The City of Collective Melancholy: Revisiting Pamuk’s Istanbul

Abstract

This essay looks back upon Orhan Pamuk’s nonfiction book, Istanbul: Memories of a City (2003), and unpacks its multi-layered representation of the city as landscape. It is here that Pamuk pursues most overtly “the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city” which won him the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. Weaving personal memoir and historical essay into a unique narrative tapestry, Pamuk’s book explores a series of tensions that define the city’s image and identity; insider/outsider and East/West polarities, in particular, are tirelessly deconstructed. The essay examines Pamuk’s poetics and politics of memory in relation to works by other authors, notably Walter Benjamin. In conclusion, the new edition of Istanbul (2015) is discussed against the background of the social and spatial changes that have beset Turkey’s cultural capital in the interim.

Keywords:

• Walter Benjamin
• city
• Istanbul
• landscape
• melancholy
• memory
• nostalgia
• Orhan Pamuk

Notes

1. Derya Özkan, ed., Cool Istanbul: Urban Enclosures and Resistances (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2014).

2. In the Turkish edition, İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2003), the subtitle means Memories and [the] City, a literal translation that has been adopted in English versions. Throughout this essay, references will be made to the 2005 English edition, Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City, translated by Maureen Freely and published in paperback by Faber & Faber (2006).

3. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2006/summary/ (accessed December 12, 2019).

4. Orhan Pamuk, “The Paris Review Interview,” in Other Colours: Essays and a Story, trans. Maureen Freely (London, UK: Faber & Faber, 2007), 377. Interview with Ángel Gurría-Quintana, originally published in The Paris Review, Fall/Winter 2005, Issue 175. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5587/orhan-pamuk-the-art-of-fiction-no-187-orhan-pamuk (accessed December 12, 2019).

5. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995). Aldo Rossi, L'architettura della città (Padova: Marsilio, 1966).

6. Mark Crinson, “Urban Memory – An Introduction,” in Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, ed. M. Crinson (London, UK: Routledge, 2005), xii.

7. Graeme Gilloch and Jane Kilby, “Trauma and Memory in the City: From Auster to Austerlitz,” in Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, ed. Mark Crinson (London, UK: Routledge), 10.

8. Pamuk, Istanbul, 333.

9. Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure (San Francisco, CA: The Westgate Press, 1930), 35.

10. Ibid., 36.

11. Pamuk discusses this life-changing decision in the essay “Why Didn’t I Become an Architect?” in Other Colours, 303–310.

12. The motif of the double can also be found in various of Pamuk’s novels, for instance, in the figures of the Ottoman master and the Venetian slave in The White Castle (1985), or in the parallel narratives of the protagonists Galip and Celâl in The Black Book (1990).

13. Pamuk, Istanbul, 6.

14. Ibid.

15. Pamuk, “Paris Review Interview,” 369.

16. Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book, trans. Maureen Freely (London, UK: Faber & Faber, 1994). See also Ian Almond, “Islam, Melancholy, and Sad, Concrete Minarets: The Futility of Narratives in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book,” New Literary History 34, no. 1 (2003): 75–90.

17. Orhan Pamuk, “Where is Europe?” in Other Colours, 189–192; 190.

18. Pamuk’s approach to Ottoman culture and legacy in this work is discussed extensively in Kader Konuk, “Istanbul on Fire: End-of-Empire Melancholy in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul,” The Germanic Review 86 (2011): 249–261.

19. Pamuk, Istanbul, 218.

20. Ibid., 217.

21. Ibid., 216.

22. Walter Benjamin, “The Return of the Flâneur,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 262.

23. See also: “Preface,” Other Colours, x–xi.

24. Pamuk, Istanbul, 260.

25. Ibid., 261.

26. Pamuk, “Paris Review,” 369.

27. Pamuk, Istanbul, 31.

28. Ibid., 9–16.

29. Ibid., 81.

30. Ibid., 82.

31. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [1621] (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1971).

32. Pamuk, Istanbul, 82.

33. Ibid., 93.

34. Ibid., 92–93.

35. Ibid., 211, 218.

36. Ibid., 31.

37. Ibid., 231.

38. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London, UK: Century, 1988), 187.

39. Pamuk elaborates further on different types of ruins in “Earthquake,” Other Colours, 84–93.

40. Pamuk, Istanbul, 230–231.

41. Ibid., 43.

42. Antoine Ignace Melling, Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1819). Pamuk’s discussion of Melling’s panoramas as an early form of “cinemascope” seems not dissimilar to the connections made visually by Turkish photographer and film-maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. See my essay “The Melancholic Air of the City,” Abitare, no. 472 (2007): 154–157.

43. Pamuk, Istanbul, 60.

44. Ibid., 67.

45. Ibid., 65.

46. For a comparative analysis of photographs in Pamuk’s Istanbul, see Gabriel Koureas, “Nicosia/Istanbul: Ruins, Memory and Photography,” Kunapipi 33, no. 1 (2011): 171–187.

47. The book closes with a short postscript, “About the photographs,” illustrated with a picture of Pamuk himself scrutinizing film slides in Güler’s studio. Ipek Türeli points out that Pamuk’s “reframing of Güler’s images is part of a broader cultural and commercial production of ‘Old Istanbul’ that has been underway since the early 1990s” – see Ipek Türeli, “Ara Güler’s Photography of ‘Old Istanbul’ and Cosmopolitan Nostalgia,” History of Photography 34, no. 3 (2010): 303.

48. Ipek Türeli, “The City in Black-and-White: Photographic Memories,” in Cool Istanbul, 103–129.

49. Pamuk, Istanbul, 335.

50. Maureen Freely, “Seeing Istanbul Again,” The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015. Available online: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/04/23/translating-pamuk-seeing-istanbul-again/

51. Esra Akcan, “The Melancholies of Istanbul,” World Literature Today 80 (2006): 43.

52. Ibid.

53. Alex Webb, Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names (New York, NY: Aperture, 2007).

54. For a critique of orientalist sources and motifs in Pamuk’s work, see Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard (London, UK: I.B. Tauris, 2007).

55. Engin F. Işın, “The Soul of a City: Hüzün, Keyif, Longing,” in Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? eds. D. Göktürk, L. Soysal, and I. Türeli (London, UK: Routledge 2010), 36.

56. Ibid., 43.

57. See also the chapter “Islam and Melancholy in Orhan Pamuk,” in Almond, The New Orientalists.

58. Pamuk, “Paris Review Interview,” 361. Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London, UK: Verso, 1997), 293–346. Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 [1932], trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).

59. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, 45–104.

60. Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2000), 72.

61. Ibid.

62. Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” 316.

63. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 89.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 89–90.

66. Ibid., 92.

67. Walter Benjamin, “Leftist Melancholia,” cited in: Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 9–12. (Page numbers refer to the passages where Pensky discusses Benjamin’s essay).

68. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 11. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London, UK: Verso, 2009 [1928]). Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” [1940], in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 313–355.

69. Pamuk, “Paris Review,” 367.

70. The interview was published in Das Magazin, the weekend supplement of Tages-Anzeiger (Zürich) on February 6, 2005. With reference to Turkey, Pamuk was quoted as saying that “thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” The passage quoted here appears, among other places, in Pamuk, “The Paris Review Interview,” 356.

71. Pamuk, Istanbul, 153.

72. See also Belgin Turan Özkaya (ed.), “Transpositions on the Edge of Europe: Difference and Ambivalence in Architecture,” themed issue of The Journal of Architecture 16, no. 6 (2011): 799–803.

73. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001), 55.

74. On the “market-oriented Islamization of the city,” which began in the late 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s, see Cihan Tuğal, “The Greening of Istanbul,” New Left Review 51 (2008): 65–80.

75. Ipek Türeli, Istanbul, Open City: Exhibiting Anxieties of Urban Modernity (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2017).

76. Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal, and Ipek Türeli, eds., Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (London, UK: Routledge 2010), 10.

77. Imre Azem, dir., Ekümenopolis: City without Limits (Turkey, Germany, 2011).

78. A pervasive state of anxiety has been associated not only with the effects of urban development but also with recent visual representations of Istanbul. See Türeli, Istanbul.

79. A total of 233 new photographs and illustrations were added to the original 206. The emphasis on the visual is reflected in the title of the new Turkish edition, which means “Istanbul with picture(s)” or “illustrated Istanbul.” Orhan Pamuk, Resimli İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2015).

80. Orhan Pamuk, “Introduction: Taking and Collecting Family Photos,” in Istanbul: Memories and the City (New York: Knopf, 2017).

81. Ibid., xiv.

82. Ibid., xvi.

83. Ibid., xxii.

84. Ibid., xxii.

85. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber & Faber, 2009). The museum itself was installed by Pamuk in an old building of Çukurcuma (a neighbourhood in the European district of Beyoğlu) which was restored with the aid of the 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency and opened to the public in 2012. As a metanarrative based on the eponymous novel, the museum displays a range of objects that were collected by the protagonist, Kemal, in order to soothe his troubled love for a woman called Füsun.

86. I wish to thank Josh Carney for his insights into this topic.

87. Orhan Pamuk, Balkon (Göttingen: Steidl, 2018).

88. Pamuk, “Introduction,” xxiii.

89. Pamuk, Istanbul, 2017 deluxe edition, 216.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Davide Deriu

Davide Deriu is Reader and Director of Architectural Research at the University of Westminster. His work focuses on representations of modern architecture and cities. After completing a PhD at University College London, he held fellowships from the AHRC, Yale University’s Paul Mellon Center, and the CCA where he curated the exhibition Modernism in Miniature (2011). He has published in several books and journals, including the Architectural Theory Review, The Journal of Architecture, and Emotion, Space and Society. Edited works of his include Emerging Landscapes (Ashgate 2014) as well as special issues of The London Journal and Architectural Histories, the journal of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN) which he helped to found. In 2019 he was awarded a Mid-Career Fellowship from the British Academy.