnay, Georg Simmel), Berlin (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse), and Moscow (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka). The tradition of literary city writing emerged and took new forms in these capitals, spreading later to Alexandria (Lawrence Durrell) and Istanbul (Tariq Ali, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar). Western modernist textuality affected Turkey such that it sought to mirror the European capitals. Venturi argued that “modern architecture could not accommodate modern life’s richness and complexity. Only a new form of architecture could take account of the diversity of the human experience and facilitate its expression through new ideas about design and planning.” This postmodern architecture was complex, contradictory, and polyvalent. Charles Jencks believes that “postmodern architecture used forms and symbols that were meaningful to an international elite and had relevance to a local population.”²⁴ In the context of Istanbul, such statements of the purpose of architectural postmodernism came alive in the regularization that the city underwent in a bid to make it not only like the West but also, importantly, a part of the West. European architects were hired to propose plans to redesign Istanbul but these were only partially put into place as the state struggled with funds, resulting in an uneven, and unusual, pattern of regularization. Henri Lefebvre’s statement about old cities and industry is relevant in the context of this refashioning of Istanbul:

[W]here there is a pre-existent network of old cities, industry assails it. It appropriates this network and refashions it according to its needs. It also attacks the city (each city), assaults it, takes it, ravages it. It tends to break up the old cores by taking them over. This does not prevent the extension of urban phenomena, cities and agglomerations, industrial towns and suburbs (with the addition of shanty towns where industrialization is unable to employ and fix available labour).

Further, “urban cores do not disappear. The fabric erodes them or integrates them to its web. These cores survive by transforming themselves.”²⁵ The postmodern is visible in Pamuk’s works in the cracks in the pavemen...