‘What makes city life meaningful is the things we hide’

Abstract

In this article we bring Marshall Berman’s writings on public space, politics and subjectivity into dialogue with a literary rendering of similar themes by Orhan Pamuk in his 2015 novel A Strangeness in my Mind. Our aim is to elaborate upon Berman’s undeveloped notion of ‘existential space’—first suggested in a review of an earlier Pamuk novel—through an extended encounter between the authors. This article begins by comparing the urban writings of Berman with Pamuk’s novel across three broad, overlapping themes: (1) the contingency of space; (2) authenticity and experience; and (3) openness, inclusivity and danger. In the analysis that develops out from this dialogue, we interpret existential space to imply any urban space—a room, a street, bar or square, for example—that is appropriated, in an act of struggle, by occupants or users as ‘an everywhere’: an inclusive place from which to connect with others and from where to pursue transcendent goals such as love, creativity, equality, justice or joy. This points to the fragile temporality of existential space, to how the meaning of the ‘present’ may be deferred or ‘hidden away in the back of the mind’ because such spaces are simultaneously concrete and preoccupied with another time (and place).

Key words:

• Orhan Pamuk
• Marshall Berman
• existential space
• Istanbul
• A Strangeness in My Mind
• public space
• literary

ORCID

Gareth Millington http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3337-1513

Vladimir Rizov http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4157-7207

Notes

1 We also draw upon Istanbul: memories and the city (Pamuk 2004), Snow (Pamuk 2004), Pamuk’s Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech (Pamuk 2006) and a series of interviews with the author.

2 Boza is a traditional Turkish drink made from fermented wheat with a very low alcohol content.

3 Mevlut’s Istanbul is a ballooning city, its population growing from 1.7 million in the late 1960s to around 13 million by the book’s close.

4 For example, Graves-Brown and Schofield (2016) discuss the rooms in Denmark Street, London where punk band The Sex Pistols first rehearsed, pointing to the recent listing of this building, which brings its punk artworks—such as John Lydon’s wall sketches and graffiti—under statutory protection.

5 This occurs, according to the precise chronology in the back of the novel, three days after Recip Tayyip Erdoğan is elected mayor of Istanbul.

6 His final, uncompleted book was to be titled The Romance of Public Space, sections of which are published in Modernism in the Streets (Berman 2017).

7 Berman (1982, 33) argues that structuralism wipes the question of self and history off the map.

8 The mood specified here is hüzün: ‘the tristesse and black mood that is shared among Istanbul’s residents since the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire and the loss of past glories’ (Huyssen 2008, 21).

9 By the end of this section Samiha has explained how the reality of her life in Istanbul was actually a disappointment; that she experienced loneliness and fear when Ferhat left alone at home while he was at work.

10 Jefferies (2016, 38) uses this phrase in assessing Max Horkheimer’s novella Spring.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gareth Millington

Gareth Millington is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of York. Email: [email protected]

Vladimir Rizov

Vladimir Rizov is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton. Email: [email protected]