Re-Imagining and Re-Placing New York and Istanbul. Hatice Bay
through Sayru Usman (Sayru:Patient and Us: Mind) a schizoid character and writer in Selim İleri’s Mel’un: Bir Us Yarılması (2013), becomes a schizoid city like its protagonist. It is a befuddled, lost, melancholic, rootless and forsaken city where binaries dominate every aspect of life from ←20 | 21→literature and history classes to the kitchens of Istanbullites: “From ladle to eggbeater, chef’s fork to possibly never used roast beef, and to ham knives, everything was there… Binaries even in kitchenware!” (19) Furthermore, it is a city that is befuddled: “Tulip Era that is praised to the skies in our literature class because of Yahya Kemal becomes an era of shame in our history class. Which one is it?” (71) Besides, “You are living in the middle of two realms and you are stuck between the two, and you do not have any idea” (438), Usman writes. Alienated from his society, Usman transforms Istanbul into a city of words through his allusions to Turkish and foreign artists and men of letters such as Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Kafka, Charles Dickens, Muhsin Ertuğrul, Tevfik Fikret, Ahmet Haşim, Yahya Kemal, Abdülhak Hamit Tarhan, Halide Edip Adıvar and Sait Faik Abasıyanık as well as through his writings ranging from history, literature, music and painting to politics. Again, this novel circulates around the theme of the city as a site of dispossession and loss where enforced forgetting and voluntary oblivion affects personal and historical memories as well as the cultural and physical landscape of the city of Istanbul. As my examples so far demonstrate, Istanbul is represented as dominated by the culture and objects of conspicuous consumption, forces of homogenization, mindless westernization and sometimes as a city of signs that confuses the reader. The inhabitants, on the other hand, seem to be unable to connect to the material city of Istanbul anymore; they feel disoriented, befuddled and disengaged from their city.
Similar to Auster, Pamuk too has been counted as an author who writes unfavorably about his city. In general, his Istanbul is regarded as an essential space, where merely ingrained binaries such as the East versus the West, Islam versus Christianity, secular versus Islam and local versus global are played out. For instance, Leonard Stone in “Minarets and Plastic Bags” states that, Pamuk’s books are about “the tension between East and West, the pull of an Islamic past and the lure of modern European manners and materialism” (198). The relation between the Westerner and the Easterner in The White Castle is read by Zekiye Antakyalioğlu “as a seventeenth-century story about an Ottoman master and his Italian slave who appear as doppelgangers” (666). Moreover, in My Name is Red, according to Rezzan Kocaöner Silkü, “Orhan Pamuk as a writer who bridges the Eastern and Western cultures with a sense of double-consciousness well portrays the burden and the misery of the traditional Ottoman miniaturists” (“Nation and Narration”). In a similar vein, in his article “Islam, Melancholy, and Sad, Concrete Minarets,” Ian Almond argues that, Pamuk’s The White Castle and The Black Book in their own ways “breathe certain sadnesses” in that,
←21 | 22→
Their plots are wandering and discursive, their tones reflective yet distant, their styles making curious use of an oxymoronically comic melancholy. The settings of his books seem to underline this tristesse which clings to every line of Pamuk’s prose: the gentle despair and nostalgia of the Venetian prisoner in The White Castle…and of course the ‘sadness of Istanbul streets in the rain’ in The Black Book. (75)
Besides, Istanbullite characters have been interpreted as inert, melancholic, indecisive, nostalgic and self-depreciating subjects. For instance, Almond regarding the characters of The White Castle and The Black Book makes the following comment:
Perhaps most keenly of all, it is the endings of Pamuk’s novels which express this modern, post-Romantic version of melancholy, a sadness which seems to combine the pain of unrequited love with the discovery that there are no grand narratives-or rather, that there are only narratives, stories whose only secret is that there is no secret, no supernatural source, no cosmic meaning beneath them…. All these endings mirror the sadness of a protagonist who has finally realised that he does not have a self, that his narratives possess no super-cosmic significance, that his life no longer has an object of adoration. (75)
Again, I agree with these comments but to a certain extent. This study does not deny the dilemmas of Pamuk’s characters, who vacillate between the West and the East; yet it claims that this is, as in the case of Auster, one aspect of the reality. This present study argues that in his novels, Pamuk problematizes the binary categories such as the West/the East, self/other, modern/traditional and offers more nuanced and enriched representations of Istanbul and its dwellers. Cities are not non-places or homogenized spaces, neither are the inhabitants devoid of any critical agency. We must move beyond the lament of spaces and their inhabitants and think that space and its production can never be completely controlled; there are always active dwellers who participate in counter-practices about the use and purpose of spaces.
In order to explore what productive and progressive possibilities Auster and Pamuk ascribe to their cities and characters, I divide this study into two parts. Part I deals with Auster and Part II is devoted to Pamuk’s work. The first chapter of Part I, which is the theory chapter, fleshes out Foucault’s theoretical work, especially his concept of heterotopia. Drawing on the premise that the other is indispensable for both Auster’s and Pamuk’s subjects’ becoming ethical selves, in the second part of Chapter 1, I will elaborate on Levinas’s ethics.
The second chapter of Part I, “The Construction of Heterotopias of Deviation and Ethical Self in City of Glass,” will examine City of Glass. The novel discusses how the main character – by walking through the streets of New York ←22 | 23→City – creates heterotopias of deviation, which allow him to transgress the norms and limits of the self and thereby construct an ethical self and hospitable space.
Chapter 3, “Gaze-to-Gaze, Flesh-to Flesh: Glimpses of Alterity and Altericidal Relations in Ghosts,” discusses the second novel of the trilogy, Ghosts. In Ghosts, heterotopia emerges as a crisis heterotopia which functions as a heterotopian mirror. This heterotopian mirror becomes a journey into exploring the impossibility of gazing the other and the dangers of attempting to do so. Eventually, the extent to which Ghosts underlines the need for an understanding of an asymmetrical relationship with the other, where the other is not graspable and reduced to the consciousness of the self, will be analyzed.
“The Construction of the Listening Eye/I in The Locked Room” analyzed in the fourth chapter explores how a room can as well act as a heterotopian space, as an alternate spatial and social ordering; more specifically, as a site of cultural and social resistance. The chapter also analyzes how the locked room where the other lives lends itself to an ethical interpretation because it makes the subject realize the unreachable nature of the other and gives room for a relation of unsaying and alterity.
Further examining the radical constructions of other spaces, Chapter 5, “In the Country of Last Things: A Journey into a Thousand of Heterotopias of Resistance,” explores how In the Country of Last Things engages with mutually constitutive spaces: the dominating public spaces of the city and heterotopias of resistance of the characters. By examining the ways in which relations between space, power and the self are interwoven, this chapter shows how even in most constricting urban spaces the subjects can establish ethical relationships and make a positive and ethical impact on the world they live in by creating textual, private and bodily spaces on their own.
The last chapter of Part I, “Heterotopical Investigations into History/Time and Geography/Space in Moon Palace,” focuses on Moon Palace. It discusses Marco Fogg’s radical excursions across heterotopic spaces such as the Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other American landscapes, especially the American West in order to find his ancestors and define his place in the world. Dealing with the past by making spatial movements allows Fogg as well as his grandfather