Disoriented in Istanbul: A Reading of Its Fogscapes Across the Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT

Istanbul's discursive positioning as a city of cultural ambiguity offers a productive way of approaching disorientation conceptually: the image of the city reveals a struggle to orient itself amidst and across discourses of Orientalism and modernity. Within that struggle, the city's metaphorical fogs, from the prototypical representation of the city's fogs by the modernist poet Tevfik Fikret to Prince Abdülmecid's eponymous painting, from the Republican writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's transmutative dream to the melancholy mists of Orhan Pamuk, constitute an unlikely guide to its exceptional experience of disorientation. The city constantly changes and various forms of literary or figurative fog accompany experiences of disorientation especially during the fraught transition between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, where the discourses of modernity and Orientalism coalesce and disorient one another. Each instance of fog/mist discloses something about the struggle to orient the city, as well as the struggle with ‘the Orient’.

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Notes

¹There is a host of writing on Istanbul's discursive ambiguity. For its status as a global cultural capital, see Göktürk and Soysal (2010). For the significance of the city's cultural blur in literary studies, see Apter (2006) and Konuk (2010).

²See Jean-Marc Moura (1998) for a detailed reading of the relationship between the etymology of Orient and its imagology.

³See Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology (2006), especially the emphasis on the directionality of Orientalism, Inge Boer's Disorienting Vision (2006) for the disorienting details in Orientalist paintings, and Ross Chambers’ Room for Manoeuver (1991) for the links between the Orient, modernity, melancholia and resistance.

⁴A celebrated writer, a committed and controversial poet and a journalist, Tevfik Fikret was one of the vanguards of Edebiyat-ı Cedide (New Literature), a major literary movement and a journal that promoted reorienting Turkish letters, by cleansing it from earlier literary conventions (Ersoy 2010; Yuva 2011).

⁵Abdülhamid II issued the first Constitution of the Empire in 1876, suspended it in 1878, and ruled the empire with absolute power for the following 40 years. Despite his autocratic conservatism, during his reign the Empire underwent unprecedented modernisation, including reforms in bureaucracy, interstate public transportation and education. For more on Abdülhamid's Westernisation and its cultural implications, see Deringil (1999).

⁶The same period marks major changes in the urbanscape, notably the desertion of the Old City and the flourishing of new quarters, notably associated with the European settlers. See Çelik (1986) for detailed information on the city's transformation in the nineteenth century.

⁷In ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ (‘Seven Old Men’), Baudelaire sketches the streets drowned by the mist: ‘Un brouillard sale et jaune inondait tout l'espace’ (1993). See Yuva (2011) for a comparison of Fikret's and Baudelairean mists. London's fogs in Dickens's work are equally invasive; in the opening scene of Bleak House (1996), the fog that dominates the streets creeps into the morals and the institutions associated with the city (11–12).

⁸The Crown Prince Abdülmecid I was proclaimed Caliph of Islam in 1922. The Caliphate was abolished in 1924 and Abdülmecid was exiled to France, where he spent the rest of his life (Yağbasan 2004).

⁹In 1928 the state implemented a reform of the alphabet, giving up Arabic script in favour of the Latin alphabet. This was followed by the language reform of 1936, which purged the Turkish language of its Ottoman vocabulary and syntax, introducing newly coined words from Turkic languages.

¹⁰Tanpınar's melancholic depictions earned him a lifetime of exclusion from the literary circles, a situation reversed posthumously, with Tanpınar's work receiving the international attention it has long deserved through translations and critical readings of his work. See Dellaloğlu (2012), Seyhan (2008), Tanpınar (2008) and Gürbilek (1995, 2004).

¹¹Maureen Freely's translations (2005).

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Notes on contributors

Hacer Esra Almas

Hacer Esra Almas is an Assistant Professor in Translation Studies at Haliç University, Istanbul. She completed her PhD on Istanbul's literary cityscape in Orhan Pamuk's work at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, where she also taught in the department of Literary Studies. Her research interests include diaspora, exile narratives, urban imaginary and Sufism.