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Collective melancholy: Istanbul at the crossroads of history, space and memory

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Collective melancholy: Istanbul at the crossroads of history, space and memory

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Content COLLECTIVE MELANCHOLY: ISTANBUL AT THE CROSSROADS OF HISTORY, SPACE AND MEMORY by Hande Tekdemir A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) December 2008 Copyright 2008 Hande Tekdemir ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. iii INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I: Uncanny Moments in Nineteenth-Century Travelogues on Constantinople ................................................................................................................ 17 i) Colliding into the Modern in Constantinople ................................................................. 17 ii) The Textual Uncanny........................................................................................................ 36 CHAPTER II: The Spectral Return to the ‗Beginning‘ in Constantinople .................... 50 i) Journey into a Forbidden Pre-modern Past ..................................................................... 50 ii) The Figure of the Flȃneur in the Belatedly Modern Geography of Constantinople ................................................................................................................ 73 CHAPTER III: The Search for the Lost City and the Lost Text: Self-Reflections of the Modern Traveler in Post-Ottoman Istanbul ..................................................... 89 i) Nostalgia for the Modern: Restoration of the ‗Heroic‘ Victorian Self in Philip Glazebrook‘s Journey to Kars ...................................................................................... 97 ii) Joseph Brodsky‘s Reflective Nostalgia in ‗Flight from Byzantium‘ ....................... 104 CHAPTER IV: Istanbul in Contemporary Western Detective Fiction: Recovering the Lost Text of the Literary Canon ........................................................................... 115 i) The Ambivalent Position of the Detective between Tradition and Modernity in the Segregated Literary Cartography of the City ..................................................... 128 ii) Nostalgia for the Other‘s Past: Barbara Nadel‘s Istanbul .......................................... 157 iii) The Historiographical Detective Fiction in Jason Goodwin‘s Ottoman Detective Series ............................................................................................................ 172 CHAPTER V: The Spectral City of Contemporary Turkish Writers Writing within and Against the Western Literary Canon on Istanbul .............................................. 181 i) Orhan Pamuk‘s City of Collective Melancholy ........................................................... 202 ii) Fantastic Encounters in and with the City: Nazlı Eray‘s Beyoğlu’nda Gezersin (You Stroll Around Beyoğlu) ....................................................................................... 216 iii) Oya Baydar‘s Istanbul: Erguvan Kapısı (The Gate of the Judas Tree) and the Search for Dead Bodies in ―The Country Killing Her Children‖ .......................... 231 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 243 APPENDICES ...................................................................................................................... 264 iii ABSTRACT This study draws on a historical perspective on the evolution of a certain form that I call the ―Istanbul canon,‖ in which the city has always been associated with loss. Tracing the genealogy of loss in the literary representations of Istanbul by both western and local writers in the past and the present, I explore how the various configurations of loss are related to the local context and to the history of modernity at large. The city‘s ambivalent history in this geography on the threshold, functions as a means to understand loss, concealed in the various spatio-temporal layers –East and West, colonizer and the colonized, pre-modern and modern,– within the history of modernity. My objective is to consider the cityscape as a template upon which modernity is projected as a subjective and fleeting experience, comprehended in both local and global terms, and critiqued accordingly. I focus on the uncanny as a recurrent characteristic of nineteenth-century travelogues, in which the traveler is unsettled by unexpectedly encountering the familiar within the unfamiliar terrain of Constantinople, while I consider the nostalgic renditions of modern travelogues and western detective fiction not only as reflections on the changes within the western literary canon about the city, but also as reactions against the modernizing world. Finally, the last chapter illustrates melancholy as the dominant sentiment in the contemporary Turkish literature on Istanbul; yet, it also displays the convergence of melancholy with the uncanny and nostalgia in Turkish writers‘ ambiguous relationship to the modern. 1 INTRODUCTION This study draws on a historical perspective on the evolution of a certain form that I call the ―Istanbul canon,‖ in which the city has always been associated with loss. Tracing the genealogy of loss in the literary representations of Istanbul by both western and local writers in the past and the present, I explore how the various configurations of loss are related to the local context and to the history of modernity at large. My objective is to consider the cityscape as a template on which modernity is projected as a subjective and fleeting experience, comprehended in both local and global terms, and critiqued accordingly. Within the scope of this dissertation, the experience of modernity correlates to the unsettlement of the individual as a result of a constant oscillation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, past and present, home and elsewhere. Located between the history of the colonizer and the colonized, Istanbul is a space in which more than one plane of reference has always been at stake. On the one hand, as the capital of a late Empire, Istanbul played a role in the colonization of parts of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (thus, challenging the binary opposition between the colonizing West and the colonized East as posed by Edward Said in Orientalism). It was the center of an eastern empire, which competed for power with other European empires for more than four hundred years until the end of nineteenth century. On the other hand, from the turn of the century until after World War I, Istanbul was a city under siege and occupation by European powers that tentatively shared the remains of the Empire, which encountered 2 strong native resistance to colonization. The result was that Turkey obtained independence before it became a colony. The city‘s ambivalent history, in this geography of the threshold, functions as a means to understand loss, concealed in the various spatio-temporal layers –East and West, colonizer and the colonized, pre-modern and modern,– within the history of modernity. While my methodology is largely based on an exploration of the manifestations of loss, such as the uncanny, nostalgia, mourning and melancholy, as articulated primarily by Sigmund Freud and other critics, my interest in urban space enlarges Freud‘s theory of the individual psyche, with the purpose of examining loss in relation to Istanbul‘s past and socio-historical background. In questioning how loss relates to different aesthetic, political and historical contexts of the cityscape, I also draw on urban theory, particularly Walter Benjamin‘s work on the metropolitan experience and the figure of the flȃneur and of the detective. More specifically, I examine four groups of narratives written about the city, which constitute the Istanbul canon that has accumulated over centuries: 1) Nineteenth- century western (particularly French, British, American) travelogues 2) Late twentieth- century travelogues 3) Contemporary western detective fiction 4) Contemporary Turkish fiction. I focus on the uncanny as a recurrent characteristic of nineteenth-century travelogues, in which the traveler is unsettled by unexpectedly encountering the familiar within the unfamiliar terrain of Constantinople, while I consider the nostalgic renditions of modern travelogues and western detective fiction not only as reflections on the changes within the western literary canon about the city, but also as reactions against the 3 modernizing world. Finally, the last chapter illustrates melancholy as the dominant sentiment in contemporary Turkish literature on Istanbul; yet, it also displays the convergence of melancholy with the uncanny and nostalgia in Turkish writers‘ ambiguous relationship to the modern. These three concepts are used as operative categories in the organization of the chapters. The purpose is to understand what it means to be modern through the reflections of the modern in a literary canon of an urban space, and to demonstrate the transformation of that literary canon in relation to the history of modernity. Mutually constructed, neither of these two concerns can fully ‗explain‘ the other, but can be used as alternative methods to the traditional approaches, employed in studies of modernity and orientalism. Reading the story of modernity from an oriental yet not too oriental setting challenges both the European-centered theories and the interpretation of alternative modernities in non-western geographies. Examination of the writings on Istanbul as an evolving canon in relation to the temporal frame of modernity, on the other hand, is a variation from the stabilized binary oppositions between East and West, modeled in orientalist studies. Focusing on western travelogues, the first two chapters, respectively titled ―Uncanny Moments in Nineteenth-Century Travelogues on Constantinople,‖ and ―The Spectral Return to the ‗Beginning‘ in Constantinople,‖ examine a variety of texts from different periods and national traditions in order to demonstrate how Istanbul has carried a common image for the western traveler, despite its changing socio-political history over centuries. Although the chapters do not incorporate a comprehensive account of any singular text, the main argument in the first two chapters points out the uncanny as a 4 ―mental state of projection‖ (Vidler 11) in western travelers‘ encounter with the nineteenth-century Ottoman capital. The traveler, who arrives in Constantinople with the expectation of finding the ‗orient‘ as part of his/her eastern journey, is shocked to see a partially familiar world that reminds him of home. Equally surprising is to glimpse into a pre-modern past, still surviving in the cityscape, particularly in the (un)regulation of the dead (i.e. the graveyards) and the inhuman (i.e. street dogs), and to draw parallels between this ‗strange‘ realm and one‘s own remote past, hidden from sight in the modernized world. Oscillating between a familiar and an unfamiliar world, the traveler witnesses the modern condition in which the uncanny is a constant presence. However, the uncanny is not posited as an inherent characteristic of the city. As Anthony Vidler argues, ―If actual buildings or spaces are interpreted through [the lens of the architectural uncanny], it is not because they themselves possess uncanny properties, but rather because they act, historically or culturally, as representations of estrangement‖ (11-12). Similarly, I argue that Constantinople‘s various temporal and spatial evocations create an effect through which the traveler encounters the uncanny –an effect that is similar to the intermediary state in between ―waking and dreaming‖ (Vidler 11). Within an extensive body of criticism on orientalist writing, the originality of the present work is indebted to the emphasis on this unconscious moment, as if one were ‗blacking out.‘ Unlike various critical works on orientalist writing, which underline oriental space as the projection of the other through which the traveler, as part of a pre-determined goal, arrives at self- knowledge [Bongie (1991); Leask (1992); Parla (1985); Turhan (2003)], my objective in reading in between the lines of the travelogues, is to illustrate the fatal entanglements of 5 the self and other on the level of the unconscious. 1 Travel to Istanbul is, if anything, to see the self in the other and the other in the self, against one‘s will. The uncanny is a momentary image that unmasks the lost text of the (forbidden past) self, hidden from sight. The experience of such an entanglement or of the threshold is also witnessed on the textual level: As I discuss at length in the chapters, the confrontation and subsequent frustration with the narrative repetition, which alienates one from one‘s own writing, and the strange familiarity with other travelers‘ notes caused by production of a sense of permanent belatedness, is an integral part of the modern condition. Despite the wide scope of travelogues referenced in the first two chapters, the choice of texts, nevertheless, is dominated by the French and British traditions, which is compelled by, first, the abundance of these narratives in the archival research I have conducted and secondly by the languages I am competent in. More importantly, as the last chapter on Turkish literature –especially Orhan Pamuk‘s work– will illustrate, these two traditions have been the most influential for the Turkish authors writing on Istanbul. However, I‘d like to emphasize the fact that it is not my intention to essentialize the western perspective as British and French. Instead, I take these two as paradigmatic of European, or even more generally of ‗western,‘ travelogues. Primary focus will be given 1 An exemplary argument for the projection of the other onto the oriental space is presented by Chris Bongie in Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siecle: ―For the purposes of this study, exoticism is defined as a nineteenth-century literary and existential practice that posited another space, the space of an Other, outside or beyond the confines of a ‗civilization‘ (and I will henceforth, as much as possible, spare the reader the quotation marks that ought to be placed around this and other such loaded words) that, by virtue of its modernity, was perceived by many writers as being incompatible with certain essential values –or, indeed, the realm of value itself. What modernity is in the process of obliterating ‗here‘ might still prove a present possibility in this alternative geopolitical space: such is the primary credo of the exoticist project‖ (4-5). 6 to the following materials: Constantinople by Théophile Gautier, Constantinople by Edmondo de Amicis, Beauties of the Bosphorus by Julia Pardoe, Constantinople in 1828 by Charles Mac Farlene, and A Sail to Smyrna by Mrs. Baillie. Supplementary examples from other countries such as Spain (Juan Goytisolo‘s Ottoman’s Istanbul), Denmark and Norway (Knut Hamsun and H. C. Anderson‘s travel notes collected in Istanbul’da Iki Iskandinav Seyyah [Two Scandinavian Travelers in Istanbul]), and United States (Francis Marion Crawford‘s ―Constantinople‖, John Dos Passos‘ Orient Express, Mark Twain‘s The Innocents Abroad), among others, reinforce, more than diversify, the parts belonging to a whole that I call the Istanbul canon. My insistence on considering a variety of texts as a consistent whole is impelled by the many cross references among works examined in these two chapters. To take just one example, Mrs. Baillie, who visited Istanbul in 1871 on her way to Smyrna for missionary work, refers to English predecessors such as Julia Pardoe and Mrs. Grey in her introduction, while she also includes an allusion to Mark Twain‘s aversion to Turkish coffee. 2 This inter-textual referentiality is significant not only for understanding the extensive scope of the canon but also the lack of distinction writers make between their male and female predecessors. While my discussion of the western travelogues is located within Edward Said‘s discursive framework, as he outlines it in his pioneering work on British and French 2 ―I had felt, for many years, a strong wish to see the scenery of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. Every work of travel which I read containing an account of Constantinople and its neighborhood, from Miss Pardoe‘s City of the Sultan to the interesting records which Mr. Russell and the Hon. Mrs. Grey have given us of their visits to it in the suite of the Prince and Princess of Wales, seemed to put a new edge on my desire‖ (A Sail to Smyrna 1). ―I had heard before that the Turkish coffee was bad, and, thanks to Mark Twain, was quite prepared to dislike it, although I scarcely expected it to be so disagreeable‖ (A Sail to Smyrna 129). 7 representations of the Orient, I limit my focus to nineteenth-century literary texts written specifically about Istanbul. Within Orientalism‘s spacious geography, Edward Said examines a body of European writing which helps shape the production of the ‗Eastern myth‘ by western narratives. This tradition has a history, which goes back as far as Homer and Aeschylus and still persists in contemporary society. As a perpetuator of this long history, the orientalist, regardless of his/her period or field of specialization, contributes to the creation of the Orient, which s/he then claims to represent. The orientalist assists in exacerbating a series of stereotypical images, as Europe (the West, the ‗self‘) being the rational, developed, superior, authentic, active and masculine; and The Orient (the East, the ‗other‘) being irrational, backward, inferior, inauthentic and feminine (8). This system is designed to promote European imperialism and colonialism. The fact that orientalist texts produce a certain type of knowledge that is transformed into power over the Orient, is only tentatively taken for granted throughout my dissertation. 3 Although especially the end of nineteenth century witnessed increasing pressure on the Ottoman Empire by the British and French, the relationship between Europe and the Ottomans did not really fulfill the criteria posited by Said in Orientalism. Since stereotypical representations of Turks and Turkey in western fiction have also been overly discussed, my work aims to further these discussions by interrogating what the Orient actually does to the Western traveler rather than what the West imposes on the 3 For representation of Turkey and Turks in western literature, see the following: Kamil Aydin, Images of Turkey in Western Literature.Huntingdon, UK:The Eothen Press, 1999. Jale Parla, The Eastern Question and the Fortunes of the Turkish Myth in England and France, Unpub. Diss. Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1978. Berna Moran, A Bibliography of English Publications About the Turks from the 15th Century to the 18th Century. Istanbul: Istanbul Univ. Press, 1964. 8 Orient. I will examine the ways in which the traveler, considered as a figure analagous to the flȃneur, is unsettled and disordered, if not totally disempowered, as a result of his/her journey to Istanbul. Confronted with the changing face of the modernized city, the melancholic impulse experienced by the figure of the traveler/flȃneur in western travelogues can be perceived as initiating a critique of modernity specifically for Istanbul, but also for a larger (European) geography also afflicted by modern loss. The Arcades Project, Benjamin‘s extensive work on the archeology of Parisian urban space, and his book on Charles Baudelaire, discuss the flȃneur as a marginal figure who deciphers the city in such a way that he opens up possibilities for the narration of a counter-history of the present moment. He pays attention to ‗the trivia, the refuse, the trash‘ of history. He is more interested in the demise concealed behind the monumental facades than in the monuments themselves. Hence, the flȃneur transforms the city into a site of remembering. Looking at the urban space, he can conjure up personal memories or historical facts while he can also do the reverse: looking into his memories, into the past, he is able to bring forth a spatial form to temporality. As Graeme Gilloch points out, ―The flaneur is heroic in exemplifying contradictory moments in the city: on the one hand, the ruination of experience and the fragmentation of memory; on the other, the decipherment of meaning and the recollection of lost moments‖ (214). In other words, the flȃneur dismantles the city into multiple layers of space, and then reassembles its fragments to create an alternative point of view of urban space and modernity. By doing that, he brings together temporal and spatial aspects of the city. Yet, coeval with his efforts to understand and capture the past, comes the realization that the past can never be fully 9 reconstituted and that what is really ‗lost‘ can never be completely substituted. His melancholic spirit corresponds to the belatedness of the traveler whose ‗authority‘ is challenged by the existing Istanbul canon. Any travelogue about Istanbul is captured within an established tradition that it is compelled to repeat. The city turns into a ‗lost text‘ which is perhaps the very first book ever written about Istanbul, but which could never be found because each text points to a different text. It is precisely this idea of the lost text, and the general dominance of the concept of ‗loss,‘ that provides both continuity and rupture between the nineteenth-century and modern travelogues. The third chapter, ―The Search for The Lost City and the Lost Text: Self-Reflections of the Modern Traveler in Post-Ottoman Istanbul‖ traces the transition from the uncanny to modern nostalgia as the dominant sentiment in western writings on Constantinople/Istanbul, with a particular focus on works by Philip Glazebrook and Joseph Brodsky. Simply put, the major question the chapter explores is: what does a twentieth-century traveler look for in ‗modernized‘ Istanbul –a marginalized city in the new Turkish Republic, whose centre is moved to Ankara, a small Anatolian town? Taking that historical moment as a starting point, when the post-Ottoman Istanbul loses its ‗unique‘ status for the west because of the transformation of the empire into a nation- state, this and the following two chapters examine the modifications to the Istanbul canon, and interrogate the manifestations of the uncanny in contemporary accounts of the city. As pseudo-detectives, both Glazebrook and Brodsky arrive in Istanbul in the 1980s with the purpose of uncovering a hidden reality, which at first seems to be related to a personal matter, though it is later revealed to concern a larger socio-historical problem. 10 Faced with a lost city, reduced to a ‗blank space‘ and emptied out of its previous meanings, both travelers re-imagine Istanbul in the image of their own creation: While Glazebrook attempts to restore the lost sense of the heroic (Victorian) self, which, in his opinion, was inspired by travel to the orient and is no longer accessible in the cityscape, Brodsky evokes the Byzantine past in order to connect to his Orthodox past. For the modern travelers, what is lost–for which one can be nostalgic like Glazebrook, or anti- nostalgic as in the case of Brodsky– is the experience of the Ottoman capital as a counter- imperial center, narrated in previous travelogues. The absence of experiencing Constantinople, however, now replaced by the act of sightseeing, creates and validates the presence of a past –actual or literary– whose revival is founded upon either the erasure of the Ottoman city or its re-invention in imaginary ways. Modern travelogues share similar concerns with the previous ones in relation to the questions of mimetic representation, authenticity, authority and canon-formation. Yet they are nuanced with the self-consciousness of the writer, at the cost of the eradication of the unconscious aspect of the uncanny, which, combined with the remarkable decrease in travel to Istanbul starting from the turn of the century, points at the dissolution of a certain literary tradition on the city. The fourth chapter, titled ―Istanbul in Contemporary Western Detective Fiction: Recovering the Lost Text of the Literary Canon,‖ interrogates the new emerging canon of detective fiction on the twentieth-century city, and examines the perpetuation of nineteenth-century and earlier travelogues within the plot structure of contemporary detective fiction that is set in Istanbul. My purpose, in this chapter, has less to do with 11 providing a generic distinction than to point out a new set of characteristics that are also shared by modern travelogues. Being by definition (self)-analytical, detective fiction incorporates the self-questioning gaze of the travelogue genre. Structurally speaking, detective fiction is the narration of a loss/secret/mystery that is obvious; yet the secret opts to be expressed, repeated, and given a form by the detective figure. As observed in the works of Barbara Nadel and Jason Goodwin, the two authors examined in this chapter, the major idea behind travel is to look for ‗something remote‘ (conceptually or physically, i.e. a long bygone past and a distant land) –a search that results in a return to the obvious and the familiar that was not so obvious at the beginning. One could argue that the investigation conducted in detective stories is, both structurally and thematically, correlated with the modern travelers‘ search. By inserting the familiar figure of the detective and the experience of detection into a strange context, western detective writers attempt to revive and re-capture that moment of fluctuation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and replace the unexpected detour of the textual uncanny with the pre-planned, recognizable pattern or template of the detective genre. The main argument in this chapter considers the act of compulsory repetition as a conscious effort to re-locate the familiar, embodied in the detective figure, within the unfamiliar domain of the post-Ottoman capital. This repetition not only revives but also overturns the modern condition that moves from the unfamiliar to the familiar, as argued in the first two chapters. The act of compulsory repetition, which is posited as a disconcerting experience in the travelogues, especially as observed in Freud‘s nightmarish anecdote about unintentionally going back to the same 12 location in the labyrinthine streets of an Italian town in his article ―The Uncanny,‖ is transformed into a comforting paradigm in the detective fiction. Moreover, the anxieties surrounding the impossibility of originality about writing on Constantinople, which lead to self-estrangement, are effectively addressed when the European-centered cartography of detective fiction reclaims authority and takes up from the point of the ‗dead end‘ or ‗nonexistence‘ associated with Istanbul in modern travelers‘ accounts. It is at the moment when the uncanny is deliberately used as an instrument, to make the familiar strange by locating it elsewhere, that modern nostalgia emerges as a desire to re-inhabit the threshold between the familiar and unfamiliar, the modern and the pre-modern, that appeared unexpectedly in nineteenth-century Constantinople. The peculiar characterization of the local detective in Istanbul as an ambiguous figure on the threshold, in between tradition and modernity, allows for the association of the figure with the distinguishing features of both the flȃneur (i.e. being intuitive) and the detective. The invocation of the flȃneur in the detective and the detective in the flȃneur correlates to the contemporary western detective writers‘ nostalgia for a legible multiethnic community of old Istanbul: the modern crowd is maintained –yet rendered legible through idiosyncratic types of clothing, as if belonging to an archaic world. While modern western travelers and writers of contemporary detective fiction react to the erasure of Istanbul‘s mythical significance as the legendary Ottoman capital by nostalgically looking for and subsequently restoring the threshold between the pre- modern and the modern, local writers develop and problematize alternative ways of historicizing the city, whose ‗ambiguity‘ as a threshold had once troubled the formation 13 of a ‗pure‘ nation. A new tradition in and of Istanbul can be reinvented by Turkish authors only if the city‘s –and the nation‘s– different temporalities and its haunting past are evoked. As Graeme Gilloch argues, The Hesselian flȃneur loses himself not only in the spatial maze of the city, but also, as a native of the metropolis, in the temporal labyrinth of his own memories. […] As we will see, these at times poetic studies were conceived as important, if ultimately unsuccessful, experiments in writing a critical ‗counter-history‘ of the present moment, one which would brush not only the recent past, but also the cityscape itself, ‗against the grain‘ to disclose its secrets. (Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations 199) Although each contemporary Turkish author, particularly those who are natives of the city, has developed a unique way of dealing with the Ottoman and/or Byzantine past of the city –some lapsing into imperialist nostalgia while others provide a concurrent critique of imperialist practices- what they hold in common is the re-introduction of the uncanny in Istanbul as both a product of and a remedy for modernity. The lost experience of the uncanny re-appears unexpectedly in the last chapter, ―The Spectral City of Contemporary Turkish Writers Writing Within and Against the Western Literary Canon on Istanbul,‖ which points out Turkish literature as creating a ‗counter-history.‘ In other words, while Orhan Pamuk, Nazlı Eray, and Oya Baydar, among other contemporary authors, stress the peculiar experience of a peripheral modernity as the continuous confrontation with not-being-at-home (for being estranged from one‘s past, from one‘s ‗authentic‘ culture as a result of modernization, and from one‘s city that has been narrated mainly through western perspectives), they respond to the debilitating effects of the uncanny by turning these effects into resources for initiating a critique of modernity. 14 The retrospective –rather than conclusive– nature of the last chapter provides the reader with a fresh perspective about the previous chapters on works by western writers. On a broader level, examination of the coalescence of space with narrative form, with a particular focus on flȃnerie, enables questioning modernity from a spatialized geography. The incorporation of a spatial component into modernity‘s temporal belatedness locates this study in between Eurocentric approaches to modernity (which prioritize the temporal dimension) and alternative modernities theory (that take spatial dimension into consideration). As Timothy Mitchell indicates in the introduction to Questions of Modernity, the history of modernity has always been universal at the expense of excluding the local deviations, and it is the aim of the critics in his edited volume to bring the local and the non-Western to attention with the purpose of proposing a more complicated and heterogeneous version of the modern (xi). The main emphasis in such counter-historical readings is to take into consideration the emergence of the modern outside the West. On the other hand, underlining the significance of the non-Western world for modernity could paradoxically be yet another way to confirm the universality of the modern to which the non-West has also contributed –together with the pioneering West. As Mitchell argues, ―The expanded vision acknowledges the significance of forces and contexts outside the European core. But their significance can be measured only in terms of their contribution to the singular history of the modern‖ (xii). An alternative way to avoid the appropriation of the non-West as a supplementary geography to the development of modernity is to discuss ‗alternative modernities‘ instead of examining the non-West‘s contribution to European modernity. However, as Mitchell demonstrates, this 15 approach has a potential weakness that puts too much emphasis on ‗infinite play of possibilities, with no rigorous sense of what, if anything, gives imperial modernity its phenomenal power of replication and expansion‖ (xii). As a result, discussion of the ‗difference‘ of alternative modernities unwittingly turns out to locate the non-West within –albeit against– the European universalizing narrative. The resolution of these two problematic interpretations of modernity‘s history, that is a singular and universal history and the too ‗easy pluralism of alternative modernities,‘ is to strike a balance between the two by acknowledging the existence of the former while paying attention to the way such a universalism is challenged every time it is adapted, re-produced, and therefore, displaced, deferred and made incomplete in non-Western geographies (Mitchell xii-xiii). Drawing on Mitchell‘s reconciliation of the two interpretations of modernity, this dissertation aims to point out the ways in which European modernity confronted its limits in the non-western geography of Constantinople. It does not attempt to challenge the dominance and taken-for-granted priority of European modernity, especially for a geography that has taken it as a model to build on, starting from the weakening of the Empire at the beginning of the seventeenth century, continuing during the foundation of the Republic in 1920s, and extending to the present day. What is challenged, however, is the taken-for-grantedness itself- that certain encounters in Constantinople do not correspond to any that one can experience in a European setting. Writing about Istanbul enables both the western and local writers to comprehend loss that is marked by modernity at home and elsewhere: it also functions as a means through which one can come to terms with loss by creating alternative strategies. The following chapters will 16 analyze these strategies, developed through different perspectives. By bringing together local and non-local responses to the significance of a certain urban space, I aim at introducing a more productive methodology for a substantial body of critical works that deal with orientalist texts from a mainly western perspective. 17 CHAPTER I: Uncanny Moments in Nineteenth-Century Travelogues on Constantinople i) Colliding into the Modern in Constantinople ―Here is a riddle for you unheimlicher bird. What is so strange it feels like home? -Susan Mitchell, ‗Bird, a Memoir,‘ in Erotikon: Poems ‗Gentlemen, tomorrow at dawn we shall see the first minarets of Stamboul,‘ as announced by the captain of the ship on which the Italian traveler Edmondo de Amicis arrived in Istanbul in 1874, might have sounded like a standard report of their voyage to the passengers on board, but it meant a lot more to de Amicis who had waited for ten long years, as he wrote earlier on in his narrative, to see Constantinople. While the ship sailed towards the city, de Amicis‘ excitement was intense, as he prepared himself finally to see the city he knew through previous travelers: One great pleasure for me and for my companion was the profound conviction we had that our immense expectations could not be disappointed. There is no doubt about Constantinople; even the wariest traveler can be certain they won‘t experience disappointment there. And it‘s not a case of nostalgic memories or conventional admiration. It is one universal and sovereign beauty, before which poets and archeologists, ambassadors and shopkeepers, princesses and sailors, sons of the north and of the south, are all alike overcome with wonder. All the world thinks it is the most beautiful place on earth. Once they‘ve arrived, travel writers are overwhelmed. Pertusier stammers, Tournefort declares that human speech is incapable, Pouqueville thinks he‘s on another planet, La Croix is intoxicated, the Vicomte de Marcellus ecstatic, Lamartine gives thanks to God, Gautier doubts the reality of what he sees, and one and all pile image on image, make their style as brilliant as possible, and torment themselves in vain to find expressions that do not miserably fall short of their thoughts. Chateaubriand alone 18 describes his entrance into Constantinople with a remarkable air of calm, but even he does not fail to remark that the sight is the most beautiful in the world, while Lady Mary Montagu passes the same judgment, interpolating a ‗perhaps‘, as if tacitly leaving the first place to her own beauty, of which she had such a high opinion. (4) Entering the Bosphorus by ship, his first vision, which has already been rehearsed through other travelers‘ accounts, is further delayed by foggy weather that gradually disappears to ‗unveil‘ the city he has long awaited to see. However, de Amicis has ‗lived‘ the city so much in books that he seems to find it hard to leave the textual world in order to recount his first impressions of the city. Rather than narrating his own enchantment with the actual sight of the city lying before him, he continues alluding to other texts, creating an impression that he is almost stuttering before the overwhelming presence of the others: And now, poor wretch, try to describe, to profane with your words that divine vision! Who would dare to describe Constantinople? Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Gautier –all mere stammering! And yet images and words rush to my mind and flow from my pen. I see, I speak, I write, all at once, with no hope of success but in a kind of drunken haze of delight. (13) One can imagine him on deck standing speechless –literally and figuratively- as he gropes for something ‗original‘ to say while realizing there is nothing new that he can contribute to what already exists. In the foreword to de Amicis‘ book, Umberto Eco draws attention to a certain ‗astonishment‘ in the ―countless descriptions of arriving in Istanbul (from antiquity onwards the accounts of the journey to the city form a literary genre with its own rules, in which the enchantment of the first arrival is an essential element)‖ (vii). Indeed, de Amicis‘ initial encounter with Constantinople manifests great astonishment not only at the ‗reality‘ of the city he has been reading about, but also at 19 himself for witnessing a moment that has been imagined for such a long time. The repetition of the first person singular pronoun in ‗I see, I speak, I write,‘ underlines the sovereign subjectivity of the author as much as it implements a certain sense of uncertainty in his stuttering speech. Here is the city he has known through books –it is so familiar that there is something strange about being actually present in it. Here is his own self looking at the panorama – it is so ‗unreal‘ that his own self –that which is the most familiar- is derealised. It is a moment of something familiar unexpectedly arising in an unfamiliar context, and something strange appearing in a familiar setting. Arriving in Constantinople on her way to Smyrna, 4 on April 19, 1871, only three years earlier than Edmondo de Amicis, an English female traveler on missionary work, E. C. C. Baillie, graphically recounts her first synoptic view of the city: Stamboul, the ancient historic town, lay to our left with its bazaars, old towers, and fortresses, while to our right, on the other side of the bridge, arose Pera, the comparatively new city, so handsomely adorned and improved by the present enterprising Sultan. Away beyond the bridge stretched, in the well-known curve, the waters of the Golden Horn, narrowing till they reached the favorite holiday resort of the Turks, called the Sweet Waters, while on the right the beautiful Bosphorus was seen taking its quiet way to the Black Sea. Curiously enough a friend, in answer to my question, ‗What does Constantinople most remind you of?‘ responded frankly enough ‗London‘. It was exactly my own idea, and had been in my mind all the morning as we approached the populous mart before us, only I had not ventured to put my cockneyism into words. All great cities, more or less, resemble each other, and the signs of population, life, and business marked at once the approach of our own great Metropolis, although the individual features of our surrounding were so different. (A Sail to Smyrna 66-67). 5 4 Mrs. Baillie describes Smyrna, today‘s Izmir, as ‗the spot so rich in historic interest, so precious from its connection with the Apocalyptic Vision‘ (210). 5 Mrs. Baillie‘s description is a panoramic view of the city. As Benjamin explains in the notes section of his book on Charles Baudelaire, panoramas used to function as artwork: ―Panoramas were largely circular tableaux, usually displaying scenes of battles and cities, painted in trompe l‘oeil and originally designed to be viewed from the center of a rotunda. They were introduced in France in 1799 by the American engineer Robert Fulton. Subsequent forms included the Diorama (opened by Louis Daguerre and Charles Bouton in 20 Considering the fact that this is Mrs. Baillie‘s first encounter with the city she is observing from a distance on the ship that has carried her all the way from England, the description of Constantinople sounds too detailed and well-informed to be captured in such a short period of time. The author does not randomly see ‗old towers‘ and ‗fortresses,‘ but recognizes them as belonging to the ‗ancient historic town,‘ opposite of which lies ‗Pera‘ –a name that is already familiar long before she sets foot there- in which she can most notably not only distinguish a ‗handsomely adorned‘ environment, but knows the towers to be erected by the ‗present enterprising Sultan‘. Her impressive knowledge of the city and its geography is also detected in her observing the ‗Golden Horn,‘ and its ‗well-known curve,‘ with ‗Sweet Waters‘ (and its significance for the local population) further down the narrow canal. Her description is accompanied by such knowledgeable commentary that one cannot but query how she is already acquainted with a city she is meeting for the first time. This question leads to justified suspicions regarding her ability to see as far as Sweet Waters when the ship on which she stands is anchored in front of the [Galata] Bridge, in between Pera and the old town, which is located in the mouth of the Golden Horn. As she states in the preface to A Sail to Smyrna, Mrs. Baillie had always nurtured a desire similar to de Amicis‘ to see Constantinople, which was strengthened by her readings of travelers‘ tales about the city: ―Every work of travel which I read containing an account of Constantinople and its neighborhood, from Miss Pardoe‘s City of the Sultan ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1822 in Paris), in which pictures were painted on cloth transparencies that, by 1831, were being used with various lightning effects; it was this installation that burned down in 1839‖ (The Writer of Modern Life 218-219). 21 to the interesting records which Mr. Russell and the Hon. Mrs. Grey have given us of their visits to it in the suite of the Prince and Princess of Wales, seemed to put a new edge on my desire‖ (1). She came to know Constantinople evidently from her readings and from meeting people who had been to the city. She informs the reader in the preface that during her trip to Italy in 1851, she met a fellow traveler who recounted to her the beauty of the Bosphorus (1-2). Hence, literary accounts combined with the ‗real‘ experiences of her acquaintances have helped her prefabricate a certain psycho-urban space before her own visit, which turns out to be a confrontation with such pre-conceived notions of the city. Her encounter with the city is destined to be mediated by other travelers‘ tales, either informing or misleading her, but always making her familiar with the city. 6 While Mrs. Baillie and Edmondo de Amicis seem to know Constantinople in advance through other texts, (an effect which I will henceforth call ‗the textual uncanny‘) the former‘s familiarity with the city is enhanced even more when she and her friend compare it to their native town. 7 Being in the category of ‗all great cities,‘ London and 6 On the ship to Constantinople, she continues to read books on the city: ―We have been reading ‗Mark Twain.‘ He is a laughing philosopher, and looks at the amusing side of everything; his descriptions are entertaining enough, but we have yet to test their truth‖ (32). 7 The way the familiar can turn into an alarming experience is narrated from the perspective of an Englishman in Philip Glazebrook‘s historiographical novel, Byzantine Honeymoon, a contemporary fictional account of the city set at the end of nineteenth-century Constantinople: ―Returning one evening from a day passed alone at empty Emirghian, consumed with desires fostered by my voluptuous furnishings, I was walking disconsolately up the Grande Rue when it occurred to me that the ill-lit side streets above the quays must certainly house brothels. To think was to act. I entered a steep alley. The Grande Rue itself is scarcely lit here, and exceedingly ill-paved; the lane I now ascended was dark as night, its surface all mud-holes and heaps of ordure. The houses, mostly wooden, were built out overhead so as almost to close out the sky‘s last glow. Constantinople, on account of the want of wheeled traffic, strikes the European as a strangely silent city. I could hear a tram ringing and clattering far off below me, and the sound of several dogfights rose above the town. In the dark lane where I walked, though, I heard only my own English boots (I did not wear the galoshes worn by most inhabitants). But I was not alone. My eyes soon made out in the dusk numerous human wrecks of both sexes slumped against rotting house-walls or upon the steps the alley now climbed. They were neither Turks nor Arabs, but Europeans. Then a ship in the port below hooted, and I was reminded at once of Liverpool. Far from reassuring me, the familiar 22 Constantinople are similar to each other in terms of ‗the signs of population, life, and business‘, while ‗individual features‘ are very different. Later on in his text, de Amicis, too, describes the people passing over Galata Bridge in detail, which is ‗like a crowd in London,‘ for him. Indeed, his straightforward identification of Constantinople as the ‗London of the East‘ (80), and association of Pera as ‗the West End‘ of the European colony (41), whereas Galata is the ‗East End‘ are even more striking than Mrs. Baillie‘s allusion to her home town since de Amicis is Italian by birth, yet maintains the allusion to London. The capital of the British Empire seems to be a universal referent of the time, epitome of the capitalist and imperialist centers, of ‗all great cities‘. In that sense, the analogy between Constantinople and London is more than a ‗homely‘ allusion: their commonality is inscribed within the imperialist endeavor found in both capitals during the nineteenth century. 8 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- alarmed me: I knew what could befall a man who strayed into the slums of Liverpool. The notion of Turkish ruffians, Eastern desperadoes, was all storybook to me; but the fear I felt of the dregs of my own Western world was real as six inches of cold Sheffield steel between my shoulder blades‖ (Byzantine Honeymoon 49-50). 8 In Aziyadé, Pierre Loti‘s fictional character Loti, who settles down in the Turkish quarter of the city, suggestively compares England and Constantinople. Despite his French origins, the author portrays his main character as an English naval officer visiting Constantinople on a mission in 1876, which might provide a more sharpened comparison between London as ‗home‘ and the Ottoman capital. Before his departure, Loti describes his country to his servant/companion Achmet by pointing out its differences from Constantinople: ―From [England] it is a far cry to Stamboul, and my country bears no resemblance to yours. Everything is paler and all the colours dimmer, just like Stamboul in a mist, but over there the atmosphere is even less transparent than here. [...] All the houses are square and exactly alike. The only prospect is one‘s neighbour‘s blank wall, and at times this flatness becomes so oppressive that one longs to climb up somewhere to obtain a wider view. But there are no steps leading up to the roof, as in Turkey, and once when I took it into my head to stroll about on my housetop, the whole neighborhood thought I was crazy. Everyone wears a uniform dress, a grey overcoat, and a hat or a cap, -worse than at Pera. Everything is mapped out, ordered, and regulated. There are laws about everything and rules for everybody, so that the meanest lout, your hatter, or your barber, has exactly the same right as an intelligent, resolute fellow, such as you or I‖ (166-167). 23 Points of similarity are cryptic enough, if not difficult to imagine; yet, a more general and vague reference to differences as ‗individual features‘ leaves the reader with no specific clue about the ways in which Constantinople differs from London. Further on in the text, Mrs. Baillie‘s account of her first sightseeing tour to the bazaars sheds more light on the specificities of what she finds similar and different in this city. In addition to the comparison between England and Constantinople, she also includes this time a curious analogy to India, hence underlining the contrast between the familiarity of ‗home‘ and unfamiliarity of ‗elsewhere‘. Her observations in the bazaars deserve to be quoted at length in order to demonstrate how she posits such a dichotomous relationship: The little cook-shops abounded where the kobbobs were to be found, tempting the Turkish appetite. I had a great wish to taste these, having often heard from childhood of the delicious ones presented at the Indian breakfasts. (…) (…) The kobbobs of the bazaar looked very nice, however. Little bits of meat or fowl, with any relishing condiment, were ranged along a skewer, and the whole were fried together. In India, where they use chiefly fowl for the delicacy with the delicious green chilli, a good camp breakfast is furnished by them, served hot and hot by the native cooks. In another part of the almost interminable bazaar it was so amusing to see displayed in long rows of shops our own English goods, manufactured in Manchester or Birmingham, and to be pressed to buy them as foreign curiosities. Mr. E. often made me laugh by putting off the Turks with the one word ‗Manchester, Manchester.‘ The poor fellows retired rather crestfallen. It was impossible not to be entertained with watching the motley crowd, jostling us about as they did with very little ceremony. There were the Turkish women of the lower class on foot, dressed with their yashmaks over the brightest of petticoats. The yashmak is very similar to the chuddah, which the native women wear in India, or which is so familiar to English eyes from the number of Ayahs and Dahyes who come over to this country with their masters; but in folding it round, it is made to cover the lower part of the face, leaving the fore-head and eyes only visible. (emphasis mine 71-73) 24 What is remarkable in the description of the surroundings in the bazaar is the author‘s reliance on a comparison to India that represents anything different, foreign and other than her own culture. Constantinople might sometimes look like home, sometimes like India. The co-existence of the analogies between Constantinople and England or India posits a contradictory perspective on the city. The shift between referring to England and India in Mrs. Baillie‘s diary suggests a strange familiarity she feels in Constantinople that is in fact shared by many other travelers visiting the city. Faced with the shockingly different, yet feeling comfortable as a result of, first, knowing the city beforehand through an infinite number of texts, and second, marking similarities in both cities, the traveler constantly moves in between a familiar and an unsettling world. As a point of reference and comparison with the new world one encounters, the genre of travelogue, by nature, evokes home, or a familiar setting that does not have to refer to ‗home‘ in the strict sense of the term. 9 What I would like to draw attention to in Mrs. Baillie‘s text, among other European travelogues written about Constantinople in the nineteenth century, is not the constant reference to home as merely a point of contrast exemplified in the passages in the footnote below, but a more unplanned or unconscious reminiscence of home and of the familiar. Hence, the traveler‘s experience is not a direct 9 There are constant references to home in A Sail to Smyrna. While she is climbing the Galata Tower, she compares the experience to climbing old church towers: ―In mounting the stairs I was reminded of many a climb to the top of some old church-tower, or belfry, in my own country; but the sight which met my eyes at the top of the tower well repaid all the trouble of ascending, and put to flight any lingering feeling of disappointment as to the aspect of the Sultan‘s city‖ (80). On taking of her shoes before they enter the house at Scutari to see the performance of Howling Dervishes, she thinks of the following: ―I wondered whether, in the large heap of boots and shoes of all descriptions, we should ever find our own again; but, like the umbrellas at the London exhibitions, they turned up all right at the last‖ (93). Even when she tastes Turkish coffee, home is always present as a point of comparison as she straightforwardly asks Dr. K, a friend who accompanies them around the town, ―why it was so different from the coffee we drink in France and England‖ (129). 25 comparison as in ‗this reminds of that,‘ or ‗this is different from home‘ but more like ‗this reminds me of something, but what is that?‘ Strongly suggestive of, yet different from déjà vu, the latter case can be described as a recognition of the familiar that one repetitively stumbles upon accidentally when it is least expected, as in getting lost in a foreign city only to find oneself back at the same spot over and over again. Being lost, re-locating oneself, but returning to the previous location, feeling the sense of being lost again –only to recognize the surrounding as the spot that is revisited one more time, against one‘s will: such an experience is related by Sigmund Freud as a personal anecdote in his 1919 essay ‗Das Unheimliche‘: As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another detour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however a feeling came over me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery. (237) The feeling of uncanny occurs when Freud runs into a familiar site without planning it –it is noteworthy that although his trip back to the piazza is also yet another detour, he does not identify this final trip as uncanny, of which the accidental emerges as a crucial aspect. At its base, what I examine in this chapter is as simple and ordinary as getting lost in a city and finding one‘s way back unexpectedly to the same location, as occurs in Freud‘s personal experience: that is, a persistent and inevitable return to the beginning that enables one to confront the familiar within what s/he initially thought to be the unfamiliar domain (of a foreign city, for instance). The subsequent reaction is one of bewilderment, 26 frustration, and powerlessness. In Freud‘s essay, the labyrinthine structure of the city surely exacerbates feelings of disorientation and lack of control; however, there is something in the act of repetition itself that seems to endow the whole experience with a sense of helplessness and uncanniness. In his discussion of the spectrality of Baudelaire‘s poem ‗Les sept vieillards,‖ David Spurr argues that The quality of spectrality is assigned, not to a supernatural presence, nor to the poet‘s conscience, but to the very structures of urban space, and the abject movement of the masses which that structure imparts. The frightening aspect of Baudelaire‘s vision lies not in its otherness, but in its character arising from the inescapable repetition of the quotidian. (―Spectres of Modernity: Notes on the Uncanny in Modern Literature,‖ 71-72) The uncanny is a mysterious experience that is facilitated by the urban setting, which serves as a backdrop to the overpowering presence of that which is beyond the individual‘s control. It is all the more uncontrollable, even unknowable, precisely because repetition derealizes the familiar to the extent that it is transformed into the unfamiliar. Freud‘s essay evokes the uncanny within the structures of urban space in such a suggestive way that it presents the act of re-tour, of going back to the same location, of the fatal involuntary repetition of the same, as a modern phenomenon. In this and the following chapter, I‘d like to interrogate the way the uncanny emerges as the projection of modernity in the form of a subjective experience in various European travelogues on Constantinople. I consider the experience of modernity as a series of tensions that manifest themselves in contradictory moments which constantly oscillate between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the past and the present. Examining various uncanny moments experienced by nineteenth-century European travelers who constantly move between a familiar and unfamiliar world in Constantinople, I argue that 27 such moments compel the traveler to recognize the modern condition in which the uncanny is a constant haunting presence. It is a moment that is as personal and unconscious as Freud‘s anecdote suggests. Although momentary, it is intricately related to the past, much in the same way that de Amicis‘ astonishment on seeing Constantinople ‗for the first time,‘ or Mrs. Baillie‘s surprise to find ‗London‘ in Constantinople, is connected to a past belonging to the familiar domain provided by home or by the world of books. It is a moment of revival of something buried, forgotten, left in the past, being resurrected through the encounter with the oriental city. Hence, it is the recognition of the strange in the familiar as much as seeing the familiar in the strange. I focus, first, on the self-reflexivity of the European traveler who is awakened to ‗modern consciousness‘ in Istanbul (hence, encountering the modern empirically and unexpectedly ‗elsewhere,‘ away from a European setting) and secondly, the production process in which representations of Istanbul are entrapped within a redundant, intertextual canon. My first focus on the self-reflectiveness of the European subject pays attention to the retreat into himself/herself as a result of travel to Constantinople. His/her melancholic spirit takes the form of self-examination which, when taken to the extreme, provokes fear of losing oneself that perhaps corresponds to the fear of losing sight, and the accompanying frenzy that is recounted in E. T. A. Hoffman‘s story, ‗The Sand-Man.‘ As Freud underlines in his article, that which creates the atmosphere of uncanniness in the story is not the ostensibly main episode of Olympia, but the theme of the ‗Sand-Man,‘ which is repetitively brought up at critical moments in the narrative. Indeed, the Sand-Man, apart from all the horror associated with his enigmatic existence, evokes fear in the child- 28 protagonist precisely because he ‗tears out children‘s eyes,‘ as graphically described by the child‘s nurse. The idea of losing sight/self is intricately related to the more ‗aesthetic‘ concern of the second argument about the production of the literary canon on Istanbul. It is precisely to this consistent and consolidated representation of Istanbul by such a disparate set of European writers that I would like to draw attention. The fact that every traveler in Istanbul inevitably returns to the previous texts written on the city is yet another aspect of the unexpected repetition of the same: a textual detour that is necessitated by the condition of belatedness in writing about Istanbul. ‗The textual uncanny‘ is a moment of realization that prompts the traveler to the unexpected familiarity of this oriental city that was written over many times and to his own writing selfhood that is annulled by the existing canon. Belatedness in writing about Istanbul is a recurrent theme in European travelogues, which creates a self-generating repetitive canon that relies heavily on citation or imitation, and delay or deferral of ‗original‘ narration. I‘d like to argue that the journey to Istanbul and the uncanny encounters in the Ottoman capital unsettle the individual for differing reasons; yet an equally unsettling phenomenon occurs on the level of the textual uncanny. I consider the encounter with the uncanny, physically and textually, in European travelogues on Istanbul as the literary embodiment of the experience of modernity -an experience which might have historically originated in Europe, while it phenomenologically found expression in the peripheries, among them the former Ottoman capital, present post-Ottoman Istanbul. In ‘Das Unheimliche,’ Sigmund Freud argues that ‗the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar,‖ which 29 challenges the equation of the term with ‗unfamiliar‘ (220). Tracing the various connotations of the term in the German language, Freud concludes that the two unidentical, if not contradictory, dictionary meanings of ‗heimlich‘, of belonging to the house or the family and of being concealed, kept from sight, suggest correlation with its opposite, ‗unheimlich‘: ―Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich‖ (226). Such a nuanced meaning is not explicit either in the English translation, ‗uncanny,‘ or the French l’inquiétante étrangeté. The German Heim is a simultaneous evocation and a negation of ‗the home,‘ le chez- soi (Spurr 67). Hence, the ‗uncanny‘ is not simply what is strange and unfamiliar. In reality, it is the thing that had been familiar in the past, but lost and buried –only to be recovered by the re-encounter with it through its opposite, the unfamiliar. Heimlich and unheimlich, though at first opposed, turn out to circulate around each other by unmasking the familiar within the unfamiliar, followed by the realization of the unfamiliar in the familiar. In the article, the uncanny stands alternately for an emotional effect that is rooted in compulsive repetition (as in his urban experience of getting lost in the labyrinthine streets and returning to the same spot again), for the fear of losing sight (as in Hoffmann‘s story), and for the overlap between the imaginary and the real (as in the story in which the table with carvings of crocodiles fire the residents‘ imagination) or for various other disconnected fears such as the fear of castration, of sorcery, of death or of being buried alive. I, therefore, examine European travelers‘ various encounters with crowds, buildings, animate or inanimate objects in 30 Constantinople, that are in different ways evocative of what is ‗homely,‘ i.e. of belonging to the house and of being concealed from sight, which in turn creates the uncanny effect. Let us bear in mind that the ‗uncanny‘ is also about the persistence of the past in the present –a disjunctive experience that could paradoxically be described as ‗modern.‘ For the purposes of this and the following chapter, the German word ‘unheimlich’ and what it connotes is a much more appropriate terminology to keep in mind every time the English word ‗uncanny‘ is used. If we go back to the passages quoted from Mrs. Baillie and Edmondo de Amicis above, what is ‗unheimlich‘ for both of the travelers is a continuous disclosure of ‗the unfamiliar,‘ which develops side by side with a sense of not being ‗at home,‘ nevertheless evoking heim. At the moment the unheimlich collides into its opposite, the heimlich, the European traveler confronts what has long been familiar to him/her. It is a moment of recognition, a retrospective awareness, in which s/he perceives the unheimlich within the heimlich. The nature of existence gains an unheimlich quality, which is inextricably bounded up with the modern condition. David Spurr defines the modern moment as ―precisely the condition of that which is not-at-home and not-here, a time and space where the nature of presence itself takes on the quality of the ghostly or spectral‖ (67). According to Charles Baudelaire, modernity is ―the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable‖ (12). If the conflict between a familiar and unfamiliar world is a characteristic of modernity, what would be peculiar about the experience of a European traveler in Constantinople? In what way does travel to Istanbul differ from any other travel to a major city, or even to one‘s native town, for which the conflict between the past and the 31 present, home and elsewhere, is always at stake? 10 The modern condition is by definition the realization of the unheimlich as part of one‘s existence. In facilitating the European mind to recognize the modern moment as a constant state of not-being-at home, what is special about Constantinople is the disjunction of the temporal and spatial order in such a way that one can see suggestions of both the present and the past, of home and elsewhere, imbedded within the structure of the cityspace. The European traveler in Constantinople witnesses the juxtaposition of the two definitions of modernity quoted above, so that the experience contains a brief moment in which realization of a different temporal and spatial setting, an ‗unhomely‘ domain, clashes with a simultaneous recognition of it as one‘s own past. Walter Benjamin‘s flâneur, a figure I consider to be analogous to the European subject in Istanbul, plays a central role in the conflict between the past and the present as he transforms the contemporary city into a site of remembering. Although the flâneur, as a figure weaving his way through the crowd with no particular goal, is located in the specific geographical and temporal place of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin‘s multilayered reading of the city refers to different contexts such as London in Poe‘s story, Berlin in Hoffman‘s tale, and Paris of the Haussmanization period in order to conceptualize the figure (Parsons 31-32). Hence, the flâneur, ―who goes botanizing on the asphalt,‖ emerges as a heuristic tool to discuss various preoccupations of modernity as played out in urban spaces (―The Paris of the Second Empire‖ 68). In his unfinished 10 One could argue that all cities have the potential to accommodate spatialized time. Various Parisian poems by Charles Baudelaire, for instance, particularly ‗The Swan‘ from the Parisian Scenes, draws on the flâneur’s capacity to grasp both the present and the past. In drawing an analogy between the changing face of Paris and the destruction of Troy, Baudelaire locates the city within a spatio-temporal framework. 32 book, The Arcades Project, which has been called the ‗history of pre-modernity,‘ and structured to be as fragmentary as the urban space, Benjamin interrogates the development of the flâneur in the section titled ‗Convolute M,‘ and argues that ―For the flâneur his city is no longer a homeland –even if, like Baudelaire, he was born in it. It represents for him a show-place‖ (Benjamin qtd. in Buck-Morss, ―The Flȃneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,‖ 129). 11 In various other cases, on the other hand, Benjamin identifies the figure of the flâneur through his transformation of the city streets into a familiar space. 12 Although he is a marginal figure, ―the street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among house façades of the houses as a citizen is in his four walls‖ (‗The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire‖ 68). As much as this ostensible contradiction, together with various other ambiguous remarks about the figure, increases the evasiveness of the flâneur, it also helps to associate him with urban space and the experience of modernity, and the conflict between the present and a past world. Looking at the urban space, he can conjure up personal memories or historical facts while looking into his memories, he is able to bring forth a spatial form out of the city‘s past. In 11 In Streetwalking the Metropolis, Deborah Parsons explains the origins of the flȃneur: ―The term flȃneur was formally recognized at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Wilson notes a French pamphlet from 1806, detailing a day in the life of a flȃneur, M. Bonhomme, in which the concept is already worked out along the themes that have been accepted as constituting the defining principles of the figure. The life of M. Bonhomme is characterized by freedom from financial/familial responsibility, by membership of the aesthetic circles of café life, by interest in the sartorial codes of society, by a fascination with womanhood but detachment from sexual relationships, and by a position of isolated marginality‖ (Parsons 17). 12 In ‗Painter of Modern Life,‘ Charles Baudelaire defines the figure of the flȃneur in similar terms: ―For the perfect flȃneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world –such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito‖ (9). 33 other words, with a heightened sensitivity he dismantles the urban space into the multiple layers of space, and then reassembles its fragments to create an alternative point of view of urban space/modernity. Such decipherment of the detritus of city life creates ‗spatialized time,‘ that is, the conjunction of temporal and spatial aspects of urban existence. As Deborah Parsons explains, the flȃneur figure points out the conjunction of historical time and geographical space as part of metropolitan existence: ―Walking in the city is at once an encounter with modernity and with the past, with the now and unknown but also with haunting ghosts‖ (Introduction 10). Yet, coeval with his efforts to understand and capture the past, becomes apparent the realization that the past can never be fully reconstituted and that what is really ‗lost‘ can never be replaced or even articulated in the present. The flâneur unconditionally nurtures a melancholic soul as a result of his encounter with urban space. As foreigners in a strange land, both the male and female traveler share a superior and a vulnerable position. 13 The distinctly female and male experience, of passing in and out of the public and private/domestic spaces of the city coincide when both perspectives situate themselves within a general Istanbul canon. I, therefore, do not distinguish the experience of the flâneur from that of the flâneuse, especially since my focus necessitates emphasis on the citationality of a literary tradition that borrows indifferently both from male and female travelers. 14 This is neither to demean the particular vulnerability of a 13 This position is analogous to what Edward Said refers to as the ―flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand‖ (Orientalism 7). Although I take Said‘s argument as my starting point, it is my aim to demonstrate how travel to Istanbul complicates Said‘s binary opposition between the Orient and the Occident. 14 The single appearance of flâneur instead of reference to both flâneur and flâneuse throughout my 34 female European in the streets of Constantinople 15 nor her privileged status as having access to the domestic space –that is, the mysterious ‗harem‘– but to underline the fact that a majority of the writing about Istanbul is based on predetermined notions extracted from previous texts, and not always directly related to actual experiences in the city. Moreover, the contingent space of Istanbul provides alternative forms of actual experience to the flâneuse. In her Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Montagu writes that ―Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the empire‖ (72). Before her departure, Lady Montagu expresses her regret at leaving Constantinople, where she rambles around incognito: I am easy here, and as much as I love traveling, I tremble at the inconveniences attending so great a journey with a numerous family and a little infant hanging at the breast. However, I endeavour upon this occasion to do as I have hitherto done in all the odd turns of my life; turn them, if I can, to my diversion. In order to this, I ramble every day, wrapped up in my ferace and yasmak about Constantinople and amuse myself with seeing all that is curious in it. (133) Indeed, on some occasions the flâneuse, wrapped in the invisible flock of the veil or of ‗yasmak,‘ the double veil, is more anonymous, almost part of the local crowd, and therefore more ‗powerful‘ than the European flâneur. Such an experience does not have a counterpart in a European perspective that is based on a positing of the flâneuse as the ‗neglected‘ figure compared to the dominant and taken-for-granted priority of the ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- dissertation is a stylistic concern for not being redundant rather than an ideological choice. 15 In Twenty Six Years on the Bosphorus, Dorina L. Neave recounts the difficulties of walking alone in the streets as a woman: ―In those days [of Sultan Hamid‘s long and famous reign] it was not safe for a European woman to appear in the streets unattended by a man, as it infuriated the Turk to see women appear in public unveiled, and young soldiers, who came as raw recruits from Asia Minor, took great pleasure in insulting us. They pushed women off the pavements, pinched their arms, and kissed those who took their fancy, if they were without an escort‖ (14). 35 flâneur. 16 In that sense, one can see the veil as a Certeauian subversive tactic, a daily practice that challenges not only the control mechanisms of the modernization process but also the European obsession with categorizing and knowing the ‗Orient.‘ The European flâneur loses his sovereignty once more when the veiled women turns him into an object of their gaze -his gaze is rendered powerless since the invisible look is directed at him. The European traveler‘s encounter with the impenetrable veiled women is an uncanny moment in which the self-confident flâneur is confronted with his own self, a self that can see without being seen; yet simultaneously estranged from his own being since he is now looked at while the veiled woman occupies the position of the onlooker. While the first section of the following chapter examines various other uncanny moments of the flâneur in Constantinople, with a specific focus on how the European encounters his own past (i.e. the temporal space), the second section examines the European traveler‘s interaction with the city crowds and his/her confrontation with the ambiguous other (i.e. the spatial aspect). The following section of this chapter, on the other hand, considers how European travelers experience the modern condition as an aesthetic concern and the way the canon is passed on to the modern travelers in contemporary Istanbul. Located within what I call ‗the Istanbul canon,‘ any traveler in Istanbul is captured within this tradition, in which the city turns into a ‗lost text‘ that can never be found, because each text points to a different text. Certain repetitive descriptions, including the ‗uncanny moments,‘ of many nineteenth-century texts are 16 That is why my references to feminist critics writing on the theory of the flâneuse does not focus on their essentialist distinction of the flâneuse from the flâneur –which is not relevant for western writings on Istanbul- but borrows from their general theory of strolling in the city. 36 indicative of the indispensable reticence that the disabled traveler is faced with as a result of his/her belated condition in the Orient. Discussion of the textual/theoretical ramifications of the uncanny will further illuminate the conditions of modern estrangement, as displayed in European travel narratives on Istanbul. The referential point for European travelogues is located neither in the real city nor in the local perspectives on it, but in the European imagery of Constantinople. The theoretical underpinning of the section highlights the textual uncanny of European travelogues about Constantinople, which is predicated on the familiarity of ‗home‘ or previous European perspectives, defamiliarized by the act of repetition itself, to which the unfamiliarity of the non-western reality and landscape add only a tinge of derealization. Hence, in addition to an actual experience, the European traveler encounters the modern in writing. My assumption is that European travel writing about Istanbul moves closer not only thematically, but also stylistically, to the ‗loss‘ marked by modernity. ii) The Textual Uncanny Lord Byron‘s Constantinople letters, written during his two-month-stay in 1810, project a writing self who is overtly hesitant to talk about Constantinople, although it was the grand destination of his oriental tour. As J. P. Donavan notes, Byron sounds impatient and unwilling to mention local details to his correspondents. His response to John Hanson is typical: ―I came up in an English Frigate, but we were detained in the Hellespont ten days for a wind. Here I am at last, I refer you for the descriptions of Constantinople to the various travellers who have scribbled on the subject‖ (qtd. in Donovan 14). In another letter written to his mother, he repeats a similar gesture of deferring description and 37 anchoring his narrative in a set of other writings, though he contradicts some of their contents: ―Of Constantinople you will find many descriptions in different travels; but Lady Mary Wortley errs strangely when she says ‗St. Paul‘s would cut a strange figure by St. Sophia‘s‘‖ ( qtd. in Hobhouse 281). What Donovan calls ―the antipathy to writing‖ in Byron‘s letters takes the form of a certain ―mannerism‖ that is resistant to, as much as regretful for, having left an obligation unfulfilled –the writing is neither properly commenced nor finished. In a letter he wrote to R. C. Dallas, Byron expresses how he felt about this ―unfinished business‖: ―I had projected an additional canto [of Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage] when I was in Troad and Constantinople and if I saw them again it would go on; but under existing circumstances and sensations, I have neither harp, ‗heart nor voice‘ to proceed‖ (qtd. in Donavan 16). Taking into consideration the multitude of travelogues written about Constantinople for centuries, Byron‘s silence is justifiable. If writing in general is self-performance, writing about Constantinople is a challenge to one‘s credentials and genuineness. There are various ways to recover one‘s writing self: silence, so not to repeat other accounts (as in the case of Lord Byron), negation of the referential network so that one‘s account is taken to be the most genuine and original, emphasis on a special case with one‘s visit, etc. What Richard Terdiman calls ―the textual dead end‖ that Flaubert is faced with in the Orient is precisely the moment the writer realizes that his text cannot be salvaged from the preestablished structures that inconspicuously seep into his narrative (―Ideological Voyages: On a Flaubertian Dis-Orient-ation‖ 235). In one particular instance, as Richard Terdiman illustrates, Flaubert mimics the very structures from which he is trying to liberate himself, 38 to such an extent that his ―caricaturizing reproduction‖ functions as a (temporary) counter-discourse (244). Grant Crichfield‘s interpretation of Gautier‘s Constantinople, likewise, highlights the overwhelmingly intertextual quality of the text that produces a debilitating effect upon personal discovery (―Descamps, Orientalist Intertext, and Counter-Discourse in Gautier‘s Constantinople” 306-307). In all these cases, which will be further examined with textual examples from different travelogues below, the European traveler nevertheless feels unsettled, if not totally obliterated. Let us start with an earlier example – Lady Montagu‘s Turkish Embassy Letters, which take issue with her own predecessors who spend years in Pera ―without having ever seen it, and yet they all pretend to describe it‖ (126) –just as Lord Byron will later question her own veracity. She finds fault with a certain Mr. Hill who provides his reading public with false information about ‗a sweating pillar very balsamic for disordered heads‘ in St. Sophia –equally wrong are his remarks about the miserable situation of Turkish ladies, who are actually ―freer than any ladies in the universe‖ (134). She also cannot avoid correcting a misleading remark by Gemelli, who claims that there are no remains of Calcedon [Kadıköy]: Lady Montagu writes that she personally visited the place on the Asian side of the city (140). On other occasions when Montagu displays reluctance akin to Lord Byron‘s, she refers the reader to certain writers such as Knolles and Sir Paul Rycaut. However, subtly implicated within her silence, her corrections, even her determination not to be redundant –hence listing of what she will not write –one may detect the very act of reiteration that she tries to avoid. ―To what purpose should I tell you that Constantinople was the ancient Byzantium, that ‗tis at present the conquest of a race 39 of people supposed Scythtians, that there is five or six thousand mosques in it, that St. Sophia was founded by Justinian etc?,‖ writes Montagu, positing a contradictory and self- destructive writing self (133). More dissenting voices, as in the case of Frances Elliott, share concerns similar to those of ‗positive‘ perspectives such as Lady Montagu‘s. Elliott‘s evocation of the Byzantine past of the city during her visit in 1893 is indebted to various other familiar names, which are acknowledged in the preface to Diary of an Idle Woman in Constantinople: The splendours of ancient Byzantium and the meanness of modern Stamboul came to my mind as such a curious contrast it could only be understood by a reference to history; and I have endeavored to describe all that I saw from this point of view, leaving to others the often repeated details of Harems, Bazaars, and Dervishes. Whatever I may have said of Turkish cruelty and the crimes of the Sultans, I have invented nothing –I have simply reproduced the chronicles of the Old Seraglio, the details of modern reigns, and what I myself saw and heard. My principal authorities have been Gibbon, Von Hammer, Lamartine, Theophile Gautier, Gallenga, and Amicis; Meyer‘s ‗Turkei und Griechenland‖ a most valuable book; an article by H.E. Sir Henry Elliot on Abdul Aziz in the ―Nineteenth Century;‖ and various Handbooks, English and German. (6) The degree of self-consciousness in travelers whose reason for travelling is derived from their profession is no less intense than those travelers whose primary motivation is ―idleness‖. Charles MacFarlene‘s visit to Constantinople, as he announces in the long title of his book, has a military purpose: Constantinople in 1828: A Residence of Sixteen Months in the Turkish Capital and Provinces with an Account of the Naval and Military Power, and of the Resources of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, the concern for originality is prevalent even in the preface. MacFarlene writes about his awareness of this volume‘s banality if it were not for that one particular event, the conflict at Navarino, 40 which makes his text exceptional since neither his predecessors nor future travelers can include this important event in their travel notes. It can only be witnessed now or never: I was in Asia Minor at the date of the fatal conflict at Navarino –at Constantinople at the commencement of the Russian invasion; and were it but as an abstract study of the human mind, in a state imperfectly civilized, and modified by a very peculiar religious code, I flatter myself that my observations on the Turks during those trying circumstances, cannot be found wholly devoid of interest. (xiii-xiv) While MacFarlene seeks to render his account unique, his futile endeavor finds echoes in other travelers‘ anxiety to authenticate their own texts and transgress the referential power of Istanbul writing. His account, grounded in a military perspective, is likewise indebted to predecessors in situations akin to his: Dr. Walsh, in his deservedly popular work, has given an able account of Sultan Mahmood‘s military reforms, which might seem to render further details unnecessary; but it was my fortune to see the development or extension of those plans, the progress made in them since the Doctor‘s departure from the country, and to watch the working of the new system in the most critical moments. Thus, taking up the subject where he left it, I consider a portion of my work an humble continuation of my predecessor‘s; whilst some details on the civil improvements of the Ottoman government, not noticed by Dr. Walsh, may pretend to entire novelty, which succeeding travellers will in their turn enlarge upon. (xiv) 17 In order to be original, one has to acknowledge the accumulated canon so that the point of departure, or the exceptional status of one‘s work, becomes recognizably prominent. Hence, the return to the beginning that seems to occur against one‘s will. James Cook quoting Miss Pardoe, [―I had brought with me for reperusal on the voyage, books that a long time ago, while I was still a lad, I had read with much interest though with some doubt as to their veracity, namely, Miss Pardoe‘s ‗City of the Sultan,‘ written in 1836, and N. P. Willis‘s ‗Pencillings by the Way,‘ written a year or two earlier‖ (8)], 17 In order to avoid quoting at length, I have attached Mac Farlene‘s entire preface in Appendix A. 41 Julia Pardoe quoting Lady Montagu, and Lady Montagu referring to other authorities, generate at best a feeling of nausea and disorientation, evoked by an endless chain of repetition and deferral. The list is not exclusive to the nineteenth century- substantial continuities can be noted in contemporary texts as well. In Turkish Reflections, published in 1991, American traveler M. L. Settle merges ancient texts with modern ones: We have heard about so much, to find an Istanbul I already thought I knew -my city of presuppositions –whispers and memories of pashas and harems and sultans and girls with almond eyes, the Orient Express of Agatha Christie, the spies of Eric Ambler, the civilized letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. (37) The canonical gesture of compulsory repetition of previous travelogues illustrates that western travelers, from different centuries and countries, describe identical ‗moments‘ in Istanbul that precipitate a heightened sense of self-consciousness. The persistent melancholic tone about what their product ‗lacks‘ when compared to prior texts undermines claims for ―authentic experience‖ and creates conflicting and self- interrogating texts in which the authority of the narrator is inevitably erased and the assertive self of the writer continuously questioned. In other words, the writer feels obliged to prove not the originality of his/her experiences in the city but the originality and distinction of his/her own text –rendered vulnerable because of the possibility that his/her text might be either too ‗original‘ (being too different from the canonical works) or not ‗original‘ enough (being too similar to the canonical works). The task of the writer of Istanbul, then, is to strike a balance between his personal voice and the public voice of the canon. The realization that the European traveler can no longer be original, that s/he is no longer the origin, estranges him from himself and alienates him from his own text. The split between the personal voice of the author and the literary canon posits a constant 42 delay and deferral of the former, implicating the textual uncanny within the general framework of modern nostalgia. The canon furnishes the traveler with the authority to speak while nonetheless undermining his/her authorizing originality. To experience one‘s belatedness is to realize one‘s doubleness, the self as a single writer and the self in relation to others- which produces an alienated being. If originality necessarily requires comparison, then the point is not actually to be original per se, but to be self-conscious about one‘s belatedness in order to be original. That is precisely the moment that exemplifies the aesthetic condition of modernity. The machinelike repetition of the literary canon correlates to the typical manifestation of the modern as the constant and recurrent production of the industrial line, which posits a crisis of subjectivity. In fact, such self-distancing is frequently encountered in travel narratives. Let us examine whether the literary canon on Constantinople can be taken as a singular experience within a general framework of travel writing and orientalist tradition, both of which can be seen to exemplify the aesthetic condition of modernity and the crisis of subjectivity as outlined above. As an unconventional example of travel writing, ―A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,‖ written by Sigmund Freud, narrates a personal anecdote in which his writing self and the self that actually stood on the Acropolis co-exist: When, finally, on the afternoon after our arrival, I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes around upon the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: ‗So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!‘ To describe the situation more accurately, the person who gave expression to the remark was divided, far more sharply than was usually noticeable, from another person who took cognizance of the remark; and both were astonished, though not by the same thing. The first behaved as though he were obliged, under the impact of an unequivocal observation, to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto 43 seemed doubtful. […] The second person, on the other hand, was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever been objects of doubt. (241) Freud explains later on in the article that the experience of derealization occurs at the same time as depersonalization, subsequently described as ―the subject feel[ing] either that a piece of reality or that a piece of his own self is strange to him‖ (245). Although derealization, the moment when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, is also crucial for the present chapter (since the textual uncanny integrates a certain sense of incredulity at being actually present and witnessing a site known through texts), the experience of depersonalization plays a more significant role in the self- alienated subject. As Freud argues, ―Depersonalization leads us on to the extraordinary condition of double conscience, which is more correctly described as ‗split personality‘‖ (245). In the passage above, the split is clear in his identification of himself as two separate people. That is also the case at the beginning of ‗The Uncanny,‘ when Freud refers to a vague ‗psycho-analyst‘ in the third person singular. The Freud who writes is differentiated from the psycho-analyst Freud who is being mentioned. In other examples throughout the essay, the uncanny seems to be related to the unfamiliarity with one‘s selfhood –in Nicholas Royle‘s words, the uncanny refers to ‗a sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves‖ (6). The uncanny puts one beside oneself. In that sense, it is the ultimate point of the self-conscious expression that one finds in the travelogue genre in general. This kind of citationality recalls Said‘s examination of several orientalist texts, in which textual authority facilitates western domination over the Orient. By underlining that the Istanbul canon has no beginning, I therefore suggest nothing unique about its 44 literary representations compared to other orientalist writings that discover melancholy and belatedness in different parts of the Orient. More recent critical works on orientalism also allude to the citational nature of their field. In Orientalist Poetics, Emily A. Haddad writes, ―Because of orientalism‘s dependence upon its own past, texts often reveal their roots in preceding texts rather than in the Middle East as it might be experienced in the flesh. As poets in turn ground their work in this already textually determined orientalist tradition, the empirical East tends to recede still further, becoming less a point of origin than one of oblique allusion‖ (5). Another well-known book in the field, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, by Ali Behdad, discusses authors such as Nerval, Flaubert, Loti, and Eberhardt and argues that the belated traveler vacillates between an insatiable search for a counterexperience in the Orient and the melancholic discovery of its impossibility; they are, as a result, discursively diffracted and ideologically split. On the one hand, these texts identify themselves differentially against the encyclopedic tableau raisonné and truth claims of official Orientalism by expressing an unease with classification and ‗objectivity.‘ On the other, they find it impossible to avoid the ‗baggage‘ of orientalist knowledge that has mediated the desire to produce an other discourse on the Orient. The representations of these belated travelers thus do not close on an exotic signified but practice an open deferment of signification; they are elliptic discourses, uncertain about their representations and melancholic about their inability to produce an alternative mode of writing about the desired Other. (15) In an article titled ―Orientalist Desire, Desire of the Orient,‖ Behdad focuses solely on Nerval‘s Voyage en Orient, a text that appropriately demonstrates the tension between what Behdad calls the ―Orientalist unconscious‖ and the personal voice of the author. As opposed to the official discourse that is generated by the European subject in the role of a savant looking for ―knowledge that must be gained through his observations and studies in the Orient,‖ Behdad discloses how Nerval plays ―the amateur traveler‖ who enjoys the experience of surrendering himself to the ―pleasure principle‖ of his 45 journey: ―Therefore, in contrast to the journalistic urge to report the events of an explorative journey, in Nerval we encounter a kind of hedonistic spontaneity that turns the occasionally serious Orientalist into a man of pleasure, a sort of self-indulgent flȃneur uninterested in re-producing an already copiously depicted image‖ (41). Among the various sites Nerval visits or at which he temporarily stays, his narration of the journey to Constantinople exhibits most effectively how his engagement with the Ottoman capital significantly departs from the canonical representations of the city. As Behdad notes, the enunciating authorial subject drops out of sight, not because the power of earlier representations overshadows his presence, but because the Nervalian narrator chooses to lose himself in the carnivalesque of the Ramadan festivities, where ―there is no distinct boundary between an observing subject and an observed other‖ (―Orientalist Desire, Desire of the Orient‖ 41). Yet, the challenging of boundaries and suspension of regulations, as is the case for all carnivals, must be terminated after a designated time- period. If the authority of the canon is violated in Nerval, this fact is due to the one- month-period of Ramadan, which plays a disruptive role in other travelers‘ accounts as well. Visiting Istanbul during the time of Ramadan, William Thackeray sounds apologetic in the concluding section of his travel notes, as if he is attempting to justify certain ‗gaps‘ in a narrative that risks falling short of the readers‘ expectations. By listing such gaps, Thackeray paradoxically makes those absences present. Victor Hugo, in his famous travels on the Rhine, visiting Cologne, gives a learned account of what he didn‘t see there. I have a remarkable catalogue of similar objects at Constantinople. I didn‘t see the dancing dervishes, it was Ramazan; nor the howling dervishes at Scutari, it was Ramazan; nor the interior of Saint Sophia, nor the women‘s apartment of the seraglio, nor the fashionable promenade at the Sweet Waters, always because it was Ramazan; during which period the dervishes 46 dance and howl but rarely, their legs and lungs being unequal to much exertion during a fast of fourteen hours. On account of the same holy season, the royal palaces and mosques are shut; and though the valley of Sweet Waters is there, no one goes to walk; the people remaining asleep all day, and passing the night in feasting and carousing. (Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo 68) Nerval stays longer than Thackeray, though the rest of his travelogue does not narrate any of the recurrent images above. Instead, what we encounter in Nerval is a text-within-the text, titled ―Histoire de la Reine du Matin et de Solimad Prince des Génies,‖ which is a long deviation from his own impressions of the city. That is precisely the idea behind writing about Constantinople: the authorial violation is only temporary, and at its termination textual re-figurations begin to overrule the personal narrative. Even if this long and suspenseful story signifies disruption of the ―representational practice of the Orientalist subject,‖ as Behdad claims, Nerval‘s personal impressions are nevertheless delayed, or subjected to this mediating text. The discrepancy between textual representations of the city inherited from the Orientalist tradition and the personal perspective of the traveler problematizes the narration of first-hand experience and intensifies the condition of belatedness. Although Behdad formulates his argument according to the assumption that it is always modern French writers who are belated travelers, and that ‗the somber discourse of nostalgia‘ is absent in late nineteenth-century British writing, I take issue with this claim since many Anglophone authors in this period express similar concerns about loss and disorientation as a result of their belated condition. In Constantinople: Settings and Traits, for instance, H.G. Dwight, an American traveler, apologizes for writing in 1907 about Istanbul: ―And to have gone deliberately to Constantinople, not in 1707, or in 1807 but in 1907, with the notion of turning out something between Loti‘s Vers Ispahan and 47 Howells‘ Venetian Life, was quite inexcusable‖ (vii). Belated orientalism cannot be ascribed to a certain period, -not 1907, 1807 or even 1707- a fact that brings forth the idea of ‗missing origins‘. In Ali Behdad‘s words, belated orientalism is ‗not chronological but ideological‘. The striking parallel between Behdad‘s arguments about how various authors unwittingly position themselves within an orientalist tradition and the citationality of the Istanbul canon points out that the latter‘s association with unconditional belatedness is not actually an unconventional case. What is unconventional in the Ottoman capital, as was demonstrated in the first section, is the fact that it can never be fully negated or ‗othered‘: any contemplation of the city is an unintentional return to oneself. In other words, the projection of self and other co-exists in the cityscape. For the purposes of clarity, if we consider a cityscape separately as a temporal and a spatial geography, we could argue that Constantinople provides the traveler with the unheimlich on both levels: the city‘s past still promises access to a continuous encounter with a vanished time that uncannily surfaces in the urban space, which constitutes a multilayered history from various ancient cities, -some of which are embraced by European travelers as one‘s own past while some others are fetishized as ‗the other.‘ 18 The cityscape, on the other hand, contains unfamiliar prospects of all kinds, from graveyards to street dogs, while certain other details act as persistent reminders of home. 18 As Francis Marion Crawford explains the city‘s complicated history, ―It has not often happened in history that a city which has been the capital of an empire during more than a thousand years has, within twenty-four hours, become the capital of another, founded and developed by a race having a totally different language, a hostile religion and traditions opposed at every point to those of the vanquished‖ (716- 717). 48 The juxtaposition of self and other in Istanbul is both related to the typical analogy of the city as the threshold between the pre-modern and the modern and to the fact that it was historically characterized, from a European point of view, as the ‗lost object‘ after the Turkish conquest; yet, the hopes for its re-capture prevented its diagnosis as completely lost. The permanent condition of belatedness resonates with the idea that Istanbul always generates melancholic responses and is never adequately mourned for. The main argument in this section demonstrates how such loss that is inscribed as a historical reality –loss of the city and the loss of ‗experience‘– finds a textual correlation that takes the form of self-consciousness about one‘s belatedness. What is ‗lost‘ and cannot be recovered then, is as much related to a place –as in the case of a fallen city- as to the possibility of immediate presence or representation that is replaced by the act of compulsory repetition. Belated travelers are also melancholic subjects because the ‗lost object‘ can never be restored or properly mourned (for it is non-recoverable or not even identified in the first place), which transforms the city into a ‗lost text‘ itself. The complications of Constantinople‘s ambiguous geography, being inside and outside of Europe, inside and outside of the modern, deepen the melancholy that is detected in European travelers with respect to their belatedness. The Ottoman capital (which can also be substituted for what the Empire signifies for Europe) can never be stabilized as the ‗other,‘ since the European traveler experiences the familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Istanbul resists categorization because it can never be completely differential to any positioning (either colonizer or colonized). If we go back to Mrs. Baillie‘s analogy between Constantinople and India, one can see her attempt to 49 make familiar what is different as drawing an analogy with the most familiar ‗other‘ position, which is India, for an Englishwoman like her. There is something of both England and India that is unsettling for an English traveler. If the modern condition is maintained in and through being differential, if it can never be stabilized as a final ‗condition‘ but only by negation, Constantinople is the point of experiencing that ‗dead end‘ when negation is persistently delayed. Such a frustrating experience, combined with the traveler‘s self-consciousness as being part of an extensive body of work that hinders efforts to be ‗original,‘ causes continuous struggle between one‘s past and present, home and elsewhere. The next chapter will focus on the way this struggle is made explicit in certain moments in which the European traveler‘s uncanny encounter with the city takes him/her back to a distant past and to the familiarity of one‘s home. 50 CHAPTER II: The Spectral Return to the „Beginning‟ in Constantinople i) Journey into a Forbidden Pre-modern Past The great charm of Constantinople to an European eye exists in the extreme novelty, which is in itself a spell; for not only the whole locality, but all its accessories, are so unlike what the traveller has left behind him in the West, that every group is a study, and every incident a lesson; and he feels at once the necessity of flinging from him a thousand factitious wants and narrow conventional prejudices, and of looking calmly and dispassionately upon men and scenes wholly dissimilar to those with which he had previously been acquainted. (4) In the introduction to Beauties of the Bosphorus, English traveler Julia Pardoe thus summarizes the reason why the Ottoman capital appeals to the Europeans. As much as Constantinople is ‗wholly dissimilar‘ to what the traveler is accustomed to, as Pardoe describes above, the city is conspicuously in the process of transformation. After describing the ‗novelty‘ of the city, Pardoe continues her introduction by acknowledging the city‘s rapid change, which cannot go unnoticed: Nor is even this all; for the march of expediency has been so rapid, and the mania for reform is so active during the reign of the present Sultan, that the most extraordinary changes are constantly taking place, not only in the habits and feelings of the people, but in the very aspect of their city. The beautiful remains of Moorish architecture, so essentially Oriental in their character, are giving place to the European innovation; the heavy, drooping, convoluted roofs of the fountains are disappearing, to make room for light iron railings; and the bright frescoes and painted screens of the wooden palaces are superseded by columns of sculptured marble; an anomaly sufficiently startling to convince the traveller that it is only a first step towards the total extinction of that peculiar and fairy-like species of architecture which renders the vicinity of the Bosphorus so unlike every other 51 locality, that it appears to be rather the embodiment of a ‗mid-summer night‘s dream,‘ than a mere earthly landscape. (5) In other words, Constantinople is turning too ‗European‘ to maintain the dissimilar aspects. Moreover, the whole transformation process echoes various other modernization projects which took place in European centers; hence, putting on stage a past that is happening again. Various other details from the cityscape are subtle reminders of a European setting. The contrast between the two sides of the Golden Horn, Galata/Pera as the Christian suburb facing the Turkish quarter Eyüp, more generally referred to as ‗Stamboul,‘ is a common referent for travelers to express a certain sense of uncanny surfacing in this geography. During one of de Amicis‘ peregrinations through the varied scenery of the city, his friend, who accompanies him on his trip, first shows him Istanbul at a distance with its monuments emanating a different time. Next, he shows De Amicis the books standing in a bookstore right next to them: La Dame aux Camélias, Madame Bovary, Mademoiselle Giraud ma femme (41). As a non-western imperial center in the process of modernization that is interpreted in restrictive terms as westernization, Constantinople might look familiar, especially to an English traveler, yet, the diverse population or the chaotic atmosphere of the city poses an unfamiliar sight for he who is reminded of the colonies such as India, located elsewhere, hence, ‗kept out of sight.‘ This chapter will demonstrate how Europe‘s ambiguous other, not only located geographically elsewhere, but also, perhaps more shockingly, left in the past, is brought back home: the traveler feels all the more unsettled in the end. It is this very encounter – of seeing the presence of what has been obliterated and irretrievably lost in a European metropolis only to observe its gradual disappearance as a 52 result of the encroaching modernization process that incarcerated this alternative geopolitical space as well- that epitomizes the traumatic experience of the modern moment as ‗the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.‘ Modernity is already about a loss: to see that loss in another culture that is modernized belatedly is to witness one‘s past at the moment of losing it. For the nineteenth-century European traveler, Constantinople evokes a pre-modern past in the city, which is both radically different from the contemporary European scene, but also uncannily reminiscent of one‘s cultural past. An effective way to illustrate this juxtaposition is to follow Mrs. Baillie‘s company as they head for the new part of the city across the Golden Horn after visiting the bazaars: ―The moment we crossed the bridge we saw sedan chairs for hire, of the most old-fashioned style, such as we see in old pictures, and may remember our mothers and grandmothers used to employ to go to their evening parties‖ (78). Since the author starts by describing a scene from contemporary Constantinople, one can easily feel confused for a moment about the referent to ‗old pictures‘: of Constantinople or of home? The temporal dimension is incorporated into the spatial difference since Constantinople emerges as a space that is perceived as one‘s remote past by the European traveler. Hence, Benjamin‘s assertion that ‗… the street leads the strolling person into a vanished time‘ is modified when the streets of Constantinople lead the strolling person into a vanished time of his/her own past, rather than the past of the city he‘s tramping. This is one of the various ways in which the European traveler encounters that which was the most familiar now turning into a self-alienating experience because it is produced by an unfamiliar setting. Pierre Loti‘s passionate relationship with the city, for 53 instance, represents the western perspective that does not support the progressive movements during the last stages of the Empire. His melancholy derives from the disintegrating Empire and the fear of losing the oriental image in which he has found a second self. Loti‘s exotic Constantinople is an alternative pastoral space that makes possible the ‗other‘ Arif-Effendi he has created in an attempt to forget what he has left behind back home, including his identity. His experience is a continuous confrontation not only with the accelerating rhythm of modernization but also, and more fundamentally, with the porous space of the city on which surfaces the remains of the author‘s cultural past. As Chris Bongie argues, ―[Loti‘s] exotic city thus harkens back to a more authentic, if supplanted, version of the European metropolis‖ (93). Loti praises the Ottoman capital as ‗the only place‘ where his dream of impersonating a completely different self could have been realized –in as authentic and Turkish setting as Eyüp, where he settles down: ―[Constantinople] is a genuine wilderness of men, of which Paris was once the prototype, an aggregate of several large towns, where every man can lead his own life without interference, and assume as many different characters as he pleases – Loti, Arif, and Marketo‖ (62). In addition to embodying a pre-modern past, Constantinople is also evocative of the Byzantine history. The former city of Byzantium, with its Roman remains, is part of the actual prehistory of modernity, which is, from a European perspective, interrupted by Islam. 19 Travel to Istanbul therefore, has multiple meanings –from observing Europe‘s 19 A contemporary American female traveler, though sympathetic to Turks, nevertheless expresses how the history of the city has been interrupted by the fall in terms of its artistic development: ―To walk into [Church of Saint Saviour in Chora] is to walk into the color and zest of the late flowering of Byzantine art, when the Iconoclasts had been forgotten for two hundred years. The figures seem to move, have depth, 54 ambiguous Other to witnessing Europe‘s lost past– that can still be detected in the few remains left from the Byzantine past. In Diary of an Idle Woman in Constantinople, Frances Elliott goes further into the ancient past than many other travelers and evokes the Byzantine reign of the city. 20 Visiting Constantinople in 1892, she is disappointed to see that construction for the Orient Express, on which she arrives by land –a radical change from other travelers‘ dramatic entry through the Bosphorus– demolished the remaining vestiges of the former Byzantium. Throughout her stay, Elliott draws a gloomy picture of the city, constantly referring to the ‗Turkish cruelty‘ that she seems to correlate with Islam. Her revival of a lost Byzantine past, another radical departure from other travelers‘ evocation of the Ottoman past, is most vividly demonstrated in the section she writes about the contemporary Hippodrome, which used to be a central location as a gathering place, business centre, bazaar and the like for the Byzantine capital. By building upon the fragments of the contemporary Hippodrome of her time, she conjures up a whole history starting from the Byzantine ages all the way to the 1850s. Elliott recognizes the different periods of history in her description of the Mosque of Ahmed, [commonly known as ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- glow. The walls are a study of the time just before the final fall of the empire, a last spark of full life. They are contemporary with Giotto, and one wonders what the Renaissance, which had been partly fomented by discoveries in Anatolia, would have brought to Constantinople had it not fallen‖ (Mary Lee Settle, Turkish Reflections 43). 20 What is noteworthy about Frances Elliot‘s book‘s title is the fact that she calls herself ‗idle,‘ which instantly reminds the contemporary reader of a major characteristic of the flȃneur. At the beginning of her diary she wrote in Italy, titled Diary of an idle Woman in Italy, she includes an ―Avant-Propos‖ in which she justifies her title: ―When I call these volumes ‗The Diary of an Idle Woman,’ I do so because I went to Italy with a perfectly disengaged mind, with no special objects of inquiry, no definite call or profession, no preconceived theories. I was idle in that I went where fancy or accident led me; otherwise I hope my readers will not consider me ‗an idle woman.‘ It may be well to mention that some of these chapters (now almost entirely re-written) have appeared from time to time in some of the leading periodicals.‖ Her enchantment with Rome in this book provides a sharp contrast to her disappointment in Constantinople. 55 ―The Blue Mosque‖] located close to the Hippodrome and rendered exceptional by its six minarets, four being the maximum number: All the time I passed within the inclosure of the Mosque of Ahmed, my mind was running on the guilty occupation of the ground. Not only has the circuit of the Hippodrome been materially reduced in order to make room for this overgrown parasite, but the actual site of the Palatium Sacrum of Constantine has been built over and obliterated. The Mosque of Ahmed stands upon the brow of the last of that range of hills on which Byzantium is built, descending to the Seven Towers and the shore – precisely the site of the Palace built by Constantine and enlarged by Justinian –a congeries of different edifices, added at various times, like the Kremlin at Moscow, and the Old Seraglio before the fire. (117) The city emerges as a palimpsest of layered time, which stages a clash of the ancient and modern, of the prehistorical and contemporary world. 21 Even in travelogues evidently engaged with the contemporary scene of the nineteenth-century Constantinople, one can note the western traveler‘s concern to examine the Ottoman together with the Byzantine past. According to Umberto Eco, for instance, Edmondo de Amicis‘ exploration of the ‗antique city walls along the Byzantine Palace to the shores of the Marmara Sea and the Golden Horn‘ is noteworthy in terms of reflecting the perspective of a Westerner: Considering that the places visited belonged to Second Rome until that moment, that the entire East was under the sway of Christian civilization and turned into the symbol of the greatness of the Ottomans in the very same place … Big churches turned into mosques and the radical change of the skyline on the evening 21 The idea of the past unexpectedly materializing in the present is the main idea behind what Benjamin calls ‗dialectical images.‘ Such a dialectical reasoning goes against the self-conscious attempt of the project of modernity to break with the past. Benjamin argues that the past is preserved in everyday objects or images (i.e. Parisian arcades), which, when excavated, dialectically bring forth the past in the present. In doing so, dialectical images violate the linear logic behind vulgar historicism. In ―Theses on the Philosophy of History,‖ Benjamin writes that ―The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. (…) For every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably‖ (255). 56 of the same day… These thoughts render De Amicis‘ visit pathetic. For until Konstantinopolis, he is in the capital of a Christian empire. A target that Western Christianity regards as exterior, where it identifies the beginnings of decline and avoids because of the difference in sect. When the city becomes the capital … Constantinople turns into an object of desire and triggers the exotic imagination of the West. The city turns into an object on which literary essays are written. While Western Christianity does ‗almost‘ not like it until that moment, it turns into the temple of difference once it is subjected to a radical transformation.‖ (―Istanbul as Unity and Trinity,‖ http://www.wan-press.org/article3190.html) Hence, the traveler is exposed to a radically different geography while at the same time s/he unexpectedly runs into details that are reminiscent of home. Tinged with a sort of historical awareness, this kind of confrontation as a way of self-realization should not be interpreted as an abstract co-existence of the past and present inscribed in the cityscape. As Susan Buck-Morss argues, ―The double exposure of the past and present is presented … as a riddle, in which knowledge of the past doesn‘t historicize present truth, but crystallizes it‖ (―The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,‖ 109). For the European traveler, what is crystallized with the co-existence of the past and present in Constantinople is the essence of modernity as the disenchantment with European rationalized, ordered space, followed by a double disenchantment at witnessing a similar ordering of space in process. The trauma is partially related to the conflict between the unfamiliarity of a non-Western world and the strange connection one feels to the site being observed, while recognizing it as part of one‘s own past. For the uncanny to occur, difference and similarity –or repetition with a difference- have to happen at the same time. That is precisely the reason why travel to the Ottoman capital evokes the uncanny for the European travelers. 57 Common points in nineteenth-century travelogues on Istanbul narrate the city of Istanbul as containing contradictory, self-effacing and self-undermining characteristics, which defy expectations. 22 If the city is a text to be interpreted, it is slippery and misleading. The soothing experience of the dancing dervishes is immediately negated by the horrifying howling dervishes; the gloominess of the cemeteries is subverted by the merry picnicking going around the graveyards; the picturesqueness of the wooden houses in the backstreets is destroyed by the frequent fires; the disposed and decaying corpses underneath the water are camouflaged by the beauty of the Bosphorus. The narratives of Istanbul mirror such actual experiences: they are usually created by self-conscious, self- negating, hesitant and silent or melancholic voices. As only one example of the self-negating voice, de Amicis unexpectedly shifts his perspective a couple of hours after his fascination with the first sight of Constantinople at a distance: The vision of this morning has vanished. The Constantinople of light and beauty has given place to a monstrous city, scattered about over an infinity of hills and valleys; it is a labyrinth of human ant-hills, cemeteries, ruins and solitary places; a confusion of civilisation and barbarity which presents an image of all the cities upon earth, and gathers to itself all the aspects of human life. It is really only the skeleton of a great city –the walls, which form only a small part –while the rest is enormous agglomeration of shacks, an interminable Asiatic encampment swarming with peoples of every race and religion who have never been counted, of people of every race and every religion. It is a great city in the process of transformation, composed of ancient cities that are in decay, new cities which emerged yesterday, and other cities now being born; everything is in confusion; on every side can be seen the vestiges of gigantic works, mountains bored 22 At the end of his first day in the city, Edmondo de Amicis recounts his impressions as follows: ―After a few hours spent in this way, should any one suddenly ask what is Constantinople like? You could only strike your hand upon your forehead, and try to still the tempest of thoughts. Constantinople is a Babylon, a world, a chaos. Beautiful? Wonderfully beautiful? Ugly? –It is horrible! –Did you like it? Madly. Would you live in it? How can I tell! – who could say that he would willingly live in another planet?‖ (21-22). 58 through, hills cut down, entire districts leveled to the ground, great streets laid out; an immense mass of debris and remains of conflagrations upon ground forever tormented by the hand of man. The most incongruous objects are all jumbled together, an endless procession of bizarre and unexpected sights that make your head spin. You walk along a fine residential street to find it end in a gorge; you come out of the theatre and to find yourself surrounded by tombs. (15) This description exemplifies one of the many cases in which the European traveler is disillusioned to penetrate into the darker side of Constantinople, which looks majestic only at a distance. In fact, such disillusionment cannot be associated with a national or even continental perspective. An American missionary, Henry M.Field, D.D, traveling in 1884, is dismayed at the initial prospect of the city from land: ‗And now we get an interior view of Constantinople, which is quite different from the glittering exterior, as seen from a distance. We are plunging into a labyrinth of dark and dirty streets, which are overhung with miserable houses, where from little shops turbaned figures peer our upon us, and women, closely veiled, glide swiftly by‖ (From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn 306). Another American traveler, Francis Marison Crawford, writes about his first impressions as enchantment with the panoramic view, followed by repulsion at particular observations of the city, which uncannily echoes de Amicis‘ description: I shall never forget my first impression of Constantinople. (…) The glory of the scene was beyond description, and, in its way, surpassed anything I have witnessed in any part of the world. A few minutes later it was gone, the wintry clouds rolled together, the light went out, snow fell again, then rain, and then more snow, and my second impression was of dismal, slushy, filthy streets, dripping eaves, marrow-biting air, and an intense longing for a comfortable room and a good fire. Perhaps the contrast has served in memory‘s gallery to throw the first picture into unreasonable prominence, but remembrance may have exaggerations which one does not regret. (726) One can explain away this swiftly changing perspective as an effect of being surprised by the unfamiliar prospects of the streets in an oriental city. However, there seems to be 59 something in the cityscape that is more than simply shocking or surprising – it usually occurs as surprise at something that is first recognized and then observed as being regulated in a radically different way than what the traveler is accustomed to. The dialectic is from the familiar overview of the city, as examined in previous literary texts as well as visual material, to the particular ‗repellent‘ details. The rest of this section will focus on two such characteristics of the city, the graveyards and street dogs, whose ‗repelling characterization‘ is as much related to the shocking circumstances of the living city‘s relation to the dead and the inhuman, as to the effect produced by glimpsing at a pre-modern reality to which one is forbidden to return. It is a common trope in European travelogues on Constantinople to mention the preponderance of cemeteries, which surprisingly function as spaces of socialization and entertainment. 23 The areas which are the most populated with burial-places in the nineteenth century, are Pera and Scutari, [today‘s Beyoğlu and Üsküdar] as one American traveler notes during his perambulations: ―Besides innumerable tombs and many small burial-grounds in the neighborhood of the mosques within Stamboul, Pera, Stamboul itself and Scutari are all bounded on the land side by an almost continuous chain of grave-yards‖ (Crawford 17). It is, therefore, no surprise that the English officer Mac Farlene accidentally runs into the vast Turkish cemetery during his first walk in Pera, 23 This function of cemeteries has been disused in the contemporary age in which the large spaces of graveyards were replaced by the increasing construction throughout the city. The remaining cemeteries are usually silent, ill-kept and unpopulated. A contemporary Turkish novel, The Flea Palace by Elif Safak, interestingly narrates the transformation of two cemeteries (Armenian and Muslim), which were located next to each other, and the consequences of this transformation. The main narrative of the novel involves the life stories of people living in an apartment building that was built in this area, coincidentally constructed on top of a saint‘s tomb. According to some characters, it is the saint‘s desecration that causes the unfortunate events in their lives. 60 where he observes, ―… besides the ‗grand champs des morts,‘ sit the groveling sons of Pera, on low stools, smoking their pipes, discussing, in their way, which is liberal and enlightened, the politics of the day, and enjoying as much pleasure as they are capable of‖ (496). In various accounts, travelers observe that families visit their dead on Fridays and religious holidays so that they can eat, play and rest next to the deceased, which contrasts with the western Christian civilization‘s perception of death. Death is incorporated into the lives of the living in the Ottoman capital. When the Danish author and poet, Hans Christian Anderson, visits the Turkish cemetery at Scutari, he is befuddled to observe that ―No fence girds round this forest of the dead men‘s graves‖ (840). H.G. Dwight, too, an American traveling to Constantinople in 1907, observes the manifest accessibility of the graveyards to the living: ―Life and death seem never very far apart in Constantinople. In other cities the fact that life has an end is put out of sight as much as possible. Here it is not only acknowledged but taken advantage of for decorative purposes‖ (Constantinople: Settings and Traits 8). On the other hand, Muslim graveyards on the European side of the Bosphorus, on the other hand, which are sometimes used even ‗as a kind of pleasure garden for soldiers and their girls‖ (42), surprise Edmondo de Amicis with their frequent human traffic: ―Little paths wind all about the wood; a Turk sits in the shade smoking his pipe; some children run and jump among the graves; a cow is grazing; hundreds of turtle doves coo among the cypresses; groups of veiled women pass by (…)‖ (40). 24 These burial-places, as observed by Julia Pardoe, are sometimes 24 Later on in the text, de Amicis describes more in detail the use of graveyards as a place for relaxation: ―.... two Turks came up, leading a child between them, and, seating themselves upon a tomb slightly further on, opened a bundle they were carrying under their arm and began to eat. When they had finished, the elder of the two wrapped up something in a sheet of paper –it looked like a fish and a piece of bread –and with a 61 visited by couples, planning their future among the tombs, where they ―sit hand in hand upon some lettered stone, to exchange their vows, and to lay plans for the future on the very threshold of the past!‖ (132). Overall, Pardoe‘s portrayal of Turkish cemeteries in Beauties of the Bosphorus aptly recapitulates the predominant image they leave on the traveler: ―There is certainly nothing which more impresses the mind or fills the imagination of the traveler in Turkey, than the appearance and situation of the burial places. The sunniest spots, where all is gaiety and gladness, yet find room for a grave, without being saddened by the partial occupancy of death‖ (130). Being more critical of Turkish manners and their ‗cruelty‘ for destroying the Byzantine past of the city, Frances Elliott describes the effect of graveyards in a stronger language than any of the other travelers quoted above: ―Anything more revolting in the centre of a town cannot be conceived. Without so much as a light fence to guard it from the thousands of passengers, carriages, carts, horses, mules, and porters –a rush, a noise, a hurry insulting to the dead‖ (31). Reminiscent of death –yet escaping the regulatory structure of a western culture, – and presenting the gloomy aspect of life in a nonchalant way, Turkish graveyards provide tools to reflectively criticize the oppressing system behind the ordering of Christian cemeteries. Not surprisingly, initial shock is frequently followed by a reflective ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- respectful gesture, placed the little packet in a hole near the head of the grave. This done, they both lit their pipes and smoked peacefully, while the child played about among the tombs. It was explained to us afterwards that the fish and bread were left as a mark of affection for their relative, probably recently deceased; and the hole in which they placed it is to be found in every Muslim tomb, near the head, so that through it the dead may hear the lamentations of their friends, and may receive from them a few drops of rose water of the perfume of a flower. Having finished their smoke by the graveside, the two pious Turks took the child between them, and vanished among the cypresses‖ (44). 62 analysis of the graveyards back home, as occurs in the French traveler Théophile Gautier‘s description from the mid-nineteenth century: I cannot understand why Turkish cemeteries do not make me feel sad like Christian cemeteries. A visit to Pére-Lachaise makes me dismally melancholy for many days, but I have spent hours at a time in the cemeteries of Pera and Scutari without falling into aught else than a vague, sweet reverie. Is this indifference due to the beauty of the heavens, the brilliancy of the light and the romantic beauty of the site, or to religious prejudices, which act upon us unconsciously and makes us despise the burial-places of infidels with whom we are to have nothing to do in the next world? I have not been able to make out the reason clearly, although I have often thought the matter over. Possibly it is due to purely plastic causes. Catholicism has shrouded death in a somber poetry of terror unknown to paganism and Mohammedanism. It has covered its tombs with lugubrious, cadaverous forms intended to cause terror, while the urns of antiquity are surrounded with joyous bassi-relievi on which graceful genii play amid leaves, and the Mussulman tombstones, diapered with azure and gold, seem, under the shadow of the beautiful trees, to be kiosks of eternal rest rather than the abodes of dead bodies. (110-111) That the same rhetoric of surprise, combined with repulsion at the proximity of the dead to the living, is also present in American writers such as Francis Marion-Crawford, is suggestive of the dichotomy between Turkish culture and a more general binary opposite that one can generalize as ‗the Christian west.‘ Crawford‘s memoirs on Constantinople were published in two installments, sequentially in December 1893 and January 1894 in Scribner’s Magazine, and it is in the latter that he provides the American audience with a critique of its relationship with death: But in spite of their wild and gloomy aspect and ruinous condition, or perhaps in consequence of this state of things, the Turkish cemetery is infinitely more picturesque than the Christian churchyard, with its abominably tasteless monuments, its trim salad-like flower beds, and its insipid inscriptions –as superior in interest to an intelligent being as the primæval forest is to the creations of a landscape gardener. Modern religious art seems to be bad because it has kept pace with modern fashion, an error of which the Mussulman cannot be accused. There is something incongruous in treating dead men like books, to be arranged in neat order and catalogued as volumes are in a library. No one who clings to old- fashioned ideas can conceive of finding rest in such a neat and business-like 63 establishment as a modern Christian cemetery. Since we do not believe in the worship of ancestors, as the Chinese do, and since those of us who believe in a future state are convinced that rest and reward or unrest and punishment are for the soul and not for the body, it seems both foolish and wicked to expand enormous sums for the preservation of what is by the hypothesis utterly worthless. Better to lie on the mountain-side under the sky, or to be dropped into the sea with a weight at one‘s feet, or at least to be put quietly away without expense- or even to occupy a nameless grave under the Turkish cypresses, than to be the prey of the modern undertaker, sexton, marble-cutter, and municipality. (19) One expects to find an ordering mechanism in ‗all great cities,‘ as Mrs. Baillie calls them, which addresses anxieties about segreagating the dead from the living. Instead, Turkish cemeteries open up a space that violates, in Michel de Certeau‘s terminology, the ‗political freezing of the place,‘ and create an ambiguous territory that not only brings death to the heart of the city but also re-regulates the relationship between the dead and the living in challenging ways. With their unaccustomed ways of accommodating the dead, Turkish cemeteries, on a broader scale, inaugurate a critique of modernity that considers modern methods of burial to be ―the prey of the modern undertaker, sexton, marble-cutter, and municipality.‖ The compartmentalization of space and the confinement of what is ‗disturbing‘ (i.e. the poor, the deranged, the dead) is the principal logic behind the modernization project, which is also an attempt to break with the past in which such ‗disturbing‘ aspects of society were considered to be interruptive of progress. As Walter Benjamin posits, ―In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living‖ (―The Storyteller‖ 82). European travelers‘ encounters with the cemetery at the heart of the city in Constantinople can, for this reason, be interpreted as facing one‘s cultural past that was buried, forgotten, or concealed from sight at the expense of being modernized. In ―Of Other Spaces, Utopias and 64 Heterotopias,‖ Michel Foucault defines heterotopian space as ‗real and effective (other) spaces‘ which represent while at the same time they challenge and overturn ‗real arrangements‘ of space (422). 25 As a requirement of the modern outlook, cemeteries, as heterotopian spaces, are gradually driven out of the cities in western societies: Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was located in the very heart of the city, near the church. (…) …. it is only from the nineteenth century on that the cemetery began to be shifted to the outskirts of the city. In parallel to this individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, an obsession with death as ‗sickness‘ has emerged. It is supposed that the dead transmit sickness to the living and that their presence and proximity to the houses and church, almost in the middle of the street, spreads death. This great concern with the spread of sickness by contagion from cemeteries began to appear with insistence toward the end of the eighteenth century, but the cemeteries only moved out to the suburbs during the course of the nineteenth. From then on, they no longer constituted the sacred and immortal wind of the city, but the ‗other city,‘ where each family possessed its gloomy dwelling. (423-424) As Foucault‘s chronological perspective underlines above, the cemeteries were rendered as separate cities, as can be detected in various accounts of European cemeteries in the nineteenth century. Bringing together writings on ancient Paris in his archival work, Walter Benjamin quotes from François Porché, who mentions Baudelaire‘s connection to the cemeteries of Paris in the following way: Behind the high walls of the houses, towards Montmartre, toward Ménilmontant, toward Montparnasse, he imagines at dusk the cemeteries of Paris, these three other cities within the larger one –cities smaller in appearance than the city of the living, which seems to contain them, but in reality how much more populous, with their closely packed little compartments arranged in tiers under the ground. And in the same places where the crowd circulates today –the Square des Innocents, for example –he evokes the ancient ossuaries, now leveled or entirely gone, 25 One of the principles of the heterotopia is ―the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other‖ (424). Two oriental examples, Persian gardens and Muslim hammams (424, 425) are suggestive in taking into consideration whether the Orient, in its totality, can be heterotopian for the Western traveler. 65 swallowed up in the sea of time with all their dead, like ships that have sunk with all their crew aboard. François Porché, La Vie douloureuse de Charles Baudelaire, in series entitled Le Roman des Grandes Existences, no. 6 (Paris 1926), pp. 186-187. (Arcades Project 99) The administration of cemeteries in European cities goes as far as marginalizing them as ―other cities‖ in connection to the ―larger one.‖ The different methods used to organize Turkish cemeteries, however, (i.e. their location close to city centers, using turbans or flowers on tombstones to distinguish men and women, the practice of leaving food inside a hole on the tombstones) should by no means be interpreted as signifying lack of proper regulation. What is shocking, then, is to see the possibility of an alternative way to modern methods of confining the dead and to become aware of one‘s past in which such a possibility was realized. The recognition of this possibility is to experience the modern, predicated on the simultaneous feeling of being ‗in place‘ and ‗out of place,‘ which happens ―precisely at the moment when one is made aware that one has unfinished business with the past, at the moment when the past returns as an ‗elemental force‘ (…) to haunt the present day‖ (Gelder and Jacobs, ―The Postcolonial Ghost Story‖ 181). From multiple perspectives, the narration of cemeteries of Constantinople in European travelogues, exemplify the past‘s return. Another shocking aspect of the Ottoman capital for the European traveler is the abundance of street dogs, which are narrated in the same style of repulsion and surprise at such ‗lack of control‘ as is seen in the account of graveyards. ―Constantinople is one vast dog kennel; everyone notices it as soon as he arrives,‖ writes Edmondo de Amicis at the beginning of his four-page-analysis of this ‗second population of the city‘ (80). Indeed, together with other depressing scenes from the ‗filthy‘ streets of Constantinople, the sight 66 of dogs is only one of the details, which causes a profound sense of disappointment immediately after being enchanted with the panoramic view of the city: On passing through Galata, and ascending the steep ‗infidel hill‘ to Pera, this [depressing] aspect did not improve; on the contrary, we seemed to have left all the life and population that still animated the place, on the quays of Galata, -we hardly met a soul on our way up, but swarms of starving, mangy dogs, perambulated the silent streets, giving me an opportunity on my very first arrival, to make the acquaintance of this pest of the Ottoman capital. (Mac Farlene 493) The street dogs are typically described as thin and ill-conditioned as a result of their incessant fights to guard their own territorial space in the city streets. The reason why Turks feed dogs, allow them to roam freely in the streets, and to create a subterranean world with their own set of rules, claiming their own districts, is ambiguous. 26 In fact, the enigma surrounding the ‗sacredness‘ of dogs in Constantinople serves as yet another point to frustrate and disorient the western traveler, confronted with what seems to be a lack of control of the inhuman at the heart of the city –in addition to the lack of control over the unliving and the graveyards. One reason why the western traveler is disturbed to see the streets over-populated by dogs can be considered in purely aesthetic terms: they simply present an unattractive sight: Broken tails, torn ears, mangy fur and scarred necks, one-eyed, lame, covered with galls and devoured by flies: reduced to the worst state a living dog can be in, they are relics of war and hunger and sexual disease. Tails can be said to be an immense luxury: it is rare for a Constantinople dog to have an entire tail for more than two months of public life. Poor beasts! (de Amicis 83) 26 While certain travelers, such as Frances Elliott, assertively explain the main rationale as ―The Koran teaches that life is never to be destroyed uselessly‖ (29), others list various potential reasons: ―Everyone knows how much the Turks love [dogs] and protect them. I couldn‘t find out if it is because charitableness towards all creatures is enjoined in the Koran, or because, like certain birds, the dogs are believed to be bringers of good fortune, or because the Prophet loved them, or because the sacred books speak of them, or because, as some claim, Mehmet the Conqueror brought in his train a numerous company of dogs, who entered the city in triumph along with him through the breach in the St. Romanus gate‖ (de Amicis 80-81). 67 Such dire conditions are also not acceptable from a religious, that is Christian, point of view: ―The depressing effect of it on me I cannot express. That a creature, created to be a companion of man, should become hideous, swollen, diseased –an object of repulsion, is horrible,‖ notes Frances Elliott among her various critical remarks of the Turkish customs (30). Apart from the predominant sentiment of disgust at the ill conditions of the street dogs, their idleness and self-creation of a world that escapes the regulatory mechanism of human beings, are two major disturbances, which are persistently repeated in these accounts. As de Amicis writes, ―They form a great free and vagabond republic, collarless and nameless, without tasks to perform, without a home to go to, without rules to obey‖ (81). The major concern is with their ambiguous, unidentifiable status rather than their poor health, as de Amicis‘ narrative suggests: They sleep almost always in the same spots. Just like the human population, the canine inhabitants of Constantinople are divided into districts. Every quarter, every street is inhabited or rather owned by a certain number of dogs, their relatives and friends, who never leave it, and never allow strangers to enter. They exercise a sort of police patrol. They have their guards, their advance posts, their sentinels; they go the rounds and reconnoitre. Woe to any dog from another quarter who, driven by hunger, dares to enter his neighborhoods‘ precincts! (…) Sometimes larger groups of them form and make such a disturbance in front of some shop that the shopkeeper and his assistants have to arm themselves with sticks and stools and make a military sortie to clear the street: you can hear the crack of heads and spines, and the dogs‘ howling fills the air. (82) The fact that street dogs in Constantinople cannot be disciplined, that their independence infringes upon the regulation of daily life, and that their sight is interruptive of the enchanting panoramic view of the city, seems to revive a pre-modern past subdued by 68 European modernization. It is noteworthy that dogs cuddled up together, in harmony with the ‗elementary‘ forces as quoted below, are reminiscent of a heap of dung, –yet another ‗disturbance‘ that needs to be cleaned up of the streets in order to maintain a more ‗modern‘ appearance. … no one, at least in Stamboul, ever thinks of disturbing [the dogs‘] occupations or their repose. They are the masters of the public highways. In our cities the dogs make way for the horseman or pedestrian; there it is the people, the horses, the camels, the donkeys, who make way for the dogs. In the busiest parts of Stamboul four or five dogs, curled up asleep in the middle of the road, will cause the entire population of the area to go out of their way for half a day. (…) Laziness is the distinctive trait of the dogs of Constantinople. They lie down in the middle of the road, five, six, then in a row, or in a ring, curled up so that they look more like a heap of dung than living creatures, and there they sleep the whole day through, among throngs of people coming and going, surrounded by a deafening hubbub, and neither cold not heat, rain or shine can get them to budge. When it snows they stay under the snow; when it rains they lie in the mud up to their ears, so that when at length they get up they look like clay models of dogs, with no visible eyes or ears or muzzles. (de Amicis 81-82) Moreover, their laziness cannot be accommodated by the modern world in which every animate and inanimate being is assigned a certain place and function, even if that means animals must be domesticated –confined and regulated. Hence, the western traveler‘s disgust with street dogs is neither related to animosity nor to love of animals, but points to the unleashing of certain feelings, mainly in the form of fear and anxiety. The sight of street dogs in Constantinople serves as a means to inaugurate discussion about what they remind the traveler of, rather than their actual condition. For Mrs. Baillie, for instance, the dogs‘ idleness initiates a chain of thoughts that proceeds to the idleness of certain human beings: I confess I could not help thinking, as I walked along, how these Stamboul dogs resembled our idle Christians, ‗dumb dogs, lying down, loving to slumber,‘ well 69 to do in this world, and apparently harmless, but useless and lethargic, only roused by an injury or grievance to turn and bite. It is a sad picture indeed, but what a contrast to the dog represented in the trade mark of one of our oldest printers, a watch-dog lying down in an attitude of intense attention, with the motto ‗Not idle, watchful!’ That is the emblem of the earnest Christian, quietly doing the duty of the day assigned to him by his Master. (78) Whether it is the fear of extreme disorder that is reminiscent of an anarchical structure or an alternative organizational system that develops outside human mechanisms, or of the disturbance of the harmony posited by the Christian worldview, what seems to be ultimately so disquieting for the western traveler, as he strolls around the city, is to witness the human will being compromised, instead of being efficient and in command of the modernized world. 27 In addition to graveyards and street dogs, the general cartography of the city prevents employment of control over space at large. The numberless houses and streets of Constantinople, even at the end of nineteenth century, generate spatial incoherence and a disorienting effect. Living in the Turkish quarter, Eyoub, where ―as yet no tinge of Western Europe has entered,‖ Loti disguises himself as a local and preserves his anonymity (77). 28 The way he describes his house to a friend, in one of his letters, is suggestive in this respect: 27 In a contemporary Turkish novel, My Name is Red, in which Orhan Pamuk writes about sixteenth- century Istanbul and the Ottoman miniature art, one of the characters is a dog who speaks, like any other character, in the first person and directly addresses the reader. In his disjointed narration, which covers various topics with a stream-of-consciousness technique, the dog mentions the main difference between Istanbul dogs and the western dogs: the former is as free as s/he desires and the streets belong to him/her whereas the latter is always at the disposition of an owner. 28 His identity is so enigmatic for the local population that despite being accepted as he is, Loti remains a mystery throughout his sojourn. When Loti bids farewell to his neighbors at the end of Aziyadé, one of them naively questions him about his identity: ―Before you go, will you tell us, Arif or Loti, who you are and what you were doing here in our midst?‖ (151) 70 Landing on the Stamboul side of Constantinople, you pick your way through three miles or so of bazaars and mosques, till you reach the sacred suburb of Eyoub, where the children make your outlandish headgear a target for their pebbles. You enquire for the Kuru Chechmeh street, which is at once pointed out to you. At the far end of this street, you will come upon a marble fountain in the shade of almond trees, and just beside it is my house. (85) The lack of clarity in Loti‘s address does not pose an exceptional case. The address of Achmet, his servant/companion, who lives in Yedi-Koule away from Eyoub, is so complicated that it takes eight lines of the address section on the envelope, when Loti corresponds with him from England –with the hopes that Achmet will act as an intermediary between him and Aziyadé: ―To Achmet, son of Ibrahim, who lives at Yedi- Koule, in the cross-road that leads to Arabahdjilar-Malessi, close to the Mosque. It is the third house after a tutunji, (tobacco shop) next door to an old Armenian woman who sells drugs, with a dervish living opposite‖ (152). Despite the potential misunderstandings it can create, –hence, its inefficiency– the lack of regulation in numbering houses can also be seen as liberating as much as chaotic. Inhabiting an unmonitored space, Loti is also able to maintain a romantic relationship with a local woman, which contrasts with the ordering of space in Europe, as described by Balzac (quoted in Benjamin), in order to explain how private affairs are affected by the numbering of houses: ―Poor women of France! You would probably like to remain unknown, so that you can carry your little romances. But how can you manage this in a civilization which registers the departures and arrivals of coaches in public places, counts letters and stamps them when they are posted and again when they are delivered, assigns numbers to houses, and will soon have the whole country, down to the smallest plot of land, in its registers?‖ (qtd. in Charles Baudelaire 78) 71 Although Benjamin never refers to Istanbul in his writings, his articles on Naples and Moscow are significant in terms of positing modernized Paris as a foil to these two cities, whose certain features might be considered to parallel those of Constantinople as ‗non- western‘ spaces. For instance, lack of house numbers is also characteristic of Naples at the turn of the century: No one orients himself by house numbers. Shops, wells, and churches are the reference points –and not always simple ones. For the typical Neapolitan church does not ostentatiously occupy a vast square, visible from afar, with transepts, gallery, and dome. It is hidden, built in; high domes are often to be seen only from a few places, and even then it is not easy to find one‘s way to them, impossible to distinguish the mass of the church from that of the neighboring secular buildings. The stranger passes by. (―Naples,‖ One Way Street and Other Writings 170) The disorienting landscape, through which ‗the stranger passes by,‘ increases the possibilities of chance encounters, as it happens in Freud‘s essay ‗The Uncanny,‘ (which interestingly includes an anecdotal note about his getting lost in an Italian town –though it is not specified as Naples). Indeed, chance encounters are a necessary component of the uncanny effect: it is only when the familiar (i.e. the European‘s past) is encountered unexpectedly that it looks unfamiliar at the first sight. The return to the ‗beginning‘ –to the once-heimlich that it is now forbidden to enter– is facilitated by the urban structures of Constantinople, which introduce chance encounters as part of everyday life. Moreover, the ‗pre-modern‘ reality of the city (i.e. graveyards, street dogs, and unregulated houses) provides an alternative to the oppressive structures of the modern world. What nineteenth-century Constantinople offers to the European traveler, then, is a special walking experience, the essence of which is the possibility of getting lost. The European subject wandering incognito around the streets 72 of Constantinople and observing all kinds of ‗strange‘ objects, scenes or practices, can be seen as the reincarnation of the flȃneur rendered marginal in the rapidly changing geography of the European capitals. Walter Benjamin‘s flȃneur is based on Baudelaire‘s reference to the figure in Paris Spleen and his essay ‗The Painter of Modern Life,‘ in which he portrays him as an urban stroller. The flȃneur is not only an idle stroller walking anonymously through the crowds, but also the figure of the modern artist/poet who observes and experiences unexpected encounters and fleeting glances, so that he can express ―the transient, the fleeting, the contingent‖ through his art. Urban space holds no mysteries for him. The city streets belong to him: he can move in and out anywhere freely while preserving his anonymity. As he is strolling around, he is both inside and outside the crowd, which gives him a ‗sovereign power.‘ He observes without being observed. He inscribes meaning and defines the world in his own terms. The emergence and disappearance of the flâneur coincides with that of the Parisian arcades. As Susan Buck-Morss states, ―The flowering of flâneurie was brief, corresponding to the first blooming of the arcades. This era of origins is irretrievable‖ (37). The first arcades were built after Napoleon‘s Egyptian campaign and were destroyed by the modernization project in an attempt to discipline time, initiated by Emperor Napoleon III and conducted by Baron Haussmann. The flâneur disappeared with the construction of grand boulevards and the subsequent traffic in the city streets (Leslie in Hanssen ed. 92-93). With the introduction of speeding cars on the boulevards, the act of strolling, observing the surroundings without the risk of being run over by a 73 car, or simply idling around became inconceivable. What was more decisive, however, was the increasing rationalization and ordering of space as a result of the modernization process. In ―The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,‖ Benjamin writes, Since the French Revolution, an extensive network of controls had been bringing bourgeois life ever more tightly into its meshes. The numbering of houses in the big cities may be used to document the progressive standardization. Napoleon‘s administration had made such numbering obligatory for Paris in 1805. (…] Baudelaire found this effort as much of an encroachment as did any criminal. (…) So he roamed about in the city, which had long since ceased to be home for the flâneur. (78-79) The grounds on which the flâneur based his identity were confiscated from him. No longer able to be in control within an ordered geography where meaning is pre- conceived, the flâneur lost his authorial existence since ―numbers destroy the poetry of the city‖ (Keith Tester 14). Hence, examination of the Paris arcades and the flȃneur is at the same time a critique of the modernization process and the changing perceptions of time and space within the experience of modernity at large. The following section will examine how the reincarnation of the flȃneur in Constantinople reenacts the changing circumstances that eliminate the figure; and in doing so, stages the loss marked by modernity –unexpectedly and unconditionally (not limited by changing circumstances) away from the European metropolitan centers. ii) The Figure of the Flȃneur in the Belatedly Modern Geography of Constantinople Let us start with ‗the crowd‘ in the streets of Constantinople, tramped by the European traveler, who is observing people at a distance, while at the same time trying to intermingle with them. As the hallmark of the modern metropolitan existence, crowds 74 play a significant role in making the condition of modernity concrete. Galata Bridge, which connects the two sides of the Golden Horn (the Turkish quarter of Stamboul with the European town of Galata/Pera), is a familiar site in western travelogues from ‗to see the population of Constantinople‘ (de Amicis 18). 29 Among her first impressions of the city, Mrs. Baillie alludes to ―the motley crowd which passed and repassed over (the bridge) in every variety of costume‖ (emphasis mine 65-66). On his first day in the city, de Amicis stands on ‗the Bridge‘ where ‗one can see all Constantinople go by in an hour‘ (18). 30 Bombarded by the vitality of the crowd, de Amicis describes the multi-ethnic population in more detail as the synecdoche of the city crowd: There are two never-ending currents of human beings that meet and mingle from sunrise to sunset, presenting a spectacle compared to which the marketplaces of India, the fair of Nizhni Novgorod and the festivals of Peking fade away. To see anything at all, you must choose a small portion of the bridge and fix your eyes on that alone; otherwise in the attempt to see everything one ends up seeing nothing. The crowd goes by in great multicoloured waves, and each new group 29 Edmondo de Amicis describes the Galata Bridge as follows: ―Both shores [of the Golden Horn] are part of Europe, but the bridge may be said to connect Asia to Europe because in Stamboul only the ground you walk on is European -even the few Christian suburbs on the hill above are Asian in character and atmosphere. The Golden Horn, which looks like a river, separates the two worlds like an ocean‖ (18). 30 In Galata Köprüleri Tarihi [History of Galata Bridges], Burcak Evren provides a detailed historical background on the bridge –referred to in the plural due to its turbulent history of fires, renovations and the like. The first Galata Bridge, which was wooden, was built in 1845. At the time there was another bridge, called Unkapani, built in 1836; yet, it is the Galata Bridge which is more frequently referred to in European travelogues, probably because Galata links the more famous quarters (Galata and Eminönü/Sultanahmet) as opposed to the Unkapani Bridge located further north. Crossing the Galata Bridge was charged with a small fee, to be used for the maintenance costs until 1930. When the first Galata Bridge began to have more human traffic than it could accommodate, it was re-built in 1863. Though this issue is still debated among historians, it is most likely the 1863 Bridge that Edmondo de Amicis refers to in his description. It was re- built (using iron instead of wood) again in 1875 and 1912. The bridge was destroyed by fire in 1992 and re- built again. Some other interesting details from the history of the Galata Bridge are as follows: When Sultan Beyazid II‘s (1481-1512) plan to construct a bridge over the Golden Horn was publicized, Leonardo de Vinci showed interest and sent a letter to the Sultan, including a tentative plan he had outlined, which was not favored by the Sultan. De Vinci‘s plan can be seen at Institut France Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. After Leonardo de Vinci, Michelangelo also made an attempt to supervise the bridge‘s construction, which he then decided not to pursue. The actual bridge was built centuries later. For more detailed information, see Jack Deleon, The Bosphorus: A Historical Guide. Istanbul: Intermedia, 1999. 75 represents a new populace. (…) What is quite natural, but appears strange to the newcomer, is that all these different people pass each other without a second glance, like a crowd in London; no one stops a moment, everyone is in a hurry; and you won‘t see one smiling face in a hundred. (19) Being a European traveler who was engrossed in the Istanbul canon, having spent many years reading about the city before his first visit, one would expect from de Amicis to find the ‗languor‘ and ‗laziness‘ that is densely associated with the East in various orientalist texts. Instead, the crowd of Constantinople is ‗like a crowd in London‘ –busy and scurrying as if in a commercial landscape. Inundated with a flood of images, de Amicis‘ disorienting experience is reminiscent of the confrontation with the unknowable multitude in the modernized metropolitan centers of Europe. The device with which he attempts to achieve mastery over the crowd is to fix his gaze at one point, whereby he can observe the flow of people pass by: The most extravagant types, costumes and social classes that can be imagined may there be seen in the space of fifty yards and within ten minutes. Behind a crowd of Turkish porters who run past, bending under enormous burdens, a sedan chair comes along, inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, with an Armenian lady looking out; on either side of it a Bedouin wrapped in a white mantle and a Turk in muslin turban and sky-blue kaftan, beside whom canters a young Greek gentleman followed by his dragoman in an embroidered jacket and a dervish with his tall conical hat and camel-hair tunic, who makes way for the carriage of a European ambassador, preceded by a footman in livery. All this is glimpsed rather than seen. Before you‘ve had time to turn round, you find yourself in the middle of a crowd of Persians, in pyramid-shaped hats of astrakhan fur, who are followed by a Jew in a long yellow coat, open at the sides; a frowzy-headed gypsy woman carrying her child in a sling on her back; a Catholic priest with breviary and staff; while through a confused throng of Greeks, Turks and Armenians a fat eunuch rides on horseback, crying out ‗Make way!‘ in front of a Turkish carriage, painted with flowers and birds, and filled with the ladies of a harem, dressed in green and violet, and wrapped in large white veils; behind the carriage come a Sister of Charity from one of the hospitals in Pera, an African slave carrying a monkey, and a professional storyteller wearing a necromancer‘s robe. (19) 31 31 The description of the carnivalesque crowd of Istanbul‘s multiethnic population is not only confined to passages about the Galata Bridge. It is usually posited as a striking characteristic of the city, encountered in 76 The ‗carnival crowd‘ is decoded by reference to idiosyncratic ways of dressing, with a particular emphasis on the color of the clothing. The crowd‘s kaleidoscope of colors and cacophony of sounds are intoxicating: yet, de Amicis‘ identification of individuals as ―types‖ according to their professional, religious or national identity brings a temporary order to the chaos of this multitude, which finds echoes in the ambiguous narration of Edgar Allan Poe‘s story ‗The Man of the Crowd,‘ a meta-text in Benjamin‘s writings on the flâneur. In the story, the narrator, recently recovered from a serious illness, sits in a London café while observing the passing crowd through the window. He identifies the profession and status of passersby simply by studying their clothes, facial expressions, statures and the like. He seems to be exhilarated by this urban experience: The tribe of clerks was an obvious one and here I discerned two remarkable divisions. There were the junior clerks of flash houses -young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed deskism for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact facsimile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of the gentry; -and this, I believe involves the best definition of the class. The division of the upper clerks of staunch firms, or of the 'steady old fellows,' it was not possible to mistake. These were known by their coats and pantaloons of black or brown, made to sit comfortably, with white cravats and waiscoats, broad solid-looking shoes, and thick hose or gaiters. -They had all slightly bald heads, from which the right ears, long used to penholding, had an odd habit of standing ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- its different parts. In one of her letters, Lady Montagu describes the cacophony of her neighborhood and its vertiginous effects: ― ... in Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Slavonian, Walachian, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Hungarian; and, what is worse, there is ten of these languages spoken in my own family. My grooms are Arabs, my footmen French, English and Germans, my nurse an Armenian, my housemaids Russians, half a dozen other servants Greeks, my steward an Italian, my janissaries Turks, that I live in the perpetual hearing of this medley of sounds, which produces a very extraordinary effect upon the people that are born here. They learn all these languages at the same time and without knowing any of them well enough to write or read in it.‖ (The Turkish Embassy Letters 122) 77 off on end. I observed that they always removed or settled their hats with both hands, and wore watches, with short gold chains of a substantial and ancient pattern. Theirs was the affectation of respectability; -if indeed there be an affectation so honorable. (264) Indeed, the chaos of diversity is exacerbated by people who are in such a hurry that it is necessary ‗to fix your eyes on [a small portion of the bridge] alone‘ – idleness that is so deeply imbricated in the act of flânerie cannot be tolerated. The description of various groups of clerks exemplifies the way Poe‘s narrator breaks down the crowd into neat categories, mainly based on their profession. Both de Amicis‘ passage and Poe‘s story share a meticulous attention to taxonomic details in clothing, physical appearance and countenance. Considering that ethnic identity in Ottoman territory played a major role in determining one‘s profession, de Amicis‘ physiology of the crowd is not a far cry from Poe‘s description. Describing London approximately fifty years earlier than Poe, William Wordsworth partakes in the qualities of urban writing as a fluctuation between chaotic experience and taxonomy of the crowd. In Book Seven of The Prelude, he narrates the crowd of the London streets as a tour guide over-explaining the multitude, in an attempt to alleviate the intoxicating effects of this unfamiliar scene: Now homeward through the thickening hubbub, where See, among less distinguishable shapes, The begging scavenger, with hat in hand; The Italian, as he thrids his way with care, Steadying, far-seen, a frame of images Upon his head; with basket at his breast The Jew; the stately and slow-moving Turk, With freight of slippers piled beneath his arm! Enough; -the mighty concourse I surveyed With no unthinking mind, well pleased to note Among the crowd all specimens of man, Through all the colours which the sun bestows, 78 And every character of form and face: The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south, The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors, Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese, And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns. (239) Before elaborating more on the description of London crowds by Poe and Wordsworth, let us take a look at one more description that brings forth more graphically the alienation and dehumanizing effects of industrialization on urban dwellers. A town such as London, where a man may wander hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing. This colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold; has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames. But the sacrifices which all this has cost become apparent later. After roaming the streets of the capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of the metropolis, one realizes for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their nature, in order to bring about all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city …. The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same interest in qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honor another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. (Engels 36-37) The speed with which the crowd moves in the labyrinthine city described by Poe, the isolation and alienation generated by the clown-like movements that are evoked in his 79 story and interpreted as ‗obvious reference to economic mechanisms‘ in Benjamin‘s reading of Poe‘s text (83) and the ‗blasé attitude‘ 32 that goes as far as not looking at the passers-by in Engels‘ observation of the crowd finds echoes in de Amicis‘ description, which in his words causes a ‗mood of stupefaction‘ (25). Under the unfamiliar prospects of the multi-ethnic crowd of Constantinople lies a familiar view of the city that ultimately seems to be similar. It is the experience of disorientation, which is followed by an inclination to categorize the crowd, that underpins the commonality of metropolitan existence in Europe and elsewhere. De Amicis‘ description strongly evokes the crowds inhabiting an industrialized city –such as London- in which the division of labor separates people into easily recognizable categories as much as it alienates them from each other. One striking difference between the three descriptions of London, however, is the fact that the diversity of the crowd, nevertheless reduced to ‗types‘ in the passages from Poe and Wordsworth, is eliminated to homogeneity in the passage from Engels quoted above. If we take such transformation as the increasing effects of modernization in urban spaces, de Amicis‘ description of Constantinople seems to dwell upon precisely that moment of transition from a picturesque crowd where one can still find distinguishable types to the homogenized crowd, all reduced to the same posture. It is, therefore, marked as the modern moment of witnessing the past and the possible future at the same time. 32 ―Blasé attitude‖ is a term coined by the sociologist Georg Simmel. In ―Metropolis and Mental Life,‖ he underlines the urban experience as the rapidly-changing stimuli of the environment: ―There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the blasé attitude. The blasé attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulation of the nerves. (…) An incapacity thus emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy‖ (Cities and Society Hatt and Reiss ed. 638). 80 As an exemplary case of repetition compulsion, what is repeated over and over in these travelogues is to write about Constantinople as a city between the pre-modern and the modern, which generates a fluctuating feeling of getting lost (as a flȃneur) and re- locating oneself by applying control over space (as a detective figure). Hence, the stereotypical image of Constantinople as a city on the threshold functions as more than a metaphor: the Ottoman capital makes it possible to experience the threshold as much as to stand on the threshold of experience. Walking in the streets of Constantinople, and standing on Galata Bridge, the European traveler revives the paradigmatic modern moment, which is encountered in the descriptions of the London crowd by Poe, Engels, and Wordsworth: it is an oscillating moment between a state of bewilderment and re- orientation of oneself through a method of identifying the distinguishable features of the crowd, which later on leads to a final moment of sudden despair and melancholic mood. That rhythm is characteristically modern. The ‗thickening hubbub,‘ the labyrinthine city in which one ‗might wander for hours‘ is given a recognizable form through which the unknown, gradually grown into a source of anxiety and fear, is suppressed and evaded. Indeed, the transformation of the hustle and bustle of urban life into a comprehensible unit of superficial stereotypes plays a major part in certain modern genres, which, as Benjamin notes, arose out of a desire to subdue the unease caused by the apparent chaos of sense impressions. In ‗The Flȃneur,‘ the central section of ‗Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,‘ Walter Benjamin explicates physiologies as a narrative form that ―investigated the human types that a person taking a look at the marketplace might encounter. From the itinerant street vendor of the boulevards to the dandy in the opera- 81 house foyer, there was not a figure of Paris life that was not sketched by a physiologue. The great flowering of the genre came in the early 1840s –the period that marked the haute école of the feuilleton‖ (67). Symptomatic of social conditions, these short articles published in the newspapers and journals, as Benjamin argues, provide assurance to the reading public ―that everyone could –unencumbered by any factual knowledge –make out the profession, character, background, and lifestyle of passers-by. The physiologies present this ability as a gift which a good fairy lays in the cradle of the big-city dweller‖ (70). 33 Hence, physiologies decipher the chaotic metropolitan environment in an intelligible way that would bring comfort to the unschooled spectators, the urban dwellers, and relieve them of the disquieting effects engendered by the anonymous, elusive crowds with their overwhelming diversity. The city, as narrated by physiognomists, emerges as a ‗secret text,‘ which is ultimately decoded when its inhabitants are rendered knowable as recognizable types. 34 According to Graeme Gilloch, ―Physiognomic reading is for Benjamin a critical enterprise, one which, though 33 In ‗Convolute M‘ on the figure of the flâneur. Walter Benjamin writes that ―The phantasmagoria of the flâneur: to read from the faces the profession, the ancestry, the character‖ (Arcades Project 429). 34 In addition to the characteristics of an urban literary genre, one can note the implicit orientalist perspective of European travelers whose writings might address the anxieties of the metropolitan audience and transform Constantinople, the capital of Europe‘s ambiguous other, into a ‗knowable‘ geography. Although one can imagine de Amicis blending into such a mixed population as an anonymous figure, he still stands detached observing the crowd. In Edmondo de Amicis‘ description of the crowd lies a desire to master it by classifying and grouping it into recognizable categories of race and ethnicity. Considering that the Ottoman government enforced a dress code to distinguish among various ethnic groups of the Empire, one can also see de Amicis‘ efforts as an attempt to penetrate into the local code by testing his book knowledge on the daily crowd. In Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire 1453-1924, Philip Mansel writes that ―Until the nineteenth century, in order to demonstrate Muslim superiority and to foster national rivalries, the Ottoman government enforced distinctions of dress between the different communities. Only Muslims could wear white or green turbans and yellow slippers. Greeks, Armenians and Jews were distinguished respectively by sky blue, dark blue (later red) and yellow hats, and by black, violet and blue slippers‖ (20-21). 82 preoccupied with the external, superficial manifestations of the metropolis, none the less penetrates beneath the facades of things to reveal their true character‖ (Myth and Metropolis 7). The transition from physiologies to detective fiction, therefore, appears to be only a matter of heightened attention on the part of the perceptive urban observer, who is collecting images and social typifications of contemporary society: ―The soothing little remedies that the physiologies offered for sale‖ are no longer in demand –the detective story replaces physiologies as the new narrative form that is still based on the threatening aspects of the urban life; yet is not explicitly engaged with the definition of physiognomic types (―The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,‖ 71). Benjamin points out the detective figure as the heir of the flâneur and argues that ―In the flâneur, the joy of watching prevails over all. It can concentrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective‖ (―The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,‖ 98). Indeed, the curiosity of the European traveler who is constantly intruding into private space (of the harem, of what lies behind women‘s veil, of the seraglio etc.) finds interesting correlations in the figure of the prying detective whose talent is to combine his reading skills of the interior (house or office where crime took place) and exterior (city streets). Similarly, the European flâneur, tramping the streets of Istanbul, looks as if he is trying to decipher a secret code or a mystery that is associated with the city. In both cases, the city emerges as a text that needs to be put in order. Let us bear in mind for now that there exists a thin line between the genre of physiology and detective fiction, from the flâneur as idle stroller to the detective as professional observer –a line which is already crossed in European metropolitan centers and re-inserted in Constantinople. 83 The move from the flȃneur to the detective can be observed in the final melancholic turn of all the four narratives by de Amicis, Poe, Wordsworth and Engels. The sudden despairing mood, which follows the six-page description of Galata Bridge in de Amicis‘ narrative, surprises the reader with the abrupt change in the tone of the confident, all-knowing narrator. Yet, such a melancholic conclusion resonates with Engels‘ lamenting commentary quoted above; hence, encompassing the uncanny effects of modernity on crowds both in Constantinople and in London: The spectacle should be a cheerful one, but it is not. Once your initial astonishment is over, the festive colours fade; it is no longer a grand carnival procession passing by, but humanity itself with all its miseries and follies, with all the infinite discord of its beliefs and its laws; it is a pilgrimage of debased peoples and fallen races; an immensity of suffering to be helped, of shame to be purged, of chains to be broken; an accumulation of tremendous problems written in characters of blood, which can only be solved by the shedding of blood; the sense of vast and utter disorder is depressing. And then curiosity is blunted rather than assuaged by this endless variety of strange objects. What mysterious changes occur in the human soul! Not a quarter of an hour had gone by since my arrival on the bridge when I found myself absent-mindedly leaning on the parapet scribbling with my pencil upon a beam and thinking to myself, between two yawns, that there was some truth in Madame de Stael‘s famous assertion: ‗Travelling is the most melancholy of pleasures.‘ (23-24). 35 35 Edmondo de Amicis‘ description of the crowd over the Galata Bridge echoes many other travelers‘ accounts of the same scene, contributing to the citational aspect of Istanbul canon. Despite his different national and historical background, Francis Marion Crawford describes Galata Bridge in terms very similar to those of de Amicis: ―There is more on Galata Bridge than appears at first sight. It is a sort of combination in itself of the Venetian Rialto and of the Florentine Ponte Vecchio. It is built on floating pontoons, having a draw in the middle which is only opened in the night, and it consists practically of three parts –a highway for foot-passengers and carriages, a narrow street of little shops and coffee-houses, and a series of steamboat piers. I have computed roughly that, taking the average of the year, twenty-eight thousand persons cross Galata Bridge every day, a calculation which includes, of course, all the passengers for the Scutari and the Bosphorus ferries who pay toll in order to reach the steamers. There is a quite spot unknown to most Europeans, where one may sit for hours in undisturbed enjoyment of coffee and cigarettes, and watch the passengers on the bridge and the arrivals and departures at one of the piers, besides observing the manners and customs of the Galata Kaikjis and the Hamals who congregate at the landing east of the bridge on the Galata side. This delightful spot is the corner of the first coffee-house on the left going toward Stamboul. It has a large, airy, and perfectly clean room, with windows on three sides through which the wind blows perpetually even on the hottest days. Take your seat in the corner nearest the bridge and nearest to Galata, order your cup of coffee –‗shekerli,‘ with sugar, or ‗sade‘ without –light your cigarette, and begin your observations. The scene is dazzling and kaleidoscopic in its variety of color and 84 Indeed, if the social reality of Constantinople is crystallized in miniature over the Bridge, the overall description of de Amicis reveals the quintessential experiences of the modern city as the source of enchantment and disappointment at the same time. It is the ‗modern anesthesia‘ to experience the unexpected feeling of boredom (‗between two yawns‘), and indifference, as a result of being exposed to a dizzying array of stimuli: the transition is from surprise –a consequence of the confrontation with the unfamiliar,– to distraction as a result of the repetition of the familiar. 36 After what now seem to be an ostentatious ‗mastery‘ of the crowd, the flâneur figure feels disabled for a mysterious reason. The gradual lack of control over the disturbingly heterogeneous crowd, the feeling of being overwhelmed by the presence of something that disables the individual, is a recurrent image in both Engels and de Amicis‘ concluding remarks on the city crowd. The scurrying, elusive urban crowd is the ultimate embodiment of the modern –the ephemeral, the momentary, and the unpredictable. It is also a means through which de Amicis can claim to see ‗humanity‘ in its infinity: its past wasted away in misery and its ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- quick motion‖ (723). Sitting in a coffee-house and observing the crowd, Crawford is reminiscent of Poe‘s narrator, who starts off confidently and ends with a more confusing mind: ―But as you sit by the open window of the coffee house, you have little time for analyzing the features or the dress of the horrifying crowd. What you see is a magnificent, inextricable confusion of moving light and sun and shade and color, a wild and almost dream-like confusion of Eastern and Western life, a startling and almost horrible contrast of magnificence and squalor; the splendid, gold-lace bedizened adjutant….‖ (725). Note the self-indulgent manner turn into a panic-ridden approach –calling the crowd ‗horrifying‘ seems to be describing the whole experience rather than pointing to any particular detail being observed. 36 The city as heaven and the city as hell is a recurrent theme in Baudelaire‘s poetry. As Gilloch comments, ―What Benjamin may have found most significant in the allegorical poetics of Baudelaire was the articulation of his own ambiguous response to the modern metropolis, his own fluctuation between adoration and detestation. The interplay between the city as bestial and the city as beautiful was both the essential theme of, and the very source of inspiration for, Baudelaire‘s poetry. Its examination constitutes the zenith of the dilemma which Benjamin first articulates in his essay on Naples in 1924. For each in different ways, Paris was both Heaven and Hell, and for each, the only possible response was melancholy‖ (Myth and Metropolis 139). 85 future that will be spent with suffering. Suddenly, the narrator‘s categorization loses ground as he observes that the ‗utter disorder is depressing.‖ Both Wordsworth and Poe, quoted below, have similar melancholic conclusions to their physiologies of London: How oft, amid those overflowing streets, Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said Unto myself, ‗The face of every one That passes by me is a mystery! (259) What say you, then, To times, when half the city shall break out Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear? To executions, to a street on fire, Mobs, riots, or rejoicings? (…) …….. What a shock For eyes and ears! What anarchy and din, Barbarian and infernal, -a phantasma, Monstrous in colour, motion, shape, sight, sound! Below, the open space, through every nook Of the wide area, twinkles, is alive With heads…. (263). (…) Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City herself To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity, by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no end- Oppression, under which even highest minds Must labour, whence the strongest are not free. (265) Edgar Allan Poe‘s story, on the other hand, proceeds as a long physiognomy of random characters until the narrator catches sight of a mysterious old man, whom he is unable to categorize in the same manner. Frustrated by his inability to group this mysterious man into one of his discrete types, the narrator rushes out of the café to follow 86 the old man, suggestively posited as ‗the man of the crowd‘. 37 As Poe‘s narrator ventures into the street, his ostentatious mastery is challenged by the confusing details of the scene around him as he follows the old man, who seems to have surrendered himself to the swarming crowd. The story ends with the persistent anonymity of the old man; hence, the failure of the narrator to ‗master‘ the crowd. The concluding sentence of the story is a cryptic quotation in German, ‗er lasst sich nicht lesen‘ (‗it does not permit itself to be read‘), which takes the reader back to the beginning where the same quote is referenced: the structure of the story is a fatal repetition of the same. The helplessness associated with the act of repetition recounted in Freud‘s anecdote correlates with the frustration of Poe‘s narrator who cannot finalize his reading of the city: the gap caused by the unintelligible old man remains even at the end. The open ending of the story gestures to a new beginning. As Dana Brand points out, ―‗The Man of the Crowd‘ implies that an urban observer is needed who can read and in some sense master what the flȃneur cannot. It may also imply that a literary approach to the city is needed that will not deny the phenomenological qualities of urban life and will therefore be able to exploit the fascination of terrifying and illegible cities‖ (―From the flȃneur to the detective‖ 225). That literary approach belongs to the genre of detective fiction. 37 In the narrator‘s act of shadowing the man of the crowd, one can see the emergence of detective figure, as suggested by Walter Benjamin and various other scholars. The quotation from Poe‘s text is an appropriate example to demonstrate the thin line that exists between the figure of the flâneur and the detective, which will be an important assertion in the following chapters. Commenting on Poe‘s story, Tom Gunning argues that ―As the narrator is drawn from his point of observation into a more elusive attempt to decode city types, the urban landscape becomes a site of mystery that must be penetrated to be deciphered. The unclassifiable figure impels the narrator into a detective-like act of shadowing. Following the stranger, he tries to remain unnoticed […] while anxiously keeping his quarry in clear view‖ (Tom Gunning Wide Angle 27). 87 Let us now go back to the passage, quoted earlier, in which de Amicis describes the crowd over the Galata Bridge, and consider it in conjunction with the concluding section of the same text. In de Amicis‘ initial description of the crowd lies a desire to master it by classifying and grouping it into recognizable categories of race and ethnicity, which is dissolved by the realization of the crowd‘s ‗unreadability.‘ If we consider de Amicis‘ experience on the bridge as that of the flâneur, what exactly does this experience reveal about the nature of flânerie and its connection to modernity? In ‗The Painter of Modern Life,‘ Charles Baudelaire points out the relationship between the flâneur and modernity in a straightforward way: ‗He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‗modernity‘: for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind‖ (12). The relationship between the flâneur and the experience of modernity takes place in a far more circuitous way over the rhapsodic view of Galata Bridge: de Amicis, as the European flâneur in a non-western space, runs into ‗modernity‘ when he is least expecting it. One could identify the most revealing moment for de Amicis as the realization of his inability to control the crowd. This marks the moment in which his position as an idle stroller surrendering himself to the crowd is transformed into one of detached observer monitoring the crowd. In other words, it is the modern attempt to control that unleashes the concurrent impossibility of representational mastery, and takes the form of the uncanny. Hence, that moment of transition in de Amicis signifies a double loss: 1) that the condition of flânerie, already eliminated in Europe, is gradually rendered impossible even in the non-western space of Constantinople which is being rapidly modernized, 2) 88 that the condition of flânerie, at its core, is impossible since every act of flânerie is destined to end with a contrasting way of monitoring, questioning, mapping out the ‗gaze‘ that belongs to the quasi-detective mode of pinpointing types. The conditions of modernity facilitate the possibilities of flânerie, while they simultaneously remove these possibilities from the cityscape. It is the crowds that act as a driving force for the flâneur; yet their alienating mechanism that does not accommodate anything functional but kills the idle stroller. If, as Benjamin notes, ―The idleness of the flâneur is a demonstration against the division of labor,‖ the act of flânerie, lacking assigned ‗labor‘, is inevitably subject to diminution and disintegration under changing societal conditions (Arcades Project 427). 38 The following chapter will look at the effects of those changing societal conditions in twentieth-century post-Ottoman Istanbul, in which modernization efforts threaten the possibilities of maintaining the city‘s threshold experience. Faced with the disintegration of the legendary Constantinople, the contemporary travelers transform the city into a site of nostalgia. 38 In ―The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,‖ Benjamin writes that ―[The flâneur] goes his leisurely way as a personality; in this manner he protests against the division of labor which makes people into specialists. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them‖ (Charles Baudelaire 84). 89 CHAPTER III: The Search for the Lost City and the Lost Text: Self-Reflections of the Modern Traveler in Post-Ottoman Istanbul John Dos Passos‘ travel notes, taken during his trip on the Orient Express in 1921, include his reflections on the Ottoman capital as a city in a state of decay and civil unrest. The city‘s mythical significance and unrivaled imperial centrality is now challenged by Ankara, the future capital of the Turkish Republic. Visiting Istanbul and other major cities in the region, during the transitional period from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the foundation of the secular republican nation-state at the turn of the century, John Dos Passos is confronted with hostile remarks by six Turkish army doctors, who regard him as an intruder upon the Turkish independence war, conducted from Ankara: ‗All we want is to be left alone and reorganize our country in peace. If you believed in the rights of small nations why did you let the British set the Greeks on us? You think the Turk is an old man and sick, smoking a narghile. Perhaps we are old men and sick men, but originally we were nomads. We are sober and understand how to fight. If necessary we will become nomads again. If the Allies drive us out of Constantinople, very good. It is a city of misery and decay. We will make Angora [Ankara] our capital. We were not made to live in cities. Our life is in the fields and on the plains. If they drive us out of Angora we will go back to the great plains of central Asia, where we came from. Tell that to your high commissioners and your Meester Veelson (Mr. Wilson). You have been to Stamboul. Did you see any Turks there? Only old people, beggars, Armenians, and Jews, riffraff. The Turks are all in Angora with Mustapha Kemal‘ (Orient Express 29-30). 90 Constantinople‘s gradual loss of its grandeur and subsequent marginalization by Ankara as its alter-ego, after the foundation of the republic, inevitably induces a change in the twentieth-century literary representations of the city. As an exemplary case of modern travelogues about Istanbul, the present chapter examines works by two authors, Philip Glazebrook and Joseph Brodsky, both of whom visited the city in the early 1980s. The fourth chapter, on the other hand, examines contemporary western detective fiction, as an emerging literary canon on the city to replace the genre of travelogue, and focuses on the detective series set in Istanbul by two English writers, Barbara Nadel and Jason Goodwin. I conclude, in the last chapter, with an analysis of examples from contemporary Turkish fiction by Orhan Pamuk, Nazlı Eray and Oya Baydar. The main question each of these three chapters explores, is how both the city‘s actual and literary past is historicized by local and western writers, in identical and different ways. Istanbul, in the contemporary period, has become a popular site for crime fiction, including spy novels, detective stories, thrillers and the like. As Kamil Aydın points out, Turkey in general continued to supply an exotic setting during the twentieth century, in which major events such as the defeat of Ottomans together with the German Empire in the World War I, the subsequent Independence War followed by the foundation of the Turkish Republic and a series of reforms conducted by the founder and first president Kemal Atatürk, and Turkey‘s neutrality in World War II, all provided grounds for fictional accounts of espionage and inspired stereotypical representations of Turkey and Turks such as one finds in previous centuries (Images of Turkey in Western Literature 91 31). 39 Thus, it is crucial to consider twentieth-century renditions not as a distinct phenomenon but as products of a continuous literary process, while it is also significant that a great majority of these works cannot comfortably be grouped in the same category as nineteenth-century travelogues. The purpose of Ernest Hemingway‘s visit to Istanbul in the early 1920s, for instance, is to act as a foreign correspondent for The Toronto Daily Star and report on the Greco-Turkish war. 40 Works published in the 50s and 60s by authors such as Ian Fleming and Eric Ambler, on the other hand, combine various generic features of the thriller, spy and suspense novels so that Turkey in general emerges as an exotic locale where all kinds of intrigue, including political espionage, illegal drug- trafficking, kidnapping and the like take place. In some other works, Istanbul plays a minor, yet still exotic role, as in Graham Greene‘s Stamboul Train (1932), in which the city is no more than a destination –the final point where decadence, suggested all throughout the journey in Europe, reaches its ultimate point when the protagonist, the low-esteemed Jewish character, now comfortable in this oriental city, is ready to propose marriage to the cousin of the gentleman he is conducting business with, provided that the 39 At another point in the text, Kamil Aydın argues that, ―What can be concluded from the travel writings and thrillers studied in the present thesis is the difficulty of determining a distinct range of images totally peculiar to the twentieth century divorced from the historical past of Turkey. In other words, despite the works intended to examine twentieth century perceptions of Turkey in the west by analysing the texts of various thrillers and travel accounts, it can be established that, with a few exceptions, it is almost impossible to discuss the prevalent images completely dissociated from early religious and historical stereotypes of Turks, which can be traced back to the Crusades. ‗The traditional Eurocentric attitude towards the Turk began then, when the Pope called for the First Crusade to protect the Christian Byzantine Empire. It was then that the name Turk became a pejorative term meaning infidel, savage‘‖ (1). 40 Even though Hemingway‘s account is not a travelogue in the strict sense, –whether consciously or unconsciously– he still uses many of the clichés one encounters in nineteenth-century travelogues, among which disappointment with the city is a recurrent theme: ―From all I had ever seen in the movies Stamboul ought to have been white and glistening and sinister. Instead the houses look like Heath Robinson drawings dry as tinder, the colour of old weather-beaten fence rails, and filled with the little windows. Scattered through the town rise minarets. They look like dirty, white candles sticking up for no apparent reason‖ (qtd. in Aydın http://tripod.com/~warlight/KAMIL/14.html#14#14). 92 latter agrees to sign a profitable contract with him. Even though these wide-ranging texts –spy novels, thrillers, and war reports produced around the first half of the twentieth century– continued to perpetuate stereotypical representations of the city in accordance with orientalist imagery, they lacked the kind of self-reflectiveness and retrospective, self-analytical gaze one finds in European travelers‘, a.k.a. flȃneurs‘, narrations of the city. The 1980s, however, marks a significant period worldwide, when progress and the experience of modernity start to be more critically scrutinized, with a nostalgic attitude for the unrecoverable past. Let us take a long digression at this point to provide a summary of Istanbul‘s twentieth-century history, and then consider the various ways in which the modern traveler copes with the changing significance of the city. At the turn of the century, Constantinople was the ‗centre‘ of a disintegrating empire. Joining forces with Germany during the World War I accelerated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. During the post-war period, the Ottoman capital was occupied by the European countries, which shared among themselves what was left of the ‗sick man‘ of Europe. Vahdettin, the Ottoman sultan and the caliphate, was ready to comply with the occupying powers and accept the English mandate. The independence war (1919-1922), which was pioneered by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an army officer during the First World War and the future founder of the Republic, should therefore be seen as a resurgent movement not only against the Allies, but also against the Ottoman Sultan residing in Istanbul. Mustafa Kemal and his associates speedily began to organize the country, based on key locations in major Anatolian towns –away from Istanbul. By early 1920, Atatürk‘s aim became explicit: the foundation of a new Turkish state in the regions where Muslim 93 Ottomans were in the majority. To convince populations to give up their loyalty to the sultan/caliphate became as challenging as fighting the Allied forces on many fronts. It is in such circumstances that Atatürk encouraged patriotism and fought with ‗enemies‘ both inside and outside. Lasting for three years, the Independence War ended in 1922, followed by the foundation of the Republic (1923) and the enforcement of a series of reforms, which would transform the multiethnic Ottoman Empire to a secular republican nation-state in a very short time span. 41 The reforms, imposed on the people, attempted to modernize the country and its citizens by mimicking western cultures and customs. In his criticism of the state-tradition in Turkish modernization, Çaglar Keyder, a well-known sociologist and scholar, points to a crucial distinction that was, willingly or unwillingly, ignored by the reformers. ―The crucial difference between modernization-from-above and modernization as a self-generating societal process is that the modernizers wield state power and are agents with their own interests. For this reason, even if they profess a project of Westernization, they are not necessarily committed to all the dimensions of modernity‖ (Keyder 39). According to Keyder, the importance of the state-tradition in 41 Some of these reforms are as follows: The abolition of the caliphate (1923); prohibition of the fez and any attire remotely connected to Islam in favor of the hat and the Western suit (1925); replacement of Islamic law with the Swiss civil code, Mussolini‘s penal code and the German commercial code; closing down of religious tombs and dervish meeting places (1926); establishment of the Latin alphabet and launching a literacy campaign (1928); the ‗Surname‘ Act (1934); the change of Islamic Sabbath to Sunday (1935) (Pope 62); the adoption of the Gregorian calendar; creation of a modern republican state structure with a constitution, an elected parliament and other western-type institutions; brief experiments with a multi-party system; building of a new capital in Ankara (Landou xii). About the ‗hat‘ reform Mustafa Kemal claims that the fez ‗sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, and fanaticism and hatred of progress and civilization‖ (qtd. in Kasaba 25). As Kasaba notes, Mustafa Kemal refers to civilization almost as a metaphysical force, a force to be worshipped: ―It is futile to try to resist the thunderous advance of civilization, for it has no pity on those who are ignorant or rebellious. The sublime force of civilization pierces mountains, crosses the skies, enlightens and explores everything from the smallest particle of dust to stars‖ (qtd. in Kasaba 26). 94 Turkey limited the scope of modernity. 42 The close connection between religion, state- formation and modernity also prevented the development of modern citizenship. According to Keyder, ―a citizenship constituted foundationally around universally applicable civil rights never developed. Instead, authoritarian nationalism emphasized unity and collective purpose. The nation was supposed to express a homogeneity deriving from ethnic unity, and this unity would be expressed in a single voice‖ (42). The single Turkish identity came to mean unity in race and religion. Modern Turkish identity has been a contested issue ever since the Republic was founded in 1923. Born out of the vestiges of the late Ottoman Empire, the newly-founded state claimed to cut its ties with its ‗past‘ –a past that has been coming back with a vengeance over the past decades. Despite the series of reforms that took place between 1922 and 1935, the Ottoman past still haunts modern Turkey. Today, on the international scene, Turkey is mostly renowned for claiming to be an Islamist democracy, seeking to negotiate past and present, tradition and modernity, as a third world country. Despite the ambiguity over the question of belonging (which will probably not terminate even if Turkey joins the European Union), one thing remains certain: twentieth-century Turkish history has advanced towards the west. 43 Taking into consideration that the Turkish 42 In order to emphasize the significance of the state-tradition, Ayşe Kadıoğlu recounts that ―On an ordinary day in 1986, a group of Turkish stage actors dressed in Nazi (SS) uniforms asked randomly the people walking in the streets of Istanbul to show their identity cards. Interestingly, they had employed a mixed language –semi German and semi Turkish –in approaching these people and asked for ‗kimlik (ID in turkish) bitte!‘. What was more interesting was that the majority of the people who were approached by these actors in SS uniforms showed their identity cards without questioning any part of the staged act. The whole event was meant to be humorous, yet it also revealed the unquestioned authority of anybody dressed in a uniform in a country with a strong state tradition‖ (177). 43 Although the west had meant Europe for the Ottomans, today it has a broader meaning which is usually related to ‗progress‘, ‗civilization‘ etc. and which can also contain countries such as the US and Japan. 95 modernization project produced a visibly (present) modernized geography, a major challenge for modern travelers is to find the uncanny in the changing landscape of the city, which increasingly and too familiarly starts to look like home. That is when Istanbul loses its ‗unique‘ status within the orientalist tradition. The following arguments presented in relation to contemporary western fiction on Istanbul could, therefore, be taken as analogous with various other postcolonial or postmodern contexts. The ‗unique‘ feature of the city, which is eradicated with the passage of time, is a haunting presence in the contemporary accounts; yet, the present city figures only as a means to reflect upon loss in more general terms. As opposed to using a widespread choice of texts from the nineteenth century, my particular interest in the way nostalgia for the Ottoman past is reflected in contemporary accounts –substituted with anti-nostalgic, and melancholic approaches in some texts, – necessitates a close examination of a more condensed historical period at the end of twentieth century, when the authors‘ self-conscious intertextuality and the longing for a local past coincides with a more general framework of nostalgia within the postmodern condition. In continuity with the previous chapters‘ argument that the nineteenth-century European traveler recognized the haunting presence of the uncanny in Constantinople as part of the modern condition, these chapters on contemporary narratives assert that (modern) nostalgia –as the dominant sentiment in contemporary writings on Istanbul– is related to a wider phenomenon, which points to the way the city is actually a projection of something larger than itself. Istanbul, in contemporary narratives, evokes loss. Each of the remaining chapters attempts to identify loss within the local spatio-temporal setting, 96 demonstrate how that loss resonates with a larger context of one‘s historical condition at the end of twentieth century, and point out the various ways in which the authors build up on the remains of that loss. Both local and western contemporary texts are saturated with an obsessive search for a ‗lost text,‘ which functions as a structural correlation to the search for loss, inscribed within the cityscape. The loss of the Ottoman experience allows Glazebrook to fabricate a fictitious heroic past in which Victorian self-certainty manifests itself in an oriental setting, while it enables Brodsky to evoke the pre-Ottoman Byzantine past. Indeed, neither of the travelers seems to be interested in the actual cityscape: despite acknowledging the influence of the previous travelers, they do not pose as the descendents of the European flȃneur who can draw on the walking experience in the streets. ―I‘m not particularly interested in the politics of present-day Turkey, or in what happened to Atatürk, whose portrait adorns the greasy walls of every last coffeehouse as well as the Turkish lira, unconvertible and representing an unreal form of payment for real labor. I came to Istanbul to look at the past, not at the future –since the latter doesn‘t exist here: whatever there was of it has gone north as well,‖ writes Brodsky at the end of his article (444). The engagement with the past in modern travelogues is, therefore, remarkably self-reflective, increasingly alienating them from the existent city. Mourning for the loss of Constantinople is not a longing for a specific location, but a different time –the age of ‗heros‘ and ancient history. In her pioneering work on the theory of nostalgia, Svetlana Boym argues that At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time –the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into 97 private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the modern condition. (Boym xv) 44 If nostalgia is a reconfiguration of one‘s past, which offers relief from the alienating present, then the modern traveler‘s nostalgia in Istanbul is a search for the restoration of the premodern world, which is eradicated as a result of modernization projects. In both cases, it is the search itself, rather than the retrieval of the object of nostalgia –which in Boym‘s terms, ‗no longer exists or has never existed‘ in the first place– that generates the homely effect. Drawing on Boym‘s distinction between different modes of nostalgia, the following sections will examine the self-reflections of Glazebrook and Brodsky, with a particular emphasis on the former‘s reliance on ‗restorative nostalgia‘ and the latter‘s ‗reflective nostalgia.‘ i) Nostalgia for the Modern: Restoration of the „Heroic‟ Victorian Self in Philip Glazebrook‟s Journey to Kars In Journey to Kars: Modern Traveller in the Ottoman Lands, the English traveler / journalist / novelist Philip Glazebrook sets out on a journey, in the early 1980s, to Turkey at a time when the country is under martial law. Being on a ‗quest‘ to answer an initially formulated question, Glazebrook travels through Greece and Asia Minor as far as the eastern frontier with Russia, and then back to Istanbul and the Balkan capitals: 44 In Turkish Reflections, Mary Lee Settle describes her experience in Istanbul in terms similar to Boym‘s identification of nostalgia: ―But when I turned away from the crowds in the main streets, there were the secret spaces: chickens wandering the grounds of mosques, vegetable gardens, flowers and dogs, and always the children who said hello-good-bye. I stopped for a smiling crowd of children in a crocodile, going to school. There are still, as there always have been, hundreds of neighborhoods that are like villages, with the same politeness, the same quietness, that I found farther east in Anatolia. Because of these areas of simplicity, Istanbul has another quality that very few large cities have. It has afternoons, long lazy ones like when I was a child. On an afternoon like that I walked with a friend along the wall of Theodosius at the extreme eastern end of the old city‖ (51). 98 I meant to meet them again and again, between here and Turkey‘s eastern frontier with Russia, where I intended to go, and to understand, if possible –by seeing some of the scenes they travelled through –something of what was in their minds; why they came, what they wanted of the East, who they thought in their hearts they really were, these Englishmen of the middle years of the nineteenth century, who travelled restlessly about the realms of Sultan and Shah in a spirit of adventure which seemed to be inherited, or imitated, from the knights-errant of Malory and Tennyson. (…) I formulated to myself this question: ‗What was the impulse which drove middle-class Victorians to leave the country they loved so chauvinistically, and the company of the race they considered God‘s last word in breeding, to travel in discomfort, danger, illness, filth and misery amongst Asiatics whose morals and habits they despised, in lands which at best, reminded them of Scotland?‘ (8-9) By the end of his journey, Glazebrook re-visits the question he had posited at the beginning and concludes that for the Victorians, traveling in the East in general and the Ottoman lands in particular was not motivated by a desire to experience ―contemporary Eastern life or character,‖ but to ―research into the classical or biblical past of these countries, not their present; and research into his own character and capabilities seen in relief against a background which has passed away in Europe‖ (86). According to Glazebrook, as was reiterated multiple times throughout the first chapter, the city‘s potentially ‗western‘ history of the classical or biblical pasts, together with its pre- modern face, which is already bygone in Europe, appeals to the Victorian travelers. He asserts that Many visitors to Turkey at all times have been concerned (as I am) to feel as strongly as possible the alienness of the place, not its familiarity. It is to feel the outlandishness of abroad that I leave home –to feel the full strength of its distinctive foreign character, and to come to terms with that. So I value the 99 barriers I come upon which mark off my home ground from foreign territory. (…) I grow to like Istanbul more and more as the first hot breath of my resentment and perplexity clears off the pane, and allows me to look distinctly at the strange city I see. (183) Similar to his Victorian predecessors, the contemporary traveler, one of whom is Philip Glazebrook, aims to earn a ‗knightly character‘ and find the selfhood he is in search for by associating himself with the previous English travelers in the East who have been through hardships and the ‗alienness of the place‘ in order to prove their chivalric qualities. If travelling in post-Ottoman lands for Glazebrook is simultaneously a journey into the British past, when the journey to the Orient, particularly to the Ottoman Empire, was an extension of the Eastern myth, then ‗the search for something else‘ is one‘s own history, which is destined to be continuously delayed, or substituted by yet another search for one‘s own history as carried out by the author‘s Victorian predecessors. That is the ultimate point of the textual uncanny, in which the actual experience of travel no longer carries priority within the narrative since what passes from one text to the next is a continuous search for one‘s past elsewhere. While for Glazebrook, ―It was Turkey‘s past that I was interested in –the ‗past‘ which was the contemporary scene to nineteenth- century travelers‖ (86), the Victorian gentleman is involved with his own past of chivalry: 45 45 Glazebrook is not really interested in the contemporary scene of Istanbul –what he is looking for is to see the past as it is revealed in the present. The following quote is appropriate in terms of demonstrating the way in which Glazebrook is interested in the moment Layard witnessed as opposed to the moment he is presently witnessing: ―At this very gate of Constantinople where I now stood had ended a ride with the Tatars which Layard made (in faster time, so he claimed, than Townley) from Belgrade: ‗I reached Constantinople before dawn,‘ he says, ‗and as some time was yet to elapse before the Adrianople gate would be opened –the gates of Stamboul were then closed between sunset and sunrise –I dismounted, and lying on the ground, slept until I could enter the city.‘ I climbed on to the ruinous walls and hollow towers 100 It occurred to me that it was partly this threatened scenery - the feeling that the Middle Ages had not ended - which attracted adventurous young Englishmen, their minds influenced by the Gothick revival and the rage for Chivalry, to travel in the East. Here were cruel pashas, wild horsemen armed with lance and sword, inhuman tortures, stone castles guarding river-crossings –all the trappings of Romance through which the Knights-errant of Scott and Southey and Tennyson rode so bravely. (47) Hence, traveling in post-Ottoman lands means more than the actual experience; it has symbolic significance in enabling the contemporary traveler to satisfy his/her cultural nostalgia for the remains of western civilization that are still accessible in Turkey. Consequently, the genre of the Eastern travelogue turns into a utopia in which the ultimate goal is to find or re-confirm one‘s (still ‗heroic‘) identity. The city Glazebrook visits is no longer the old capital that his predecessors experienced: He does not meet the same difficulties because recent technological developments, in addition to Turkish hospitality, facilitate his journey. In fact, he feels physically and emotionally quite at home at the Pera Palas Hotel where he stays during his sojourn in Istanbul: So, at the Pera Palas, once behind your mahogany door off the long dim corridor, what you have is the bedroom of a Victorian country house with an Edwardian bathroom added to it. When the porter had gone, leaving me master of solemn wardrobes and chests of drawers, of plush curtains and Turkey rug, of broad white bed and comfortable white space in the bathroom, peace entered my soul. Home at last! (176) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- beside the gate, and looked down on the spot where he must have slept. It isn‘t so much the extent of the modern Istanbul beyond the walls which surprises me, as the vast extent of the old city within the walls. When the size of, say, London in the early nineteenth century is considered, Constantinople must have seemed a megapolis to travellers‖ (Glazebrook 185-186). 101 Indeed, the ‗naturally‘ essential difference between Istanbul and the English home collapses as the author confesses his artificial attempt to maintain the binary opposition. Accordingly, not knowing the native tongue, Turkish, is an advantage to keeping Istanbul unhomely, unfriendly and foreign: ―No doubt if I spoke Turkish I would discover a thing or two from people like [the stallkeeper]; but if I spoke Turkish would I then be able to maintain my view of Turkey as mysterious and hostile territory, which is the tint most useful to my imagination in the task of resurrecting the Turkey of Ottoman rule?‖ (153). The challenge that Glazebrook faces is to find ways to see the modernizing face of the city still as un-European / un-English. This becomes indeed a difficult task, especially since the ―severe dark architecture shutting out the sky‖ (177), among other details, looks intriguingly European at the end of twentieth century. Despite his own observations and the physical outlook of the actual city, by the end of his travelogue, Glazebrook still asserts his hope that Turkey and Turks will remain as foreign as possible. On the train from Istanbul to Sofia, he meets an old man standing with his donkey in the fields. Glazebrook writes that I recognized in him a European –mon frere, mon semblable. I was home from Asia. (…) Neither NATO, nor the EEC, not the self-proclaimed Europeanization of Ataturk, could ever make a Turk mon frere, mon semblable. Nor did I want him to be. From Turkey and the Turks I wanted something else, perhaps the antithesis of the ‗homeliness‘ of Europe. (196-197) Yet, his expectation is conspicuously violated within his own text, in which the narrative eradicates the desired antithetical effect of the city. Glazebrook is nostalgic about the loss of a city which used to produce heroes; yet, it is dubious whether travel to Istanbul enhanced the heroic status of the travelers in the 102 past. As the first two chapters illustrate, travelers in the city, far from feeling heroic, went through an unsettling experience in the nineteenth century. By mourning for the loss of a certain sense of heroism, which did not exist in the first place, Glazebrook himself creates the object of his search. 46 Moreover, in the absence of any possibilities for heroism in the contemporary city, he travels further back into ancient history –to pre-Ottoman times. ―I suspect that Turkey has always looked as though it would have been perfectly wonderful if you‘d come twenty years ago,‖ writes Glazebrook in order to underline the ‗mis- preparation‘ for what really exists (151-152). That is how he ―expected to arrive in Istanbul where [he] had imagined Constantinople‖ (171). Being satisfied with neither the present Istanbul nor the imagined Constantinople, Glazebrook refers to an alternative time as a means to create the heroic self he is looking for. The Archeological Museum, the least ‗Ottoman‘ site, is surprisingly presented as the most and only appealing site for Glazebrook during his visit in Istanbul. The museum‘s ‗unmodern‘ appearance presents the familiarity of ‗Marcus Aurelius‘ –Greek culture on display is readily assumed to belong ‗naturally‘ to European civilization: ―The race of Osman, after all, is not descended by blood or by culture from the Greeks, as Europeans are, so it isn‘t surprising that Turks don‘t instinctively revere classical 46 As Zizek argues, ―The mistake of the melancholic, however, is not simply to assert that something resists symbolic ‗sublation‘ but, rather, to locate this resistance in a positively existing, albeit lost, object. In Kant‘s terms, the melancholic is guilty of committing a kind of ‗paralogism of the pure capacity to desire‘, which lies in the confusion between loss and lack: in so far as the object-cause of desire is originally, in a constitutive way, lacking, melancholy interprets this lack as a loss, as if the object lacking were once possessed and then lost. In short, what melancholy obfuscates is the fact that the object is lacking from the very beginning, that its emergence coincides with its lack, that this object is nothing but the positivization of a void/lack, a purely anamorphic entity which does not exist ‗in itself.‘ The paradox, of course, is that this deceitful translation of lack into loss enables us to assert our possession of the object: what we never possessed can also never be lost, so the melancholic, in his unconditional fixation on the lost object, in a way possesses it in its very loss‖ (143). 103 remains‖ (191). 47 As he strolls around the museum, Glazebrook looks at the ‗fine busts‘ of Marcus Aurelius and concludes that ―He is indeed a model for the Victorian gentleman‖ (190). That look of ‗amused irony‘ is not to be found in the Christian icons, on which the most distinguishable expression is that of humility, which is not what the author would like to associate with his Victorian predecessors (189). Glazebrook‘s preference for the Greek mythology displayed in the Archeological Museum over what he calls the ‗Christian humility‘ that he observes on the mosaics inside the church of St. Saviour in Chora, draws an analogy between the Victorian gentleman and his pagan ancestry. One of the significant points of Istanbul for the contemporary traveler is a certain ‗freedom of choice‘ that is inadvertently provided in an unfamiliar setting/belief system for the western world, so that the traveler is able to choose what he feels to be the most familiar, or simply the most to his own liking. Hence, the parallel he draws between Marcus Aurelius and the Victorian gentleman helps Glazebrook to restore the lost heroism –which is even more visible when presented in a background that is remarkably un-European with its chilly, dusty and damp atmosphere, not concerned about showmanship except to display ‗marbles‘ haphazardly brought together, under a gloomy lightning and sheltered in a building that ‗appears to be 47 The desire to link contemporary England to a heroic ancient world has a long history, as Glazebrook explains at the beginning of his book: ―Such lineage, such continuity linking antiquity with modern time, cannot be understood in England. Norman castles arise from the bare soil. No statues from ancient times stand in their courtyards. For this reason Lord Carlisle was quite wrong to compare Rhodes with Kenilworth, but maybe he betrayed in doing so the Englishman‘s desire, at the zenith of British power, to connect himself and his empire by direct descent with those that had gone before in ancient times. And long before Britain was a mighty power there was felt a need to provide brave deeds with an ancestry linking them to antiquity: the opening lines of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight refer to the fall of Troy, and give as Britain‘s founder and ancestor of her brave knights Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas. His statue was dug up from England‘s bare soil to stand in Arthur‘s courtyard at Camelot, but it is less convincing, like the quarterings of a parvenu‖ (38). 104 falling to pieces.‘ Glazebrook re-constructs a sense of nostos (home) in the revival of heroism. In Brodsky‘s travelogue, however, the sense of an ending, or ‗the linear principle‘ is continuously delayed, correlating to the author‘s understanding of the city‘s spatio-historical existence. ii) Joseph Brodsky‟s Reflective Nostalgia in „Flight from Byzantium‟ While Philip Glazebrook is after his Victorian past, the Russian expatriate poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky, who became an American citizen five years after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, arrives in Istanbul in 1985 in order to fulfill a promise he had made years ago on leaving his hometown: having lived in ‗Leningrad, the Third Rome‘ for thirty-two years, and having spent time in the First for a year and a half, one day he would certainly visit ‗Byzantium, the Second Rome.‘ 48 Hence, it is the Byzantine past of the city that is conjured up in the fifty-page article suggestively titled ‗Flight from Byzantium,‘ which is published in a collection of essays (Less Than One). Similar to Glazebrook‘s, Brodsky‘s visit to Istanbul is highly motivated by a personal reason even though it is inevitably related to the historical significance of the city. What the author calls ‗a certain incoherence,‘ alluding perhaps to the aphoristic structure of the essay, consists of the juxtaposition of the author‘s somewhat disillusioned observations of 48 In addition to his chief motivation, Brodsky lists the following as other trivial reasons for his travel: a) it was in this city that my favorite poet, Constantine Cavafy, spent three momentous years at the turn of the century; b) I always felt, for some reason, that here, in apartments, shops, and coffeehouses, I should find intact an atmosphere that at present seems to have totally vanished everywhere else; c) I hoped to hear in Istanbul, on the outskirts of history, that ‗overseas creak of a Turkish mattress‘ which I thought I discerned one night some twenty years ago in the Crimea; d) I wanted to find myself addressed as ‗effendi‘; e) But I‘m afraid the alphabet isn‘t long enough to accommodate all these ridiculous notions (though perhaps it‘s better if you are set in motion precisely by some such non-sense, for it makes final disappointment so much easier to bear.)‖ (394). 105 the contemporary scene, with a nightmarish and surreal quality, to his revisionist readings of the Byzantine past. Writing his article in Attica, forty miles from Athens, a couple of days after his visit to Istanbul, Brodsky confesses that he feels ―feverish from what [he has] seen‖ (396). The strange nightmare with cats and a huge rat, which he sees the night he stays in Pera Palace Hotel, clearly has traces of the ―crooked, filthy‖ streets of Istanbul, run-down by ‗repellent‘ street cats. Even conscious observations of the city streets describe the ‗delirium and horror of the East‘ (403), which produce a sharp contrast to the historian‘s clear, concise and self-determined tone. A similar, though less self-styled, opposition is identifiable in Philip Glazebrook‘s travelogue. The contemporary scene in Istanbul is a nightmare that the authors are trying to awake from to have access to the city‘s ancient history. It is an awakening that is mutually constructed and constructive: not only the Byzantine past of the city, but also the past of western Christianity is at stake. In many other aspects, however, Brodsky‘s account is radically different from Glazebrook‘s even in the most general terms, such as the latter‘s obviously more conservative political attitude, which is precisely the reason why an examination of their work promises to comprehend which characteristics of the city constitute ‗the standard‘ for disparate perspectives. Brodsky challenges upfront the conventional ways of Byzantine historiography by re-interpreting Constantine‘s dream of the cross and the famous presaging legend, ‗In this sign, conquer,‘ which encouraged the Emperor to expand toward the East and designate Byzantium as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. According to the 106 author, the cross does not stand for Christ but is an urban sign, signifying the plan of any Roman settlement so that ―an imperial citizen always knew where he was in relation to the capital‖ (397). Not only does it flout traditional historiography, Brodsky‘s analysis also violates the orthodox interpretations of western history. In excavating Istanbul‘s past, where ―geography provokes history,‖ Brodsky underlines the organizational and economic effectiveness –rather than the commonly noted philanthropic side- of the Christian Church, which, combined with imperial needs, put the geographical expansion to good effect. He takes Emperor Constantine‘s questionable piousness to task by asserting that Constantine‘s ostensible religiousness did not prevent him from benefiting from such effectiveness by moving the capital to the periphery, hence turning the periphery into the center, which enables a growing proximity to India, ―the object of all imperial dreams known to us‖ (405). That is how one‘s cultural past is filtered and brought to the present through what is considered to be the most unfamiliar domain. Such a crucial criticism of one‘s past is perhaps more easily expressed when it is inserted meanderingly in-between the dusty streets of a foreign city. Brodsky‘s evocation of the pre-Ottoman period of the city, on the one hand, becomes a means to connect to his Orthodox ‗roots,‘ but also to come to terms with his perpetual unhomely condition by drawing on the Roman elegists, disciples of the Alexandrian school of poetry, defined through ‘return to the origin,‘ and best represented in the works of the exiled Roman poet, Ovid. Against the ‗surplus forms of Greek literature in the archaic period,‘ particularly the epic form, the elegists celebrate ‗brevity, terseness, compression, concreteness, erudition, didacticism, and a preoccupation with 107 the personal‖ (400). What seems to be a long digression –inserted as a sub-text– in Brodsky‘s article about the criticism of Virgil and his Aeneid by the Roman elegiac poets can be perceived as a discussion of the former‘s linear principle taken to task by the latter‘s cyclical understanding of the cosmos. 49 It is through the idea of the linear principle that the two seemingly disconnected narrative threads –about Constantine‘s expansion and the Roman elegists,– converge in Brodsky‘s travel notes on the contemporary Istanbul. Indeed, even the structure of the essay is against the linear principle: the author‘s personal account of the city is continuously disrupted by the historical narrative and vice versa. Let us examine the function of Istanbul in Brodsky‘s critical reflections on the ‗linear principle,‘ considered both as a poetic device by elegists and an imperial enterprise by Constantine, who is described as ―not only the embodiment but also the instrument of the linear principle of existence‖ (404). Travel to Istanbul inspires Brodsky to write against the linear principle, while his reflections on Constantine and elegists help him develop a spatio-historical theory, which, unlike many other ancient or modern travelers‘ accounts, portray the city in double layers –past and present, home and elsewhere. As Brodsky notes, ―There are places where history is inescapable, like a highway accident –places where geography provokes history. Such is Istanbul, alias Constantinople, alias Byzantium‖ (406-407). Brodsky‘s reading of the city‘s history through space and vice versa, allows him to point out the fatal entanglements of the city of Byzantium (the east) and Rome (the west) –both 49 Though Brodsky does not idealize Greeks in his essay, he maintains an ironic detachment from Virgil‘s linear principle, which focuses on the future at the cost of burying the past into oblivion and goes against the idea of seeing the past in the present: ―The point is that the linear principle, detecting in itself a certain irresponsibility vis-à-vis the past –irresponsibility linked with the linear idea of existence –tends to balance this with a detailed projection of the future‖ (402). 108 spatially and historically. The city‘s unique geographical status determined the split within what Constantine deemed would be a unified Christian world: Up until the seventh century, friction between East and West in Byzantium was of a standard, I‘ll-skin-you-alive military sort and was resolved by force of arms, usually in the West‘s favor. […] But by the seventh century what had risen over the entire East and started to dominate it was the crescent of Islam. Thereafter, the military encounters between East and West, whatever their outcome, resulted in a gradual but steady erosion of the cross and in a growing relativism of the Byzantine outlook as a consequence of too close and too frequent contact between the two sacred signs. (415) The intricate relationship between Rome and Byzantium stands for the binary opposition between the western and the eastern worlds, as much as their juxtaposition. Brodsky emphasizes that ―the belief system called Christianity came from the East‖ at a time when ‗the West was a customer‖ (408). Indeed, writing about contemporary Istanbul is an unexpected return to one‘s origins, as is posited in Brodsky‘s rhetorical question: ―There is something amusing, even a bit alarming, isn‘t there, in the idea that the East is actually the metaphysical center of mankind?‖ (408). Even more amusing and alarming is to trace one‘s past back to its ―origins,‖ only to see something totally unfamiliar lurking behind the familiar façade: Byzantium, even at its Christian origins, is the Other –or ―the stranger within the self.‖ Since Christianity in Byzantium was ‗orientalized,‘ the Roman church gradually became detached from its Eastern counterpart, turning Constantine‘s conquest into a ‗Pyrrhic victory‘ (411). Brodsky asserts that Byzantium‘s radical status, which could not be moderated even by Christianity, is contingent on the city‘s essentially ‗eastern‘ character: the city had been carrying on with its non-western and totalitarian values from an eternally medieval world 109 long before the Turkish domination. ―But no matter what extreme idea of idealization of the East we may entertain, we‘ll never be able to ascribe to it the least semblance of democracy. And I am speaking here of Byzantium before the Turkish domination: of the Byzantium of Constantine, Justinian, Theodora –of Christian Byzantium, anyway‖ (417). That means, from time immemorial, this place was associated with what it is still associated with, though Brodsky does not explain the reason –it is disputably related to an enigmatic source: ―What is it, then? The spirit of place? Its evil genius? The spirit of bad spells –porcha in Russian?‖ (428). Brodsky‘s controversial assertion brings forth the idea of the East/Byzantium as the forgotten, neglected, abandoned and unwanted side of the West, which keeps coming back with a vengeance. Hence, the unfamiliar familiarity in the return to the beginning –followed by another cycle of refusing to recognize the all- too-familiar. Brodsky‘s reflections on Istanbul are not restorative: they do not re-construct ‘nostos’; there is no home for an absolute return, as literalized in the author‘s exile identity. As Boym argues, ―Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming –wistfully, ironically, desperately. (…) Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity‖ (xviii). Brodsky‘s multi-spatial and temporal narrative corresponds to the reflective nostalgic desire for ‗inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones‖ (xviii). He does not have an ending –does not return to the comfort of his English home as Glazebrook does. The narrative simply stops, suggesting that there can be no definite end; yet the story has to end somewhere, 110 anywhere. The inconclusiveness of Brodsky‘s travel notes also provide ‗the flight from Byzantium‘ with a permanent status. If what Brodsky coins as ‗the eastern attitude‘ is not associated with a specific period in history, but is prevalent even today, then ―the flight from Byzantium‖ has always been and will always be at stake- it is a repetitive process that takes one to the beginning when the city is opted for, as occurs in Constantine‘s dream, and then left behind. As Brodsky writes, ―By divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity consigned the East to nonexistence, and thus reduced its own notion of human negative potential to a considerable, perhaps even a perilous, degree‖ (422). Indeed, these two ideas –of the East in possession of an eternally negative potential and of the West ‗fleeing‘ or turning its back to the East- coincide. That is the moment the hollow site of Istanbul, emptied of its content and brought to ‗nonexistence,‘ is furnished with what the West is not, or hopes not to be. Moreover, Brodsky underlines the historical projection of the western reduction of the East to a hollow site: ―What did Constantine see and not see as he looked at the map of Byzantium? He saw, to put it mildly, a tabula rasa. An imperial province settled by Greeks, Jews, Persians, and such – a population he was used to dealing with, typical subjects of the eastern part of his empire‖ (412). What is even more intriguing, though less clarified, is the connection Brodsky draws between the favorable circumstances for Islam in Byzantium and the city‘s ethnic texture –―a mixture of races and nationalities that had neither local nor, moreover, overall memory of any kind of coherent tradition of individualism‖ (417). These two quotations, together, seem to posit the city‘s ethnic diversity as dwelling in a sort of empty landscape -reminiscent of the idea of ‗nonexistence‘ cited in the previous 111 passage- that is occupied by whatever will be imposed on them. Let us keep this interesting correlation in mind in the following chapter on detective fiction, particularly Barbara Nadel‘s work, that consistently plays on the multi-ethnic face of the city. The increasing interest of western writers in producing detective novels set in Istanbul can be perceived as a consequence of the overemphasis on ‗the exhaustion of lived experience‘ in modern travelogues of Istanbul (i.e. Brodsky‘s blunt remark that ‗nothing will happen anymore‘). In a canonical article on detective fiction, Fredric Jameson deliberates over the emergence of the private investigator: Since there is no longer any privileged experience in which the whole of the social structure can be grasped, a figure must be invented who can be superimposed on the society as a whole, whose routine and life-pattern serve somehow to tie its separate and isolated parts together. Its equivalent is the picaresque novel, where a single character moves from one background to another, links picturesque but not intrinsically related episodes together. In doing this the detective in a sense once again fulfills the demands of the function of knowledge rather than that of lived experience: through him we are able to see, to know, the society as whole, but he does not really stand for any genuine close-up experience of it. (―On Raymond Chandler‖ 625) While ―genuine‖ experience as a flȃneur is no longer possible, the detective figure emerges to take over ―the demands of the function of knowledge.‖ The void of the present, encountered by the modern traveler in post-Ottoman Istanbul, is filled in with contemporary western detective fiction. In fact, the conceptualization of flȃnerie, even at its origins, is already associated with loss –of a past in which strolling around idly in the city was possible. The emergence of the flȃneur coincides with the threats of his elimination. At the time Benjamin is writing on the flâneur, he is already talking about the disappearance of the figure –the discussion of flȃnerie is conducted through his vanishing conditions. Hence, 112 the flȃneur, by definition, feels unheimlich. 50 The evocation of Benjamin reading Baudelaire reading Poe‘s pioneering story, ‗The Man of the Crowd,‘ draws attention to the enigmatic set of concepts related to the flâneur and his ambivalent position, exemplified in both ‗the man of the crowd‘ as the idle stroller and Poe‘s narrator as the potential detective figure. Which one of them is the flâneur? In his various writings on urban space, Benjamin underlines the affinity between the flâneur and the detective: ―Preformed in the figure of the flâneur is that of the detective. The flâneur required a social legitimation of his habitus. It suited him very well to see his indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight‖ (Arcades Project 442). Let us go back to the ‗origins‘ of the concept to better evaluate how the two are related to each other. In ‗The Painter of Modern Life,‘ the essay in which flânerie is tentatively ‗theorized,‘ Charles Baudelaire‘s initial purpose is to posit his contemporary painter Constantin Guys not only as an artist, but also as ‗a man of the world,‘ ―a man who understands the world and the mysterious and lawful reasons for all its uses‖ (―The Painter of Modern Life‖ 7). Baudelaire builds up on this concept through an analogy 50 In Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator, John Rignall argues that ―The flȃneur, strolling the streets of nineteenth-century Paris with cool but curious eye, is a stock character in the documentary genre of the Tableaux de Paris which flourished in the 1830s and 1840s. He seemed to typify the new urban culture by appearing comfortably at home on the streets and in harmony with his world. Benjamin, however, responding to Baudelaire‘s use of a flȃneur persona in his Tableaux parisiens, which appeared as the genre was declining, sees the element of estrangement that shadows this apparent harmony and sense of place. For him the flȃneur is a transient phenomenon, typical only of a brief period of nineteenth-century culture, a threatened figure existing in a state of precarious balance. Still standing on the margins both of the great city and the bourgeois class, he is yet to be overwhelmed by either; but it is only a matter of time before he is swept into their alienating embrace. (9) 113 between Constantin Guys and the narrator in ‗The Man of the Crowd.‘ For both figures, ‗the crowd is his element‘: For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world –such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. (9) While Benjamin‘s initial articulation of the flâneur in ―The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire‖ is in line with Baudelaire‘s flâneur who ‗takes refuge in the crowds,‘ he adopts a more critical version of the urban observer in the revised version of the same article, re-titled ‗On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,‘ written in response to Adorno‘s criticism. According to the revised version, the flâneur, unlike Baudelaire‘s description above, is no longer an idle stroller who develops a symbiotic relationship with the crowd, but is a detached figure in possession of scopic authority. As Benjamin asserts, ―Baudelaire was moved to equate the man of the crowd, whom Poe‘s narrator follows throughout the length and breadth of nocturnal London, with the flâneur. It is hard to accept this view. The man of the crowd is no flâneur. In him, composure has given way to manic behavior. He exemplifies, rather, what had to become of the flâneur after the latter was deprived of the milieu to which he belonged‖ (188). What had to become of the flâneur was an increasing move away from the crowds so that he could still preserve his control and authoritative gaze over urban chaos. As Deborah Parsons describes the consequences of the transition to a superior and panoramic perspective, ―Detachment, self-assertion, and bourgeois control are now made prominent, in comparison to the 114 wandering, subversive, and marginal ambiguity of the Baudelairian flâneur” (36). A retrospective look at the section, ―The figure of the flȃneur in the belatedly modern geography of Constantinople‖ in the first chapter might help to reveal the detecting eye embedded within the flȃneur figure. Going back to de Amicis‘ concluding section about the Galata Bridge, we can witness the moment at which harmony with the crowd turns into a mental detachment on the part of the urban observer, who suddenly retreats into himself as much as he feels alienated from the crowd, which until very recently provided him with his identity. 51 To see the endless variety of humanity no longer incites the will to categorize- instead of the crowds, the modern subject seeks refuge in his melancholic mood. It is the experience of not being in control, of seeing that ―curiosity is blunted rather than assuaged by this endless variety of strange objects‖ that drives one to unintended repetition. Finally, it is also the moment when the modern individual realizes his own eradication in the multitude and the corresponding loss of control over his own existence –he cannot assert his sovereign individuality while he remains incognito as a flâneur, unnoticed and unacknowledged by the indifference of the crowd. 52 Hence, the transition to the detective figure. 51 See page 81 in Chapter Two. 52 One could also interpret the loss of his sovereign individuality as the dialectic of flânerie that Benjamin posits in the Arcades Project: ―on one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man. Presumably, it is this dialectic that is developed in ‗The Man of the Crowd.‘ ― (Arcades Project 420). If the flâneur is part of the crowd, then he too, can be monitored, which is yet another aspect of the modern individual experiencing the self as split between autonomy and heteronomy. 115 CHAPTER IV: Istanbul in Contemporary Western Detective Fiction: Recovering the Lost Text of the Literary Canon Something is uncanny –that is how it begins. But at the same time one must search for that remoter ‗something,‘ which is already close at hand. Ernst Bloch, ‗A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel‘ In an interview with La Repubblica, published on his own website, English author and scholar Jason Goodwin, responding to a question about his influences in writing an Ottoman detective series, refers to the Italian traveler Edmondo de Amicis as a major source for his fiction: ―… I adore nineteenth century writers generally, and my happiest discovery recently has been Edmondo de Amicis, whose book on Constantinople has been translated into English for the first time. It‘s a proper Victorian tour de force, everything is in it –and he apparently was only there for a week or two!‖ 53 In his first book, The Janissary Tree, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s 2007 Edgar Award, Goodwin expresses his indebtedness to travelers in a more straightforward way: ―I owe a debt to all the historians who have broadened our appreciation of the Ottoman Empire; I‘ve also drawn constantly on the observations of contemporary travelers‖ (―Acknowledgements‖ 301). Indeed, his two novels in the series, The Janissary Tree 53 http://thebellinicard.wordpress.com/interview-with-la-repubblica/ 116 (2006) and The Snake Stone (2007), can be perceived as the contemporary version of nineteenth-century travelogues into which the story of detection has been sporadically inserted. 54 The first thirty pages of The Snake Stone are an agglomeration of snapshots that glance through the major characters of the story and their corresponding neighborhoods, sketching moments from their ordinary lives. While the arrival of the French archeologist, Maximilien Lefevre, is juxtaposed with the description of the eunuch detective Yashim‘s early morning in the Fener district of the city, the camera eye turns to locals such as the Greek bookseller Goulandris, the Armenian antique seller Aram Malakian, and the Bulgarian Madame Mavrogordato. Although Jason Goodwin does not specifically point out which parts are indebted to de Amicis‘ book, the opening section of the book seems to be an extended and narrativized version of de Amicis‘ descriptive passage on the multiethnic crowd over the Galata Bridge. 55 This close reading of Goodwin‘s introductory section, focusing on the network between three things –the literary canon posited by European travelogues, the portrayal of the spatial geography, and the multiethnic population in Istanbul– can be seen as a microcosm for the overall argument of this chapter. The intertextuality of Istanbul writings is further explored by examining how detective novels, especially those by twenty-first century English writers, Barbara Nadel and Jason Goodwin, portray the spatial layout of the city and its relation to the city‘s mythicized multi-ethnic environment. The Ottoman capital, characterized by its strange familiarity in European 54 The third book in the series, The Bellini Card, for which the author keeps a blog that is accessible through his personal web-site, has just come out in July 2008. 55 See page 72-74 in Chapter II. 117 travelogues, continues to provide a background for detective novels. The two major threads I focus on are the way the literary canon, accumulated through travelogues, is perpetuated in detective fiction, and secondly how the European traveler‘s oscillation between the familiar and unfamiliar is still in play as a form of self-retrospection in detective stories, whose revival of a pre-modern past in contemporary Istanbul provides an unfamiliar terrain onto which the conventions of the detective genre and the detective figure are imposed with modifications. 56 In exploring the transition of the main figure in western writing on Constantinople/Istanbul –that is, from the melancholic soul of the European traveler/flȃneur who experiences the unheimlich as a fundamental part of his metropolitan existence into the nostalgic figure of the detective– it is crucial to locate this transformation both within the more general framework of the modern [nostalgia] as ‗loss,‘ and within the specific context of Istanbul as a particular source of nostalgia for the western world. As much as the two are intricately related, let us examine them separately, and first discuss the way the appearance of the nostalgic impulse in western writings on Istanbul is a product of historical conditions that also had an effect on the emergence of detective fiction. In contrast to other genres among ‗crime novels,‘ detective fiction is, by nature, concerned with the resurrection of the past in the present. The emergence of the detective coincides with the increasing anxiety caused by the chaos of metropolitan centers and the 56 That is also the main reason for the exclusion of other literary genres that do not always maintain the self-questioning gaze and the confrontation of the self through the other, which plays a significant role for the main argument in this chapter. In various British spy novels, for instance, the story develops in such a way that the conflict between the English and Russian characters complicates the plot structure, as happens in Dennis Wheatley‘s The Eunuch of Istanbul, and draws the story outside the geography of the post- Ottoman capital. 118 consequent need to control the unknown. Initial examples of detectives such as Edgar Allan Poe‘s Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes characteristically apply a scientific method and deduction skills to solve mysterious cases. 57 One could argue that the condition of flȃnerie is an object of yearning for the detective who is nostalgic about a time when it was possible to be unconditionally intuitive, and yet to make sense out of chaos. Later examples of detective fiction from the beginning and the first half of the twentieth century belong to the hard-boiled tradition created by American writers such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, and Mickey Spillane, whose detective figures continue to show off their skills at intuition while the stumbling policemen function as their foils. 58 In the increasingly modernized world, however, ‗modern methods‘ of solving cases challenge the belief in the power of intuition and endanger the position of the flȃneur. 57 In Crime Fiction: 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity,Stephen Knight explicates the origins of the genre: ―The classical or ratiocinative detective story was first clearly articulated by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s, but it did not become a widely popular genre until the end of the nineteenth century. Its period of greatest popularity was initiated by the enormous success of Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes stories, and it flourished in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Since World War II, other formulas that include some elements of the mystery archetype, but are also stories of adventure or melodrama- the hard- boiled detective story, the spy story, the police procedural tale, the gangster saga, and the Enforcer‘s caper- have become increasingly popular‖ (80). 58 Coming after the British rationative tradition, the American hard-boiled detective fiction displays generic differences; yet, the conflict between the police and the detective, occupying a perpetual oppositional status, is a common characteristic in both. As Jon Thompson argues, ―Poe‘s longing for a prebourgeois, settled aristocracy untainted by iniquity is one of the legacies he left to the genre of detective fiction, and persists to this day in the work of Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy Sayers, novelists who added to this legacy by bringing an analysis of manners to the genre; indeed, it might be said that this longing is still one of the hallmarks of the ratiocinative tradition of detective fiction. Poe‘s main legacy to the adolescent, popular fiction industry of his day, then, was his definition of detective fiction as oppositional, as antagonistic to contemporary values, mores, ways of thinking and seeing. To be sure, Poe wrote in the name of an idiosyncratic, radical conservatism, shaped by an unrealizable social fantasy; nevertheless, by articulating values alternate to those dominant in nineteenth-century America, he helped to define a genre rich enough in novelistic possibilities to be reworked by writers as ideologically and stylistically different from himself as Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald‖ (Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism 57). 119 Taking into consideration the development of the genre, writing detective stories set in Istanbul facilitates the conditions for being intuitive –a defining characteristic of the flȃneur- in the contemporary world, especially when the city‘s ‗pre-modern‘ past is revived in the present. At the same time, the modernized face of the city indicates the erasure of ‗lived experience‘ and this loss is replaced by the act of ‗sightseeing‘ as the only remaining possibility. Indeed, detective fiction stands on this threshold of experience between the pre-modern and modernizing world. In that sense, detective fiction set in Istanbul seems to revisit the threshold that is increasingly eradicated from the European metropolitan space. The object of desire in these detective novels, then, is to be able to dwell temporarily on that threshold of experience –and the experience of the threshold- that is projected onto Istanbul‘s space and given expression through the revival of a vanished world –be it Ottoman or Byzantine past –in the present. The substitution of Istanbul‘s space as a perpetual condition of being on the threshold is most visible in the persistence of the idea even when the novel is written against completely different historical settings. Jason Goodwin points out in an interview that what has motivated him to write about 1830s Constantinople is to be able to observe contradictory moments in the cityscape: I was drawn to Istanbul in the 1830s because it‘s such an interesting time in the history of that astonishing city, a time of flux and change and new ideas, when the Ottomans embarked on a radical and ultimately unsuccessful experiment to renegotiate their relationship with their subjects, and with the wider world. So Istanbul in the 1830s feels the lure of modernity and the pull of tradition, all at once. On top of that, Istanbul was a great port, and the turnstile between Europe and Asia. It wasn‘t just a Turkish city: it was a Greek city, a Jewish and Armenian 120 city, a world capital that was beginning to build up a sizeable foreign population, too. All those tensions and conflicts - it‘s the perfect place to find a dead body… 59 The two characteristics of the Ottoman city of 1830s that Goodwin emphasizes –that is, the city‘s diversity and its transitional period –appear as major themes in Nadel‘s fiction as well. In addition to its contextual evocation of nostalgia, detective fiction is nostalgic in terms of its obsessively repetitive structure, recurrence and persistent return to the beginning of the story. As Franco Moretti argues, detective fiction is ‗radically anti- novelistic‘ since ―the aim of the narration is no longer the character‘s development into autonomy, or a change from the initial situation, or the presentation of plot as a conflict and an evolutionary spiral, image of a developing world that it is difficult to draw to a close. On the contrary detective fiction‘s object is to return to the beginning” (137-138). The focus on the concepts of delay, deferral, repetition, return to the beginning, and the abolition of narration correlates with the narrative structure of travelogues and structurally –as well as thematically– links the two literary genres on Constantinople/Istanbul. Indeed, the act of writing and of reading as something incomplete or in progress, and at times cyclical, is overtly brought to the foreground in both travelogues and detective novels, through the travelers‘ self-consciousness of their belatedness or the detective‘s continuously updated retelling/rewriting of the mystery, which demonstrates the way Istanbul‘s cityscape (i.e. its legendary association with the threshold) is a projection more than a strictly geographical positioning. Such projection 59 http://thebellinicard.wordpress.com/interview-with-la-repubblica/ 121 allows for a certain type of narration that stands for the western perspective on the city, even when this perspective is presented in literary genres as different as travelogues and detective fiction. In that sense, the fact that the narration of Istanbul is taken over by detective fiction in the contemporary period can also be seen as stemming from a generic nostalgia for the loss of possibilities of a certain type of textual structure or narration – characterized by a predetermined structure or template– in addition to the loss of the experience (of the flȃneur’s intuition) itself. If nostalgia is, both structurally and thematically, a tendency of detective fiction, set against the background of metropolitan existence, in what ways is it layered when the longing finds expression, particularly in Istanbul? How does this projection of longing reflect on the changing significance of Istanbul for the west? As analysis in individual sections will demonstrate, longing for a pre-modern past in western detective fiction takes the form of a particular nostalgic sentiment for the multiethnic population of Istanbul, which does not necessarily correlate to a mourning for the disappearance of diversity in the post-Ottoman city. Instead, Nadel and Goodwin‘s work, among other detective novels on Istanbul, manifest a nostalgia for the legible multiethnic community, recognizable through the idiosyncratic types of clothing and residential segregation of the imperial capital, whose comprehensibility is being threatened by the modernizing world. 60 The imposition of a more structured version and a modern caricature of the 60 In ―Istanbul: from imperial to peripheralized city,‖ Edhem Eldem questions the nature of cosmopolitanism in the Ottoman city and points out the co-habitation of multiethnic groups in segregated neighborhoods: ―What today is often retrospectively –and in a rather sentimental and nostalgic way- perceived as pluralism or even cosmopolitanism was in fact a diversity which could not possibly develop into any real integrative process before the appearance of a supra-communal or supra-religious ideology that would have offered a more sophisticated and abstract locus of allegiance, thus potentially overriding any other form of identity/solidarity. Dealing with a mosaic far more complex than any equivalent in 122 multiethnic population of the old city is suggestive for interrogating the way representations of Istanbul reflect the search for identity in the post-imperial centers of Britain. Tracing back the idea that travel to Constantinople in the nineteenth century is an unsettling experience because of the unexpected encounter with the familiar within the unfamiliar, I argue that detective novels set in Istanbul, regardless of the genre‘s usual designation as ‗escape literature‘, provide fertile grounds to confront the unfamiliar as part of one‘s own environment. 61 As has been emphasized in the first chapter, one of my objectives in dealing with orientalist texts is to go beyond unmasking the knowledge- power axis, as discussed in Edward Said‘s Orientalism, and consider in what way the European mind is unsettled as a result of his/her encounter with the Orient. The relevance of Said‘s conceptualization of the power-knowledge relationship to this chapter is the emergence of a narrative that is saturated with a panoptical, detecting gaze over the cityscape. 62 Yet, the major idea is to see this surveillance not only as the western ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- western Europe at that time, the Ottoman state could only process a formula of coexistence based in a systematic avoidance of potential frictions that might result from excessive contact and intermingling‖ (154). 61 In the last section of Crime Fiction: 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity, Stephen Knight dicusses the effects of postmodern crime fiction and asserts that ―As Michael Holquist argued in an influential essay (1971) and Stefano Tani outlined in detail in the Doomed Detective (1984), Borges, Butor and Eco in particular showed how crime fiction can, by being less determinate and simplistic than usual in its processes and outcomes, be a means of questioning certainties about the self, the mind and indeed the ambivalent world‖ (195). 62 Jon Thompson presents a similar argument in his analysis of Poe‘s detective stories: ―The relevance of this conception of power-knowledge to my argument, then, is not that Poe recreates a disciplinary society in his detective fiction; rather, it is that in the person of Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, Poe creates a figure whose omniscience is comparable to that of a panopticon. (…) The chief significance of Foucault‘s notion of the disciplinary society for Poe‘s detective fiction, then, is that it articulates a desire for a complete form of knowledge, a desire that ultimately becomes a structural element of the genre. This desire for knowledge is not an immutable feature of detective fiction but changes with the transformations in the genre‖ (Fiction, Crime, and Empire 44-45). 123 domination over the oriental space, but also as self-surveillance and a projection of that which is conveniently given expression elsewhere rather than at home. The insistence on projection provides a segue to discuss how the critical faculty inherent in the detective fiction genre has the potential to reflect both on the Ottoman/Turkish society and on one‘s own culture. It also takes into consideration the possibilities of going beyond the orientalist tradition written specifically on the Ottoman capital. The major question I address, if not wholly answer, in both the present chapter and the next is the following: Faced with an overburdening canon, what kinds of alternatives exist for the contemporary writer to write within, yet against, this tradition? Can parodying the genre provide a solution? The first section of this chapter, which examines Nadel‘s and Goodwin‘s ambivalent positioning of their detective figures, Çetin Ikmen and Yashim Togalu, in- betweeen modernity and tradition, and the spatial renditions of the city in both authors‘ work, demonstrate both the possibilities and impossibilities of writing outside the tradition. I draw attention to the fact that the ambiguity surrounding the identity of the detective is exaggerated to such an extent that it provides the genre with a characteristically parodic quality, even if this is unintentional. The city‘s persistent image as being inside and outside of Europe, inside and outside of the modern, renders it unproblematic to produce a detective figure characterized by his ambivalent position in- between the native and western cultures. However, instead of positing a determinist view on the detective‘s identity as a product of geographical location, or an exotic rendering of the stereotypical imagery of the city and the country as a bridge or a threshold, I will 124 insist on the connection between the detective figure and the source of nostalgia for a more orderly world. In both cases, the detective‘s identity is not simply ambiguous, but also split, contradicted, and deferred so that he is consistently excluded from the structured multicultural community of different neighborhoods that are usually modeled on fictional representations of previous texts rather than on the contemporary sprawling layout of the city. The ethnic neighborhoods of Istanbul are mapped out according to the corruption and crime tale that the narrative imposes on this particular geography. Barbara Nadel, for instance, consistently plays on the multi-ethnic face of the city while writing her Cetin Ikmen series. In contrast to Nadel‘s, Jason Goodwin‘s novels take place in the historical Ottoman city; hence, the limited geography of his novels, which reiterates that of the travelers‘ accounts, might be related to his concern to provide his readers with an ‗authentic‘ setting that is potentially compatible with the novel‘s background: simply put, this is the nineteenth-century Constantinople as opposed to today‘s sprawling metropolis. Yet, the striking similarity between his descriptions of certain neighborhoods and those of the travelers requires further analysis. The second and third sections respectively focus on Barbara Nadel‘s and Jason Goodwin‘s work, with particular emphasis on their representations of the diversity of Istanbul/Constantinople, and present the varying conclusions these two authors draw out of their nostalgic renderings of a legible multiethnic community. In my analysis of Nadel‘s resurrection of Istanbul‘s diverse population, which is realistically no longer as diverse in the contemporary period as it was during the heyday of the empire, I draw attention to the fact that what ultimately makes Nadel‘s novels so controversial is not 125 only the one-dimensional, shallow characterization of ethnic groups that at times sounds even racist, but also, and more crucially, the use of the Ottoman past merely as a backdrop (the backdrop being the major event in the plot structure) for the contemporary city, which blurs the boundaries between the past and present without any visible political agenda on the part of the writer. Despite the ethnic conflict that lies at the heart of the city, Nadel‘s Istanbul paradoxically emerges as a melting pot, a picturesque spectacle, which seems to stand for an ‗idea‘ more than a real experience on the part of the author, feeling nostalgic for the Ottoman past. As the contemporary form which heavily relies on the conflicts between ethnic groups, Barbara Nadel‘s work projects Istanbul as the embodiment of the ‗East End‘ of London –the liminal part of the great metropolis. Although one cannot claim to know the author‘s intentions, the recurrent images in her novels and her comments during interviews, which will be explored in more detail, give sufficient reason to consider Nadel‘s Turkish detective series as a socio-historical analysis of the way the English perspective reflects the post-Ottoman capital together with ‗home‘ filtered through the revival of the other‘s past. Hence, the main argument in this section will first read the conflict between different ethnic groups, which is easily recognizable in Nadel‘s fiction, as a desire for a pre-modern, more comprehensible social order, and secondly, illustrate the way the portrayal of Istanbul‘s unfamiliar multiethnic community is always displayed as an unexpected return to the heimlich. Jason Goodwin‘s work, which I focus on in the third section of this chapter, displays similar characteristics to Nadel‘s in his reference to the Ottoman past, the multiethnic population and the portrayal of the ancient city; yet his parodic writing opens 126 up possibilities to redeem the past. In addition to certain amusing references to some common motifs in travelogues, the way parody is integrated into his fiction takes the form of an obsessive search for a ‗lost text‘ –that is reminiscent of the modern travelers‘ textual expedition– whose recovery is made possible, at least fictionally, but also rendered untenable and even absurd. 63 However, I take Goodwin‘s parodic writing as more than an all-too-easy postmodern stratagem; it prefigures, in the way the chapters are sequenced, the sort of melancholic responses to loss that is to appear in works by Turkish authors. The way melancholy infringes upon nostalgia in Goodwin‘s work, entails a more conscious and productive relationship with the history of the city and its canonization. Goodwin defamiliarizes himself from the literary tradition by repeating it with a difference: copying yet mocking it so that he can exist both inside and outside the tradition. The detective figure, Yashim, for instance, strolls around the city, much in the same way as the canonical European traveler/flȃneur, although the familiar sites of travelogues, such as the Grand Bazaar, exoticized with its chaotic, labyrinthine layout and strange objects, are reduced by Goodwin to ordinary, unexotic experiences: Yashim regularly buys fruit and vegetables from the many of the markets in the Grand Bazaar and cooks delicious meals for himself and his frequent guest, the Polish Ambassador, Stanislaw Palewski. In his portrayal of the multiethnic population, as well, Goodwin resorts to certain stereotypical representations: in both novels, for instance, the major source of the trouble turns out to be the Albanian community (which constitutes the former military troops, the Janissaries in The Janissary Tree, and the watermen guild in 63 See Appendix B for an exemplary case of parody in Goodwin‘s fiction. The letter written by an Englishman to his sister is reminiscent of many such letters written by western travelers in the nineteenth- century and earlier, such as Lady Montagu‘s Turkish Embassy Letters. 127 Snake Stone). However, in sharp contrast to the portrayal of the same community in Nadel‘s books, in which it is persistently related to nothing more than a feudal world with ongoing blood feuds, Goodwin provides significant insights into certain historical events that elicited resentment (i.e. the violent suppression of the Janissaries) among the minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, it is precisely because of the revisionist look at the past, and the reliance on alternative, unofficial readings of history, that Goodwin‘s multiethnic Ottoman city –functioning as more than a backdrop– brings forth a critique of modernity for the Ottoman society. Forgotten lives, histories, and erased memories are resurrected so that the Ottoman past is revived through unconventional methods. While both authors write with great consciousness of the cityscape that has already been mapped out before them, Jason Goodwin‘s academic background in studying Byzantine history at Cambridge University inspires revisionist readings of the city‘s past, in much the same vein as Joseph Brodsky‘s article ‗Flight from Byzantium,‘ discussed in the third chapter. Before starting his detective series, Goodwin had already written four non-fictional books, two of which are related to Ottoman/Turkish society: A Time for Tea: Travels Through China and India in Search of Tea [1991], alternately titled as The Gunpowder Gardens; On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul [1993], which is a travelogue that recounts his six-month journey with his wife on foot from Eastern Europe to Istanbul; Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire [1998], a history book that covers the six hundred years of Ottoman history, and Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America [2003]. Though set in mid-nineteenth-century Constantinople, Goodwin‘s fictional work, partly based on 128 imaginative re-writings of historical events such as the Janissary Revolt or the (life)stories of real travelers such as Dr. Millingen, is furnished with a critical faculty through which the present is envisioned as only one possibility among various others. Barbara Nadel‘s detective series, on the other hand, cannot go beyond a recuperation of certain stereotypical images of the city that have been accumulating for centuries. Despite the contemporary setting of her novels, the essence of her work does not bring any historical urgency to bear upon the present except for the resurgence of the Ottoman nostalgia as a stylistic concern, rather than an initiation of a productive relationship with the past. The significance of comparing these two writers is, therefore, much less related to the discrepancy between the historical backgrounds of their novels than to the consequences of their different approaches in evoking the city‘s past. In other words, I‘d like to pit Barbara Nadel as a foil to Jason Goodwin as a way to explore the possibilities and impossibilities implanted in detective fiction to redeem the past –of a city and its literary canon. Such comparison, in a way, continues the thread that has already started in the third chapter in the examination of the nostalgia of Philip Glazebrook as opposed to the anti-nostalgic writing of Joseph Brodsky, and will carry on to have significance for the next chapter on contemporary Turkish authors writing on Istanbul. i) The Ambivalent Position of the Detective between Tradition and Modernity in the Segregated Literary Cartography of the City In the introduction to The Postcolonial Detective, Ed Christian considers the various possibilities of the term and asserts that ―A post-colonial detective is not always the creation of a post-colonial writer. For example, H. R. F. Keating wrote nine of his 129 culturally accurate Inspector Ghote novels before even visiting India. On the other hand, most detective novels set in foreign countries do not qualify as post-colonial detective fiction‖ (2). For the latter case, Christian refers to Agatha Christie, whose omission from the book (and from the present chapter as well) is justifiable if we look at the consistent set of identifying features of postcolonial detective fiction outlined in the introduction: The crucial distinctions are that post-colonial detectives are always indigenous to or settlers in the countries where they work; they are usually marginalized in some way, which affects their ability to work at their full potential; they are always central and sympathetic characters; and their creators’ interest usually lies in an exploration of how these detectives’ approaches to criminal investigation are influenced by their cultural attitudes. Thus, books featuring post-colonial detectives are interesting not only because of their plots and the quality of their writing but because of their revelations of diverse cultures. (2) This section discusses detective fiction, set in a non-western context (if not in a strictly post-colonial setting) in agreement with Christian‘s definition of the postcolonial detective, which is the foundation of the focus on Ikmen and Yashim –two Turkish/Ottoman detective figures created by English writers. Let us examine in more depth the characteristics of the ambivalent position of the two detectives, located in- between ‗diverse cultures,‘ and consider how this position contributes to the chapter‘s ongoing discussion of the power-knowledge axis, the spatial and temporal use of Istanbul‘s cityscape as the projection of nostalgia in western detective fiction, and its connection to the experience of modernity. Born in the East End of London, contemporary detective fiction writer Barbara Nadel started her career with the Çetin Ikmen novels, most of which are set in today‘s Istanbul. Following her debut novel, Belshazzar’s Daughter published in 1999, Nadel 130 wrote nine more books for the same series. 64 Since 2005, she has also been writing the adventures of an English detective, Francis Hancock, who has so far appeared in three of her novels [Last Rights (2005), After the Mourning (2006), Ashes to Ashes (2008)]. Nadel‘s Turkish detective series evokes the familiar Holmesian dilettante and affinity with the mystical powers solidified in his cocaine abuse in the character of the detective figure, Çetin Ikmen, addicted to alcohol and smoking. Like Holmes, Ikmen seems to consider detection as a way of life more than a way to make a living, although he is portrayed as living on his low salary as a police investigator. 65 As occurs in countries where it is not common to have local authority being challenged by private detectives, or indeed where the concept of p.i. is nonexistent, Ikmen‘s character is created in line with the socio-historical context: He works under the police force in the homicide department. Compared to his colleagues, Ikmen is meticulous with details; yet, this characteristic is related not to the scientific method applied by the legendary English detective, but to Ikmen‘s dubious background as the son of an Albanian mother who possessed occult powers and thus endowed Ikmen with second sight. The chain-smoking, low-income Ikmen is the embodiment of the ‗traditional Turk,‘ with his extended Turkish household consisting of nine children, a nagging wife, and an aging father, while his atheism, progressive thoughts, westernized musical taste, English fluency, western education and 64 Chemical Prison (a.k.a. Ottoman Cage) (2000), Arabesk (2001), Deep Waters (2002), Harem (2003), Petrified (2004), Deadly Web (2005), Dance With Death (2006), A Passion for Killing (2007), Pretty Dead Things (2007). 65 The fact that Ikmen does not eat regularly and that he completely stops eating before he solves the mystery subtly remind one of Sherlock Holmes‘ loss of appetite when he is on a case. Even though finding the criminal is part of Ikmen‘s routine job, his extreme commitment underscores the way he takes his job as meaning more than a professional pursuit. On various occasions, he will persist in continuing the investigation, defying his superiors‘, particularly Commissioner Ardıç‘s, order to quit the case. 131 ultimate ‗otherness‘ as half Albanian present him as an anomaly that needs to be solved together with the mysterious events that happen in the city. It is as if every single component of Ikmen‘s personality is exaggerated to such an extent that the outcome is a caricature of what is considered ‗Turkish,‘ ‗Albanian,‘ ‗westernized,‘ or ‗traditional.‘ Even though all the contradictory details and the familiar aspects of a detective, defamiliarized in his non-western identity, are incorporated into the plot structure without endangering the character development, in the final analysis, Ikmen is a deracinated individual in this geography over which he can only have partial control. Even in various investigations that are resolved successfully, he is far from possessing the masculine panoptical gaze: the whole picture is patched together by the reader as the sole owner of the all-powerful eye. Similarly, Jason Goodwin‘s Ottoman eunuch investigator, Yashim Togalu, springs from a complicated background and functions as another metropolitan individual endowed with a modern capacity for detection in spite of his unfailing support for tradition against the modernizing enterprise of the Empire, embodied in his insistence on wearing the turban even after its replacement with the fez at the Sultan‘s order. 66 As against his traditional outlook, Yashim has a passion for western, particularly French novels, which he periodically borrows from his long-time friend Validé, the Sultan‘s 66 Yashim‘s appearance is described in detail at the beginning of The Snake Stone: ―It was partly the way Yashim still dressed. It was several years since the sultan had begun to encourage his subjects to adopt western dress; the results were mixed. Many men had swapped their turbans for the scarlet fez, and their loose robes for trousers and the stambouline, a curiously high-necked, swallow-tailed jacket, but few of them wore European lace-up boots. Some of Yashim‘s neighbours on the divan resembled black beetles, in bare feet; all elbows and pointy knees. In a long cloak, somewhere between deep red and brown, and a saffron-coloured robe, Yashim might have been a ruck in the carpet which covered the divan; only his turban was dazzlingly white‖ (4-5). 132 French mother. The mere idea of bringing together a eunuch and a detective –prototypical representations of the traditional and Enlightenment individual,– in the same character gives sufficient reason to ponder the ways in which these two contrasting aspects are seamlessly integrated into each other. In a suggestive conversation Yashim holds with a black eunuch inside the harem, the latter, standing on the tradition‘s side, questions Yashim about the reason for the recent unrest in the city: ―I saw Selim [Sultan before Mahmud II] die. It was here, in this courtyard. Did you know that? […] Many people wanted him to die. He wanted everything to change. It‘s the same now, isn‘t it? [….] They want us … to be modern. How can I be modern? I‘m a … eunuch‖ (The Janissary Revolt 252). Posited rhetorically, the black eunuch‘s question can as well be taken literally for detective Yashim‘s identity as a ‗modern‘ eunuch whose strangeness is further emphasized by isolating him from the usual eunuch types, which are already marginal figures in the modernizing world: He ran his thumb along the table‘s edge: it occurred to him, not for the first time, that of all Istanbul he might be the exception which proved the rule. Sometimes he felt more like a ghost than a man; his invisibility hurt him. Even beggars had a guild that promised to provide their burial at the end. The ordinary eunuchs of the Empire, who served as chaperones, escorts, guardians –they were all, in that sense, members of a family: many belonged to the greatest family of all, and lived and died in the sultan‘s service. Yashim, for a spell, had served in the sultan‘s palace, too; but his gifts were too broad to be comfortably contained there, between the women of the harem and the secret‘s of the sultan‘s inner sanctum. So Yashim had chosen between freedom and belonging: and a grateful sultan had bestowed that freedom to him. With freedom had come responsibilities which Yashim worked hard to uphold: but also loneliness. Neither his condition, nor his profession, such as it was, gave 133 him the right to expect to see his own reflection in another pair of eyes. All he had were his friends. (The Snake Stone 10-11) 67 Yashim is a eunuch –yet he is a detective (without being ‗modern‘). Despite his emasculated identity, he courts women (hence, goes against the common characteristics of eunuch types), such as the Russian Ambassador‘s wife in The Janissary Tree and the French traveler, Maximilien Lefèvre‘s, wife in The Snake Stone, both of whom are interestingly posited as partners of Yashim‘s rivals. His ethnic identity seems to be deliberately left unclear, with vague passing remarks such as when the Russian Ambassador seductively tells him ―So take me, Turk!‖ (JT 191), or when Yashim thinks about himself using the third person pronoun, ‗He was white. Whiteish, anyway‖ (SS 296), both of which create confusion since eunuchs usually come from non-Turkish backgrounds, particularly from northern Africa. It is as if each single aspect of Yashim‘s identity prevents the other aspects from constituting a social group. The overemphasis on the idea that Yashim does not belong anywhere is brought forth by the writer himself in an interview: Well, I wanted to do a character with a slightly detached view of society – someone who didn‘t quite belong to the world in which he found himself. Think of the great literary detectives –Chandler‘s Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, or even 67 The idea of belonging is more emphatically brought forth in the two preceding passages: ―Some cities in Europe were now bigger than Istanbul, and more industrious, and lonely; for Istanbul was a city in which everyone, from sultan to beggar, belonged somewhere –to a guild, a district, a family, a church or a mosque. Where they lived, the work they did, how they were paid, married, born or buried, the friends they made, the place they worshipped –all these things were arranged for them, so to speak, long before they ever balled their tiny fists and sucked in their first blast of Istanbul air; an air freighted with muezzins, the smell of the sea, the scent of cypresses, spices and drains. Newcomers –foreigners, especially– often complained that Istanbul life was a sequence of divisions: they noticed the harem arrangement of the houses, the black street walls, the way tradesmen clung together in one street or a section of the bazaar. They frequently gave way to feelings of claustrophobia. Stamboulites, on the other hand, were used to the hugger-mugger atmosphere of warmth and gossip which surrounded them from the cradle and followed them to the grave. In the city of belonging, Yashim well knew, even the dead belonged somewhere‖ (9-10). 134 Hercule Poirot –they are essentially lonely men, on the margin of the world whose morals and motives they study. A eunuch is the extreme form! Eunuchs occupy a huge place in world history, especially in the east. They could be described as ‗perfect servants‘, because they could have no dynastic ambitions of their own. It was only in western Europe that medieval states relied on celibate priests and monks instead. Yashim, my eunuch investigator, is effectively dedicated to serving the people. There‘s a practical reason, too, why a eunuch would make a good detective in Ottoman society: there is nowhere he cannot go. He can go behind the veil, visit women in the harem. He is almost invisible. 68 Yashim‘s ‗otherness‘ is perhaps only a convenient method in his characterization to give him access to all strata of Constantinople culture. The detective figure, by definition, stands on the margins of society, and his peripheral perspective provides him with a critical look at the corruption in multiple segments of society –the police department, the upper class, and the lower class as well as their criminal underground networks. As Raymond Chandler‘s frequently quoted portrayal of the detective in ―On Simple Art of Murder‖ underlines, the detective figure is characteristically endowed with a detached view: But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. 69 68 http://thebellinicard.wordpress.com/interview-with-la-repubblica/ 69 http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html 135 Hence, the outsider status of the postcolonial detective cannot be seen as a unique case; yet, the heightened vulnerability of Ikmen and Yashim noticeably increases their marginality. As Christian argues, A distinctive feature of hard-boiled and police procedural detective fiction is the way detectives frequently proceed from the interrogation of suspects to the interrogation of society. Individual crime comes to be seen as a symptom of, result of, or reaction to basic flaws in the political, social and industrial systems. Post-colonial detectives, approaching crime with a special sensitivity enhanced by their marginalized positions, are especially quick to notice societal contradictions because they have always been exploited by them. (2) Indeed, one could argue that both Ikmen and Yashim share a certain sensitivity to societal conditions, especially since they can have access to different circles. It is owing to his various connections in the refined world of the palace –such as the Validé Sultan, Sultan Mahmud‘s mother in the Sultan‘s harem, 70 and other connections in the backstreets of Constantinople, such as the Greek archimandrite, the Polish ambassador (left without a country after Poland‘s occupation), an imam (the Muslim religious leader in charge of directing prayer in the mosque) and a transsexual dancer, Preen– that Yashim possesses a power that no other individual or establishment holds, while Cetin Ikmen, on the other hand –in spite of his institutional ties as a policeman at the Homicide Department–is able to supersede his colleagues, including the Chief Inspector, as he effortlessly navigates through a kaleidoscope of nationalities and social circles ranging from an English teacher and a Kabbalist, a gyspy and fortune-teller, an Armenian forensic pathologist, and an old Greek lady with a surviving eunuch, to the Albanian 70 On another note, Yashim‘s unfettered access to the harem is significant when considered within the whole literary canon in which the harem is greatly mystified and turned into an object of desire by both male and female travelers. 136 community of the city. In this exaggerated way in which the multiethnic community is rendered ‗comprehensible,‘ the initial focus on the detective‘s flexibility is replaced by the projection of an ordered society against which the detective emerges as a foil. 71 Although one could trace the continuity of the idea of the perpetual threshold –between tradition and modernity- in both detective figures and the way their ambivalent position in-between indigenous cultural knowledge and western methods of detection facilitates the penetration of the panoptical gaze into every segment of Turkish/Ottoman society, it is this less obvious aspect of what I‘d like to see as a parody of the western detective in Ikmen and Yashim, and its connection to the spatial layout of the city, that offers a much 71 The fact that in some other contemporary detective novels or spy novels, the ambiguity of the detective or the main character, who is a westerner is underlined, bolsters a reading into the function of the detective‘s identity. A common characteristic of many Englishmen in Istanbul is that they either have hybrid identities or their homogeneous Englishness is threatened throughout their sojourn. For instance, Seymour from the office of special Branch, has an immigrant background in England, as portrayed in A Dead Man in Istanbul. (see footnote 96 on page 148 for more detail). Similarly, the protagonist, Arthur Abdel Simpson in The Light of Day is born in Cairo of an Egyptian mother and a British father, although he asserts that ―I myself am British to the core‖. Throughout the novel, Simpson is dragged into trouble several times because of his passport. After the brief biographical information provided at the beginning, Simpson‘s hybrid identity is not referred to in the rest of the novel until the very end, which contains an arabesque return to the beginning: ―I took out the travel document and looked at it carefully. It, too, said I was British. And yet they had made me sign a paper which said in effect that I wasn‘t. Therefore, the travel document could be considered an admission of my claim. The paper was unimportant because I had signed that under duress. You cannot take away a man‘s nationality by refusing to recognize his right to it. The 1948 Act is quite clear. The only way you can lose British nationality is by renouncing it. I haven‘t renounced mine at any time. Specifically, I did not renounce it by taking that Egyptian passport. Since the Egyptians say that my Egyptian naturalization is null and void because I made false statements, then it is null and void – all of it. The British Government can‘t have it both ways. Either I am Egyptian or I am British. The Egyptians say I am not Egyptian and never have been. I say that I am not Egyptian and never have been. My father was a British officer. I am British. That is why I have been so completely frank and open. I am not asking to be loved. I am not asking to be liked. I do not mind being loathed, if that will make some pettifogging government official happier. It is a matter of principle. If necessary, I shall take my case to the United Nations. They caned the British after Suez; they can cane them again for me. Sheep I may be; and perhaps certain persons find my breath displeasing; but I am no longer indignant. I am angry now. I give the British Government fair warning. I refuse to go on being an anomaly. Is that quite clear? I refuse!” (Ambler 247). Being the only person who is informed about the international group planning to break into the treasure room of the Topkapi Palace, Arthur‘s testimony is not taken seriously by the Turkish police because of his dubious background. 137 more nuanced argument to support the main idea of this chapter. 72 The diverse population of the city, spread out in different ethnic neighborhoods, all accessible by the malleable detective, can mistakenly be regarded as the projection of a harmonious congregation, especially since the detective solves the crime as a result of the assemblage of ideas coming from a variety of sources. However, not only the suggestions of ethnic conflict that lies at the centre of the plot, but also the overemphasis on the idea of defining and mapping out this diversity, should be taken as a starting point to question, in this and the following sections, whether the source of the nostalgic impulse in these novels is for a projected order or for a utopic past that, from a European perspective, indeed existed in the Ottoman capital. Let us interrogate, in the rest of this section, how the literary cartography of the city displays both similar and varying characteristics in Jason Goodwin‘s and Barbara Nadel‘s work and how that complicates the ambiguity of the detective figure. The first striking aspect of Istanbul‘s geography for the European traveler was the separation of the ―Turkish city,‖ (alternately known as ‗Stamboul,‘ including today‘s Sultanahmet and Eyüp, referred to as ‗Eyoub‘ in old texts), located on the left side of the Golden Horn, from the European quarter known as Pera, today‘s Beyoglu, on the other side, and borrows from an old tradition of orientalist texts which, in very simplistic terms, pitted the Muslim quarter of Eyüp against the non-Muslim Pera as a way of mapping the city for their readers. Bertrand Bareilles, for instance, narrates that the first-time visitor in 72 As the embodiment of confused minds lingering between tradition and modernity Ikmen and Yashim also stand for many modern subjects in Turkey, who feel like strangers at home, a theme which will be taken up in the following chapter on contemporary Turkish authors writing on Istanbul. 138 Istanbul, if arriving by sea, is first shocked by the beauty and then notices at once that the water of the Golden Horn washes up on two different cities: On the left is the foggy peninsula with minarets extending into the sky, and on the right stands the modern city at the foot of a feudal-looking tower (32, emphasis mine). Pera‘s metaphorical and temporal distance has geographical validity. In his work on Galata, John Freely asserts that [Galata] 73 continued to be known as Sykai up until the 7 th century, when it came to be called Galata, a name of uncertain origin. It was also referred to as Pera, which in Greek means ―opposite,‖ in the sense that it was across the Golden Horn from Constantinople. Later, from the 17 th century onwards, Pera (today‘s Beyoglu) referred to the district on the heights above, while the past quarter below was known as Galata, as it still is today. (2) Facing both, Galata and Pera/Beyoğlu, the ‗Turkish side‘ is also known as the ‗historical peninsula‘ for harboring not only the Topkapi Palace complex, where the reigning Sultan lived for centuries, but also the ancient Hippodrome of Byzantium, on which now stand various Ottoman structures beside Topkapi Palace and the Byzantine Church Aga Sophia. Although both shores of the Golden Horn are located on the European side of the city, as opposed to the two other neighborhoods frequently referenced in travelogues, Scutari [today‘s Uskudar] and Chalcedon [Kadiköy], located on the Asian side, the European vs. Turkish dichotomy seems to have much more validity for the area around the Golden Horn. As inheritors of this tradition, both Nadel and Goodwin perpetuate the dichotomy 73 Jack Deleon writes that ―In antiquity, Galata was known as Sykai or Sykaena (the Fig Orchard) and in some sources is referred to as Sykudis. ....The Genoese called Galata ‗Pera‘; this district, famous for its wine and fish, appears in records as ―Magnifica Communita di Pera‖. Until the 17 th century the Ottomans also referred to the area and its inhabitants as ‗Pera Cemaat-i Muazzamasi‖ (the Great Community of Pera). When the settlement expanded onto the hillside vineyards (today‘s Beyoglu), Pera became the name of this extended area, while the former Genoese colony once again assumed the name of Galata‖ (16-17). 139 found in European travelogues, together with the descriptions of specific ethnic neighborhoods on both sides of the Golden Horn. Reading such passages, one starts to question the thin line that separates the multitude of travelogues about Istanbul from contemporary western detective fiction. Although one could attribute these instructive parts to the scholarly background of Jason Goodwin, the fact that Barbara Nadel, coming from a non-scholarly background, also has similar sections suggests that the intertextuality of contemporary detective fiction set in Istanbul is an intrinsic characteristic of the genre. The interruptive voice of intertextuality is prevalent in both authors; yet, what needs to be scrutinized is not a redundant overview of various intertextual references, but their different approaches to what they ultimately do with that intertextuality in their fiction. Barbara Nadel uses space in a rather direct way: characters are significantly associated with neighborhoods; they are assigned specific spaces within the city which has been mapped out according to its diverse community. Most of the time, the action takes place in Pera/Beyoglu –when the setting is around the old city across the Golden Horn, Nadel chooses ethnic neighborhoods such as Balat, the former Jewish quarter of the city, to provide a backdrop for the multiethnic make-up of her characters. Let us take a look at the way Nadel portrays the city by focusing on four major locations – Sultanahmet (the old Turkish quarter/city center Byzantium), facing Pera/Beyoglu (European quarter), and two ethnic neighborhoods around the Golden Horn, Balat and Galata (nearby neighborhoods to Galata such as Karakoy and Tophane will also be included). Twenty-first century Istanbul is a sprawling metropolis; yet, Nadel‘s city is 140 still confined to the limited geography that one encounters in nineteenth-century travelogues. In her extensive research about Galata and Pera in the second half of the nineteenth century, Turkish sociologist Nur Akin demonstrates that especially from the beginning of the eighteenth century, Pera is increasingly populated by foreigners and non-Muslim minorities congregating around the Ambassadors (19. yuzyilin ikinci yarisinda Galata ve Pera [Galata and Pera in the second half of the 19 th century] 12). Galata and Pera become a significant central location for major European nations such as England and France, for foreign traders benefiting from the advantages of capitulations (extraterritorial rights or privileges) for Levantines, and for minorities cooperating with them. Particularly, the growth of relations with western nations during the reign of Selim III. (1789-1808) accelerates interest in Pera, leading to new settlements (Akin 12). As a result, Pera becomes ‗the centre‘ for most European travelers, precisely because they feel at home there. The different customs observed on both sides draw these shores apart as much as the waters of the Golden Horn separate them. Nerval observes that women in Istanbul are much more covered than in Pera: they wear a green or a purple ferace, covering their faces with a thick veil. It is very uncommon for them to show anything except their eyes and the upper part of their noses. Armenian and Greek women cover their faces with a thinner veil (Nerval 556). Because of all these different customs, living in the old Turkish quarter as a foreigner is difficult, which leads the Pera region to retreat into itself, causing an almost claustrophobic atmosphere. It is as if ―real life‖ passes by elsewhere, with little 141 disturbance to the Pera inhabitants. The seclusion is best expressed in the Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope whose visit to Constantinople coincides with the unrest within the janissaries: ―We were often told that tumults had taken place in Constantinople; but as Pera, where the Franks reside, is separated by the harbour from Constantinople proper, which is not often visited by the Franks, we were never eye-witnesses of them‖ (62). Similarly, the Christian population is isolated from the troubled atmosphere before the adoption of the Constitution, as Loti writes in Aziyadé: ―The Christians in Constantinople are, however, in a state of panic. Stamboul inspires the residents of Pera with terror and they never cross its bridges except in fear and trembling‖ (44). Writing before Loti‘s time, which was a less restless time for the Ottomans, and displaying his adventurous traveler spirit, Nerval attempts to venture into the unknown, and inquires after the ways to participate in the night entertainments in the Turkish quarter of the city. A friend, a painter who knows the country‘s customs, informs Nerval that the only way to participate is to be a resident of Istanbul [Stamboul], but that residence is very difficult for a foreigner (583). Additionally, Nerval is informed that no Christian is given the right to spend the night there; they were only allowed to visit during daytime. Plus, there was no hotel for Christians to stay in (Armenians, Jews and Greeks, being natives of the city, were exempt from this restriction) (583). However, Nerval manages to stay in Istanbul by disguising himself as an Iranian, which is reminiscent of Loti‘s disguise as Arif-Effendi in Eyoub after his decision to leave Pera: ―I am tired of Pera and about to leave it. I am going to take up my abode in old Stamboul, or rather on the far side of Stamboul, in the sacred suburb of Eyoub itself. There I am 142 known as Arif-Effendi, and no one is aware of my real name or social position. The pious Moslems, my neighbours, are under no delusion as to my nationality‖ (46). On the other hand, it is equally uncomfortable for Turks to stroll around the Christian neighborhood of Pera. For instance, in Constantinopoli, Edmondo De Amicis detects that the crowd in Pera looks totally different from the crowd on the Turkish quarter: Here Turkish men stop to look at the dolls in the hairdresser‘s; Turkish women are detained in front of the tailors; the European loudly speaks, laughs and jokes in the middle of the street; the Muslim considers himself/herself away from home and cannot hold her head as straight as she does in Istanbul (68). What is intriguing for the Western traveler, particularly for De Amicis, is the contrast between the two sides of the Golden Horn. When they are in Pera, his friend, who accompanies him on his trip, first shows him Istanbul at a distance with its monuments evoking a different time. Next, he shows De Amicis the books on display in a bookstore right next to them: La Dame aux Camélias, Madame Bovary, Mademoiselle Giraud ma femme –all French books (75). This contrast between the familiarity of Pera and the ultimate otherness of the Turkish quarter, as portrayed in European travelogues, can be seen as an excellent example of the spatial uncanny observed in the geographical layout in Constantinople. The first letter Lady Montagu writes from Constantinople, dated 29 May 1717, is addressed to the Abbé Conti, to whom Montagu recounts a sketchy description of Pera where she is staying with her family: ―Our palace is in Pera, which is no more a suburb of Constantinople than Westminster is a suburb to London. All the Ambassadors are lodged very near each other. One part of our house shows us the port, the city and the 143 seraglio and the distant hills of Asia, perhaps altogether the most beautiful prospect in the world‖ (99). Montagu‘s description reveals that the district‘s view dominates everything that is associated with the Empire: the Ambassadors, the port, the city and the seraglio. On the other hand, Pera –when compared to the rest of the city- emerges almost as the stranger whose gaze at the actual city is one that belongs to an outsider –panoptical, secretive, and commanding. Centuries later, Pierre Loti‘s Aziyadé incorporates a description of Pera similar to that one finds in Montagu‘s text. Loti‘s first residence, like that of any other European subject, is in Pera, from whose heights Loti records, … I command the whole wide prospect, so pure and peaceful. Beyond the cypresses, I can see the Golden Horn, a gleaming sheet of water, and higher still on the skyline looms the silhouette of an Oriental city, Stamboul itself. The minarets, the lofty cupolas of the mosques, stand out against a star strewn sky, with a slender crescent moon floating in its depths. The horizon is fretted with turrets and minarets, faintly outlined in bluish tints against the wan background of the night. The great shadowy domes, that brood above the mosques, soar one beyond the other as high as the moon itself, and impress the imagination with the sense of gigantic size. (36) It is as if the European traveler comes to Pera to command and not necessarily to be part of the city. The defining characteristic of Pera becomes its panoptical view of the city. Perhaps it is no coincidence that both descriptions of Pera note that the neighborhood looks over the city, implying its stand-offishness. This aspect of Pera reflects intriguingly on a twenty-first-century narrative. Barbara Nadel, despite replacing Pera by the contemporary name Beyoglu, keeps most of the afore-mentioned allusions intact in the first book of her series, Belshazzar’s Daughter: A Novel of Istanbul. The surreal description of the neighborhood and its pronounced enigma aptly indicate the subconsciously inherited legacy of Pera‘s 144 representation in literature. First of all, Pera, in Nadel‘s text, is densely associated with Natalia whose unfathomable, ghost-like presence, much like Pera‘s position, dominates the scene at a distance. Natalia is Russian and the ‗unattainable woman‘ pursued by the protagonist, Robert Cornelius, who interestingly enough is English in his origins. Robert‘s frequent visits to Pera, Natalia‘s neighborhood, and the time he spends with her paradoxically make Natalia even more detached and mysterious. 74 In various other cases, Pera/Beyoglu is the neighborhood of vice and corruption, portrayed as the red-light district in Arabesk, and as the locale of underground entertainment, including Satanists‘ meeting clubs, in The Deadly Web. On the other hand, the Turkish quarter Sultanahmet, across the Golden Horn, is intensely associated with Çetin Ikmen in an effort to accentuate his ‗Turkish‘ identity. 75 74 See the Appendix C for the continuation of the idea of the commanding Pera in another twenty-first century detective novel, A Dead Man in Istanbul, written by Michael Pearce and published in 2005. 75 Considering that Nadel seems to develop her characters by looking at the map of the city, the fact that another canonically ‗Turkish‘ neighborhood is also associated with Ikmen can only be taken as a narrative necessity in her fiction, as the following two quotations from two different books suggest: ―Üsküdar, or Scutari as it had once been called, had for several generations been the Ikmen family‘s native district. It was the place from which his great-grandfather had been taken by agents of the wicked Sultan Abdul Hamid to his death at the hands of the imperial executioner on Galata Bridge; it was also the place to which his father had once brought his strange and exotic European wife. Because his mother had come from Albania, Cetin was strictly speaking half European himself; this was an ‗honour‘ that most Turks could in a spiritual sense claim because of Turkey‘s geographical location, yet he had always felt that it was rather more marked in him. The urge to modernize and rationalize his world was both strong and evident in him, yet that wild, independent and at times irrationally superstitious streak of the insular mountain dweller remained. It was a split that caused some confusion in his life and, at times, some pain too‖ (A Chemical Prison 100-101). ―Outside, Ikmen stopped briefly to observe how the midday sunlight hit the glass-like waters of the Bosphorus. This side of town, if not the district, was still home. All through his childhood he had seen İstanbul from this perspective. The imperial mosques were ‗across the water‘, as was Pera, the ‗new‘ city which had all that was European and naughty and tantalising –and important. Asia, where he was now and where he had been born in poor, old, working-class Üsküdar, was different –older almost, he sometimes felt, even though he knew that wasn‘t so. Perhaps it was a mindset –the Asian mind, hard-working and given to suffering and the reality of death; the whole area was characterised by massive, tree-darkened cemeteries. Even here in smart Kandilli there as a huge graveyard less than five minutes from where he stood now looking at Tepe watching the activity in and around the car. It was perhaps this fleeting contemplation of death that made him return to the subject of poor little Hatice İpek‖ (Harem 90). 145 With nine children, a wife and an ageing father to support, Cetin lived the life of a struggling working-class Turk, albeit an educated one. His home was a crowded, reeking apartment in Sultan Ahmet, an area of the city that not only boasted most of the famous Istanbul monuments but also a large shifting population of backpackers, drug dealers, pimps and illegal immigrants. (…) Arto, his rotund and jolly little Armenian friend, had not only done very well for himself professionally, he had married well too, which was why Cetin was now standing in this vast floodlit palace on the shore of the Bosphorus. (A Chemical Prison 9) Indeed, for the second novel, A Chemical Prison (alternately titled The Ottoman Cage), the Sultanahmet district is not only associated with the main character, but also functions as a primary location of action- the underground crime network of the city goes undisguised, side by side with the monumental history of the city. While trying to track down child prostitution, Ikmen‘s informant tricks the pimp in front of the Gate of Felicity of Topkapi Palace. Description of the significance of the place is inserted in-between description of the deal, as if to emphasize the great contradiction: The Gate of Felicity was the point where, during Ottoman times, those who were royalty or who were intimately connected with same parted company with those who were not thus blessed. It marks the start of the Inderun or inner part of the palace beyond which lie the Petition Room where the Ottoman Grand Viziers would consider requests from individuals for favours from the Sultan and the Treasury where the largess of the old Empire is sill lovingly stored. It is therefore a place that is equally evocative of both the splendours and the cruelties and inequalities of absolute rule. It is also a place where large numbers of tourists are usually gathered. On this occasion, however, there was almost total silence in this area –a late afternoon in October not generally being a busy time for any part of the Topkapi complex. (159) What initiates a reading of Nadel‘s books from a ‗spatial‘ perspective is the fact that a majority of the characters or events appear to be developed according to certain typical characteristics of the neighborhoods, which are also observed in travelers‘ accounts. As in the linkage between Ikmen and Sultanahmet, the Jewish Constable Cohen is identified 146 with Galata, the low-key neighborhood he lives in, which turns out to play a crucial role for the story in Arabesk: Cohen‘s apartment, though large, was not situated in the best part of Istanbul. Karaköy, which is that district that runs from the eastern end of the Galata Bridge up the hill of the same name to Istiklal Caddesi, is not for the faint-hearted. Though dotted with many fine old buildings, some of Genoese and Armenian origin, plus the now lovingly restored Neve Shalom Synagogue, Karaköy also possesses its share of tatty apartment buildings. The one the Cohens had moved into twenty-six years previously was the one they still lived in now. Not once in all those years had the place been so much as painted, let alone properly decorated. With the notable exceptions of one new television and an even more erratic plumbing system, nothing much had changed in all that time, at least not for the better anyway. The locals had always been dubious but in the last ten years they had become, to use a Cohenism, far more ‗serious.‘ Despite the very best efforts of the city authorities, now run by the traditional Refah Party, to flush such elements out, the old ways died hard. Indeed, in this case, they actually prospered. And, although the cheap dancing girls, petty thieves and even the legal brothels had gone away, they had been replaced mainly by full-on, streetwalking prostitutes and drug dealers. (Arabesk 14-15) Note the similarity between Nadel‘s description and the two descriptions of the same district below by Pierre Loti‘s fictional account in Aziyadé, and Francis Marion Crawford, taken from his travel notes: ‗Our Madame‘ (bizum Madame), as Samuel and Achmet called her, was an old hag, who has traipsed all over Europe and tried her hand at every trade. An Italian by birth, she could speak every language under the sun and she kept a disreputable café in the Galata quarter. The café faced a wide and busy thoroughfare; it was very roomy and ran a long way back. At the far end another door opened on to a blind alley of evil reputation, adjoining the Galata quay. This alley served as outlet to several houses of ill-fame, while the café was the favourite haunt of certain Italian and Maltese merchant seamen, who were suspected of smuggling and thieving. Business of various kinds was transacted within its doors and everyone venturing there at night did well to carry a revolver. (Loti 95) As for Galata, it is the fermenting vat of the scum of the earth. It is doubtful whether in any city in the globe such an iniquitous population could be found as that which is huddled together by the water‘s edge from Kassim Pasha to Tophane. It is indeed an interesting region to the student of criminal 147 physiognomy, for the lowest types of what must necessarily be called the civilized criminal classes fill the filthy streets, the poisonous lanes, and the reeking liquor- shops, the terror of the Europeans above and the object of righteous hatred and loathing to the Turks on the other side. The Greeks and Armenians, who lead a sort of underground existence, here make a good living, and by no means a precarious one, by a great variety of evil practices. (…) There is hardly a liquor- shop in Galata, and there are few even among the more respectable cafés in Pera, in which a gambling hell is not kept in a quiet room at the back of the establishment. (19-20) Let us look at one last neighborhood, the Jewish populated Balat, before discussing Nadel‘s representation of the city in more general terms. In an article, titled ―Special Istanbul,‖ written for a touristic web-site, Nadel refers to the Ottoman past while writing about her favorite places in Istanbul, ‗the old western [of the Golden Horn] districts of Fener and Balat,‘ both of which are appealing to her because of their ‗picturesque‘ appearance: ‗Formerly strongholds of the Greek and Jewish communities respectively, Fener and Balat still retain their churches and synagogues which continue to provide links with the past for those who either attend them or just live within these districts,‖ Nadel writes. 76 The buildings she draws attention to in these neighborhoods are all related to Ottoman history; the Church of St. Stephen of the Bulgars, Istanbul‘s oldest synagogue, Ahrida, the Fener Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, and the Armenian church of Surp Hiresdagabet. In her fiction, the neighborhood of Balat, directly associated with the Jewish population, appears perhaps less ‗picturesque‘ than she portrays it in her non- fictional work: Balat.(…) Dickensian charm was what this district possessed. David Copperfield, Pip, Mr. Jingle, Fagin: none of them would have been out of place within Balat‘s 76 http://www.bazaarturkey.com/press/press1.htm 148 ambience of poverty, petty crime and picturesque filth. Fagin, especially would have fitted in perfectly. Jews, old Jews, were the one and only commodity that Balat could boast of having in anything approaching abundance. Not that they were obvious, these ancient, winter-clad, shy little Jews, muttering gently in some language they kept exclusive, secret, like themselves. (…) Suspicious of strangers and a perceived outside world that largely hated them, they would turn their faces to the wall as he approached and disappear into the brickwork, the concrete, the stone. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire, now the Turkish Republic, provided a safe haven for Jews. It was famed for its humane attitude toward the Hebrews. But old, suspicious habits, learned in the hard schools of Western Europe, die hard. It wasn‘t personal. Of course, at its root it was all economic. In ―better‖ parts of the city there were thousands of middle-class and wealthy Jews who lived lives identical in almost every way to the Turkish majority. But in Balat things were different. When money and comfort are absent, other more fundamental aspects take on greater importance. Traditions, rules, taboos. (Belshazzar’s Daughter 2-3) 77 Nadel‘s description is noticeably similar to the two descriptions below by nineteenth- century travelers in the city: ……. I armed myself with courage, and took many turns through the vast ghetto of Balata, which winds like a disgusting serpent along the shore of the Golden Horn. I pushed on even into the most wretched alleys, in the midst of houses……. from which issued an odor fetid enough to take away my breath, making way before groups of diseased and ugly children, elbowing horrible old men, who looked like resuscitated corpses dead of the plague…. But in general I saw nothing but signs of the degradation of the race. (de Amicis 158-159) 77 The same neighborhood is described by Goodwin in a similar way: ―Just yards from the Balat landing stage the alleyways closed in. [Yashim] was funnelled between old houses rotten at their base, green with mildew, stepping past mounds of rubbish that spilled out into the passageway, negotiating stones and holes and ducking the laundry strung at head-height. The lanes of Balat were all but impassable in winter; at the height of summer some were wet and squelchy underfoot, the mud green with algae, the stench of rot sweet and pervasive. A few children, whose shaven heads exposed the red sores of ringworm, tagged him up the alleyways. Women in loose turbans which covered their hair and their ears watched him from the doorways of their houses; the alleys were so narrow he felt his cloak brush against them as he passed. From time to time he stopped to ask the way: a rabbi in a long robe, a clean-shaven young man with a yarmulka, an olive-skinned dandy in tight European trousers who lounged by a recess in the wall‖ (SS 136). 149 I never saw the type of the Jew so degraded as it is in Constantinople. There was something to me quite repulsive in the expression of one and another of the poor Israelites, as they came up pressing their goods and services upon us. I shrank with a deeply pained feeling from the recognition of their well-known features. (Baillie 68) By setting her series in the old neighborhoods of the city that appears in travelers‘ accounts and referring to London as analogous to Istanbul, Nadel in a way perpetuates the legacy of her predecessors who have visited Istanbul, only to encounter the familiar, centuries before she walked in the same streets. Moreover, her invocation of Dickens maintains continuity with another nineteenth-century long bygone literary tradition in which it was possible to identify racial others as the Jewish population. Moving from Nadel‘s individual descriptions of neighborhoods to the general representation of Istanbul allows us to see that her ultimate purpose is to turn the whole city into a criminal underground network, from the majestic Hippodrome of the old Empire and the ‗holy‘ Church of Aya Sofya to the backstreets of Balat –hence, drawing the two sides of the Golden Horn closer- even after reiterating the segregated geography of the travelogues. What remains is the scattered cosmopolitan population of Istanbul which has survived through the ruins of the empire and the foundation of the Republic. Nadel‘s obsession with providing the exact location of her characters, by giving addresses which match real locations in today‘s cityscape, looks like an attempt to solidify their presence in this, in one of her character‘s words, ―essentially Turkish city‖ (A Chemical Prison 141). In a way, she gives voice to the diminishing ethnic diversity of this city, but does this in such exaggerated terms that her fiction becomes almost like a caricature of old Constantinople. This tension between the representation of the real city 150 with its actual street addresses, and the reliance on what I call ‗the Istanbul canon,‘ underlines textuality, or the ‗textual uncanny‘ as a continuing characteristic of Istanbul‘s representation in contemporary detective fiction. Compared to Nadel‘s ‗direct‘ mode of spatial representation, Jason Goodwin develops a more unsteady relationship with ‗the Istanbul canon,‘ which he persistently questions, mocks and modifies. In the opening section of Goodwin‘s The Snake Stone, the procession of the ‗carnival crowd‘ of characters is juxtaposed with the canonical image of the city: Separation of the city layout into three neighborhoods, the old city/Turkish quarter, the European quarter and Uskudar –one of the first images one encounters in travelogues– is subtly integrated into the plot structure as the sound of the evening call to prayer, coming from the old city district, disseminates across the two other neighborhoods: It was the hour of the evening prayer, when you could no longer distinguish between a black thread and a white one in ordinary light. George pulled the paring knife from his belt and sliced it through the air as he turned. All over Istanbul, muezzins in their minarets threw back their heads and began to chant. It was a good time to kick a man to death in the street. The grainy ululations swept in sobbing waves across the Golden Horn, where the Greek oarsmen on the gliding caiques were lighting their lamps. The notes of prayer rolled over the European town at Pera, a few lights wavering against the black ridge of Galata Hill. They skimmed the Bosphorus to Uskudar, a smudge of purple fading back into the blackness of the mountains; and from there, on the Asian side, the mosques on the waterline echoed them back. (1) Though Goodwin starts out by mapping the city in the same way that his predecessors did, what he ultimately aims for is to posit the contrast between the two shores not as a local vs. foreign culture dichotomy but more as the opposition between the old and new, 151 embodied in the old abandoned Topkapi Palace in Sultanahmet/Stamboul, and the newly built Dolmabahce Palace in Besiktas across the Golden Horn. Topkapi Palace had been the residence of the Sultan and his court for almost four hundred years when it started to lose its appeal, and Dolmabahçe became the new residence of the court in 1853. Setting his novel, Snake Stone, in 1838 (and The Janissary Tree in 1836), approximately 15-20 years before the official move of the palace from Topkapı to Dolmabahçe, Goodwin aptly incorporates this transitional period. When Yashim visits the Sultan‘s mother in Topkapı, the palace grounds seem to have already lost their significance since the Sultan now resides in Dolmabahçe. The dichotomy between the two palaces strengthens the opposition between the Sultan‘s mother, still clinging to the old traditions and refusing to leave Topkapi, and the progressive Sultan Mahmud II, lying on his death bed (suffering from tuberculosis and cirrhosis of the liver) across the Golden Horn. The approaching death of Sultan Mahmud marks the end of his thirty-year reign in which he administered several radical changes to the Ottoman state, including the destruction of the Janissaries, the adoption of the French drill and the westernized dress code, all of which generated varying reactions. The Validé Sultan‘s and Yashim‘s critical look at the ‗ordering‘ and compartmentalization of space in the new palace is, in many ways, a reversal of the western travelers‘ self-critique of their own culture when confronted with the street dogs and the ‗disordered‘ space of graveyards in Constantinople: ―I intend to die here, Yashim, fully dressed. At the sultan‘s palace at Besiktas I‘d be popped into a nightgown and tucked up in a French bed, and that would be an end of it,‖ (101) asserts the Validé Sultan, and Yashim can empathize with her wish: 152 A nightgown. A tight French bed. Yashim knew how the European lived, with their mania for divisions. They parcelled up their homes the way they segregated their actions. The Franks had special rooms for sleeping in, with fussy contraptions created for performing the act itself, and all day long these bedrooms sat vacant and desolate, consoled by the dust rising in the sunlight –unless they belonged to an invalid. In which case the invalid herself shared the loneliness and desolation, far away from the household activity. The Franks had dining rooms for dining in, and sitting rooms for sitting in, and drawing rooms for withdrawing into –as if their whole lives were not a series of withdrawals anyway, tiptoeing from one room and one function to the next, changing and dressing all over again, forever on the run from engagement with real life. Whereas in an Ottoman home –even here, in the harem –everyone was allowed to float on the currents of life as they sped by. People divided their lives between what was public, and what was reserved for the family, between selamlik and haremlik: in the poorest homes, they were divided only by a curtain. If you were hungry, food was brought in. If you wished to sleep, you unfolded your legs, reclined, and twitched a shawl over yourself. If you were moody, someone was sure to drop in to cheer you up; ill, and someone noticed; tired, and nobody minded if you dozed. (101-102) The reverse defamiliarization at work in observing the familiarity of a European style within the Ottoman palace overturns the nineteenth-century traveler‘s unexpected encounter with the familiar in unfamiliar terrain. In The Janissary Tree, a similar defamiliarizing effect can be observed in the description of the New Guard, which is many times associated with discipline as the Seraskier (the commander-in-chief of the new troops) tells Yashim: ―But horsemen without discipline have no place on the modern battlefield. Today we need disciplined infantry, with muskets and bayonets. Artillery‖ (8). 78 The dichotomy between the old 78 In contrast to the Seraskier‘s perspective, Yashim considers various factors in the formation of the New Guard: ―Yashim saw the seraskier stiffen. In their newfangled European jackets and trousers, the New Guard had been put through their paces by a succession of foreign instructors, ferenghi from Europe who taught them drilling, marching, presenting arms. What could you say? In spite of it all the Egyptians –the Egyptians!- had dealt them humiliating reverses in Palestine and Syria, and the Russians were closer to 153 and new is this time embodied in the contrast between the Janissaries, old troops of the Empire, known for their frequent uprisings against any kind of modernizing attempts by various Sultans (and hence violently suppressed and massacred in 1826), and the western-style ‗New Guard,‘ which replaces the old troops. 79 As Yashim discovers in the novel, the recent unrest in the city and the brutal killing of the four soldiers from the New Guard is only the starting point of an extensive Janissary insurrection supported by the Russians. What is of relevance here about the Janissary plot is how each location of the murder on the two sides of the Golden Horn contributes to the reiteration of certain landmarks that appear frequently in travelogues, such as the Galata Tower, The Beyazit Tower, the Grand Bazaar and the City Walls; yet, reveals the alternative history of these locations‘ significance for the Janissaries. While each of the first three housed a Karagozi tekke, a religious place sacred for the Janissaries, the last one, particularly a certain gate in the northwestern part of the Golden Horn where Yashim expects to find the fourth soldier, was important in the conquest of the city in which the Janissaries played a significant role. The insurrection can, therefore, be seen as the Janissaries reclaiming of ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Istanbul than at any time in living memory. Perhaps their victories were to have been expected, for they were formidable opponents with up-to-date equipment and modern armies; yet there remained, too, the debacle in Greece. No more than peasants in pantaloons, led by quarrelsome windbags, even the Greeks had proved to be more than a match for the New Guard. All this left the New Guard with a single sanguinary triumph. It was a victory achieved not on the battlefield but right here, on the streets of Istanbul; not against foreign enemies but against their own military predecessors, the dangerously overweening Janissary Corps. The Ottoman Empire‘s crack troops in the sixteenth century, the Janissaries had long since degenerated –or evolved, if you liked –into an armed mafia, terrorizing sultans, swaggering through the streets of Istanbul, rioting, fire-raising, thieving, and extorting with impunity. The New Guard had finally settled the account. Ten years ago, on the night of June 16, 1826, New Guard gunners had pounded the Janissaries to pieces in their barracks, bringing four centuries of terror and triumph to a well-deserved end‖ (9-10). 79 Please see Appendix D about the history of the Janissaries and their suppression in 1826, as it is narrated in The Janissary Tree. 154 the city together with their lost power. In a similar way, The Snake Stone gradually turns into an intricate plot organized around the Byzantine past and the secret underground system, combined with another insurrection story about the Albanian watermen, the old guild which consists of former Janissaries. In addition to the main story about the resurfacing resentment of the Janissaries and of the watermen guild, various related sub- plots and the characterization of main figures bolster the polarity between tradition and modernity, old and new, while at the same time underlining the complications imbedded in this polarization. To give just one example, Stanislaw Palewski, the Polish imperial ambassador to the Sublime Porte, embodies the crumbling of the old world order in his personality –he still lives in the Polish Embassy in Pera (probably tolerated by the Ottomans as a means to contradict Russian policy as part of the contemporary political rivalry between the two empires) although Poland at the time was already wiped out from the map by the Russian, Prussian and Austrian troops. Taking the opposition between the old and new world as a starting point, Goodwin‘s ultimate goal is to interrogate the less explored aspects of the city that escape the dichotomy between tradition and modernity that is too easily charted in travelogues, as if they can be as clearly divided as the two sides of the Golden Horn. Moreover, he also aims to bring the story back home: ―After all, the Ottomans are exotic, foreign, whatever– but their story is also our story. And it is amazingly under-explored, in fiction certainly‖ comments Goodwin. 80 In answering an interviewer about the reasons behind the popularity of his Ottoman detective series, he recapitulates the thorny relationship between Europe and the Ottomans: 80 http://thebellinicard.wordpress.com/interview-with-la-repubblica/ 155 It must be a question of lucky timing, with Turkey always in the news now, as a candidate for EU membership, there is also a lot more interest in, and awareness of, the Ottoman heritage. That‘s true in Turkey itself –the Turks are much more open towards their past than they have been for years. Also, don‘t forget that a lot of European countries can claim a piece of Ottoman history for themselves. Italy, certainly –the Ottomans landed in Otranto in 1480, and swept up to the banks of the Piave, too. And others, more directly concerned – ruled by the Ottomans for instance. So there is a genuine wave of curiosity, I think. 81 Hence, the portrayal of Istanbul‘s past in Goodwin‘s fiction (and the past as corresponding to Istanbul in Nadel), combined with the representation of the city‘s spatial geography, including the various neighborhoods and the exaggerated demography of the multiethnic population, functions as a way to contemplate oneself. The balance between a familiar and an unfamiliar world generates stories for English readers who are fascinated by these novels that are strangely about themselves. Western detective fiction set in Istanbul resurrects a past world, resurfaces a suppressed present reality, projected elsewhere, so that fear and anxiety (of a current situation at home), or simply longing (for an irretrievable past) are given form and materialized, as much as isolated for being external to oneself. Considered in this way, the encounter with the exotic is a way to impose power over the other, in addition to ‗the monstrous‘ silenced within. In Signs Taken for Wonders, Franco Moretti summarizes the function of what he calls ―the literature of terror‖ as bringing comfort to individuals, which is achieved through the replacement of the ‗original‘ with a copy. While Moretti argues that any ‗aesthetic activity‘ originates 81 http://thebellinicard.wordpress.com/interview-with-la-repubblica/ 156 from the ‗return of the repressed,‘ ―in order for the repressed psychical contents to reoccupy the stage, they must put on a ‗mask‘, or more exactly take on a ‗form‘ different from their original, in consequence of the conflict with a psychical force which acts in the opposite direction‖ (35). Moretti‘s assertions about the ―literature of terror‖ have relevance for detective fiction as well: Marxism and psychoanalysis thus converge in defining the function of this literature: to take up within itself determinate fears in order to present them in a form different from their real one: to transform them into other fears, so that readers do not have to face up to what might really frighten them. It is a ‗negative‘ function: it distorts reality. It is a work of ‗mystification‘. But it is also a work of ‗production‘. The more these great symbols of mass culture depart from reality the more, of necessity, they must expand and enrich the structures of false consciousness: which is nothing other than the dominant culture. They are not confined to distortion and falsification: they form, affirm, convince. (Moretti 105) Moretti‘s assertion aptly summarizes this chapter‘s overall attempt to understand the motivation behind the fact that contemporary Istanbul serves as a background for detective novels written by European (especially English) writers, and considers that which is projected on Istanbul space as the ‗mask‘ whose unmasking has the potential to identify the content of the repressed. In both writers, among others writing on Istanbul, the city is used as a landscape, an empty space onto which the West projects its criminality from an Orientalist perspective in the form of detective fiction. Istanbul is chosen not only because its multiethnic past has the potential to portray the threatening chaos and conflict that is crucial for the storyline, but also because the projected order of a perpetually pre-modern world facilitates the necessary resolution of the ending. The reader finds comfort first in the familiar structure of the detective story set against the modernizing metropolis (defamiliarized with the introduction of a pre-modern world in 157 which witchcraft, blood feuds, paganism, and strange rituals exist and everyone turns out to be related to everyone else) and secondly in the re-assurance that all the tension and danger in the narrative takes place away from home. As a structural requirement, however, detective fiction always returns back home: the conclusion incorporates the elimination of that which threatens the comfortable bourgeois domesticity. Let us interrogate, in the following section, how western detective fiction returns to the heimlich, again, after a long journey from the familiar to the unfamiliar. ii) Nostalgia for the Other‟s Past: Barbara Nadel‟s Istanbul ―Fiction is so much more comfortable than reality‖ Barbara Nadel (http://www.twbooks.co.uk/authors/bnadellastrights.html) Barbara Nadel‘s work is a dizzying agglomeration of ethnic characters that seem to be produced on every single page of her novels. Apart from the chaotic social structure over which the police try to have control, the Homicide Department also displays remarkable diversity in the representation of police officers such as the half-Albanian Inspector Çetin Ikmen, Ottoman aristocratic descendent Inspector Mehmet Süleyman, Yezidi Kurdish Isak Çöktin, and Jewish Constable Cohen. In Nadel‘s first four novels, the premodern world is evoked by portraying the city‘s various ethnic groups as tribal communities with ‗unmodern‘ lifestyles, seeping into and corrupting even the police department, whereas murder as a result of certain forgotten ritualistic practices that are strongly associated with the premodern is the main focus in a majority of the subsequent 158 novels set in Istanbul. As Nadel writes in the opening section of her fourth novel, Arabesk, the city has a potential ambiguity which can be molded in a way that is appealing for a multitude of perspectives: And in truth the tourists get what they pay for –whatever that might be. In Istanbul, it is said, a man can very easily satisfy all of his desires both earthly and divine. That the getting of those desirables might lead such a man, or woman, to discontent or even rage has little to do with either the city or its inhabitants. When you have been on the world stage for as long as Istanbul you are expected to deliver a very great deal to those who come to visit you. (2) What Nadel suggests in this passage that might at first sound contradictory is that the perception of the city is independent of the city itself. The cityscape can be used to project desire -or perhaps fear within the context of the current chapter- in any form it can assume, and its resolution is comfortingly away from home. Belshazzar’s Daughter opens with a horrifying description of a decaying corpse in the Jewish quarter, followed by the introduction of the main character, the Englishman, Robert Cornelius, teaching English at a language school in Istanbul. He happens to have passed by the Jewish quarter of Balat when the murder possibly took place; hence turning into a probable suspect according to the experienced Inspector, Cetin Ikmen. Ikmen‘s best friend, doctor Arto, who is a rich Armenian, arrives to examine the body. As the investigation progresses, we learn that Cornelius is infatuated with Natalia, a Russian woman, whose extended family escaped to Istanbul from the Bolshevik Revolution. Natalia‘s grandmother was helped by the Jewish victim, who was a Bolshevik at the time, at the cost of being his lover till they arrive in Istanbul. Meanwhile, a former Nazi partisan, Reinhold Smiths, the victim‘s former employee who mysteriously fired him, is also considered as a possible murderer, especially since the police find a remarkably 159 enormous swastika next to the body of the Jewish victim. In this chaotic city which produces ethnically diverse characters on almost every page of the novel, Nadel writes the story of a crime that has strong implications of being motivated by xenophobia. This is certainly a gloomy image of the consequences of different ethnic groups‘ co-existence. However, Nadel maintains a balance between the dystopic and utopic image of the multi- ethnic city by pointing out xenophobia as only a possible motivation for homicide. Indeed, the resolution of the investigation reveals that the Jewish victim is murdered as an act of personal revenge by the Russians, who have not forgiven the victim‘s involvement with the murder of the rest of their family during the Revolution. Hence, the fear of ethnic crime is unleashed, yet mollified within the narrative. What is striking in the novel is the portrayal of the Russian family as a closed tribal community which defiantly violates basic regulations of modern metropolitan existence. In addition to their remaining undocumented since their arrival, the family‘s incestuous internal structure is guarded to protect ‗the purity of blood‘ inherited from Natalia‘s grandmother, the Tsar‘s third daughter and only survivor. The possibility of maintaining a feudal order at the heart of the city, posited as part of Istanbul‘s ordinary life in Nadel‘s fiction, is eliminated by yet another everyday (though slightly anachronistic) event in the wooden houses of the old city: a fire that is unintentionally started by Natalia‘s half-witted twin Misha quickly spreads around the building and wipes out from earth the surviving heirs of the ‗divine family.‘ Along the lines of her first novel, Barbara Nadel uses the Armenian community in the second one, A Chemical Prison, in order to give rise to suspicions about hate crime as 160 the primary reason behind the murder. The victim this time is a teenaged boy found dead, strangled and his limbs atrophied, in a house close to the Topkapi Museum in Sultanahmet. The flat is owned by a middle-aged man, disguised as an Armenian, who is under suspicion of having drugged and possibly abused the boy. 82 The implication of pedophilia is only a starting point to involve Ikmen and his crew with an investigation that gradually reveals that a Christian doctor is the supplier of drugs for a group of under- age male prostitutes visited by old men. As the plot unfolds, it is demonstrated that the drug is supplied by an Armenian doctor, giving the impression that the Armenian community, headed by the victim‘s abuser and the doctor, is acting as a gang or conspirators in illegal activity. Yet, it turns out that the crime committed by one or more Armenian citizen/s is not directly related to either the victim‘s or the criminal‘s ethnic identity, but is much more personally-motivated. Cetin Ikmen finds out that the victim is the brother of the sickly-minded Muhammed Ersoy who incarcerated his brother for dubious reasons. The Armenian disguise originated at the suggestion of his gay lover, the Armenian doctor Avram‘s, theory that ‗Armenians are invisible.‘ Avram injected drugs into Ersoy‘s bed-ridden brother to help Ersoy, with whom he was desperately in love, while he supplied clinical drugs to child prostitutes in return for sex that was supposedly conducted to avenge Ersoy‘s affairs with other men. The brother was overdosed by the 82 Among the various other red herrings, the fact that the victim is held captive in an old Ottoman mansion unavoidably evokes the ancient practice of the cage system. As Filiz Turhan explains, the imprisonment of Ottoman princes began as a consequence of political rivalry among siblings: ―The custom of the so-called cage began in 1595. Ottoman princes were virtual prisoners in the Harem, kept there in the event that an unexpected fatality (or coup) should befall the reigning sovereign. However, to fend off the possibility of their plotting against the Sultan, they were ‗locked in the cage.‘ It is noteworthy that the genesis of this custom is traced to the influence of the Queen Mother Safiye, the Venetian-born mother of Mehmed III (1595-1603), who wielded an enormous amount of control over her son‖ (179). 161 doctor because of Ersoy‘s personal whim –he simply grew tired of the efforts to keep him. When Ersoy, the central figure of the story, is arrested, the policemen finally learn his real motivation for treating his brother so sadistically: Ersoy was sexually abused by his father as a child. Hence his efforts to excel his role model in the evil he has inflicted on his family. The motivation behind the potential hate crime could not be more personal. The ethnic conflict of the city is once again presented only as a possibility. In the third novel, Arabesk, Nadel turns her attention to the Kurdish community by writing about the murder of the wife of a popular Arabesk singer, Kurdish Erol Urfa, who has an extra-marital affair with another Kurdish Arabesk singer, Tansu Hanim. By not only portraying the victim, Erol Urfa and an officer in the police department, as Yezidi Kurds, a tribal sect that worships the sun instead of God, but also writing about Arabesk music, created and consumed by migrants in Istanbul, Nadel delves into the depths of the underrepresented population of the city. 83 Dubiously situated within Turkish modernity, arabesk music has been criticized for its anti-western style in its lyrics and melodies, since ―it connotes for its critics a subversive internal orient, a subaltern eastern Turkey resistant to secularized modernity‖ (Born and Hesmondhalgh 34). As a devout secularist, Cetin Ikmen, who is temporarily on leave due to a chronic ulcer, greatly 83 Arabesk (French arabesque, Italian arbesco) meaning ―made and done in the Arabic fashion,‖ refers to a complex, ornate design of intertwined foliate or geometrical figures used for ornamentation. The association of rural migrants with Turkish arabesk music is preceded by huge flocks of migration to big cities such as Istanbul starting from the late 1950s. The migrants who had to move due to various economic reasons finally ended up in urban squatter settlements, coping with displacement and disillusionment. Looking for a way to restore their lost voice in the so-called shared space of Istanbul, the migrants resorted to the newly emerging arabesk music in order to raise their objection against the authorities. 83 Synthesizing western and eastern, particularly Egyptian musical elements, arabesk music enabled migrants to express their frustration for being excluded from this ―city of golden rocks and lands.‖ Inhabiting in the city, yet being debarred from accessing its resources as geographically and socially marginalized, the migrants represented a hybrid culture which found expression in the mixed style of arabesk that gave voice to the challenges of living in a big city. 162 dislikes the music while his wife, Fatma, is unabashedly attached to it. Arabesk has an intriguing and fast-paced plot development in which Suleyman, Ikmen‘s former sergeant, now promoted to Ikmen‘s status, discloses that the victim was murdered as an act of revenge by the least-suspected Tansu‘s sister, Latife, whose testimony reveals her life- long hatred and sibling rivalry that results from remaining in the shadow of her elder sister. Knowing ‗how devastating it would be for her should something happen to [Erol‘s wife] and Erol then not marry her,‘ Latife kills Erol‘s wife to avenge giving up on her own ambitions, such as going to college, in order to help Tansu rise in her career as a singer. Although the crime itself has no direct correlation with the ‗tribal values‘ of the Yezidi sect, commonly known as ‗Devil-worshippers,‘ the story keeps the possibility open as it continuously focuses on the conflict between society and the ‗un-modern‘ ways of this community whose secrecy needs to be disclosed alongside the identity of the murderer. During a conversation between Suleyman and the Armenian forensic pathologist Arto, who suggests that Suleyman should use Coktin, a Yezidi policeman, as an ‗insider,‘ the former speaks in straight Holmesian language when he blurts out that ―I wish to cut through as much clan loyalty as I can. (…) I don‘t care what values these people adhere to or what they consider their origins to be‘ (82-83). As Arto‘s sarcastic response, ‗How very modern‘ implies, Suleyman‘s frustration has as much with the mystery surrounding the murder as with the secrecy of a community that escapes the penetration of his panoptical gaze. That Suleyman sounds totally at a loss during the interrogation of Erol Urfa, who informs him that his family does not know about the 163 death of his wife since they have no means of communication with the outside world in his village (i.e. no telephone, no television, and no possibility of correspondence because of their illiteracy), emphasizes the urban elite‘s reaction to, and subsequent marginalization of, the migrant population. For Suleyman, it is incomprehensible that Erol Urfa‘s inter-marriage, as a requirement dictated by his religion, occurred after he started an affair with Tansu, the woman he claims to love along with his wife. In addition to the unacceptability of polygamy from the perspective of the modernized elite, Suleyman points at what he sees as a contradiction in Erol‘s publicized affair with Tansu whereas his marriage is kept as a secret from his fans. Süleyman‘s comment, ‗I would have thought that [his manager] would have wanted to exploit the fact that Erol honoured his village betrothal. Man of principle marries little country girl. After all, most of his fans are of a certain class,‘ summarizes the sweeping generalization about values shared by ‗peasants‘ and their ways of living, and his efforts to simplify the complexities of what is considered to be peripheral to the modern world. The threat posed by the Yezidi sect might have been subdued in the narrative with the discovery of the real motivation behind crime. Yet, what emerges as another possible conflict in Nadel‘s fiction is the gap opened up between the migrant population and the urban elite, which brings the story close to home. The unfounded claims of ethnic conflict that results in homicide involve inspector Cetin Ikmen‘s personal life in Nadel‘s fourth novel, Deep Waters, in which Rifat Berisha, a twenty-year old Albanian, is found dead, his head severed from his body. What is being hinted at this time, is the continuing blood feud between the Berishas and Vloras, two 164 Albanians clans living in Istanbul. During the course of the investigation, Ikmen is driven to confront his own past as he learns the shocking reality that surrounds his mother‘s death. As one of the members of the families ‗in blood‘ tells him in a fit of rage, Ayse Ikmen was killed in a blood feud, a claim which, upon Ikmen‘s further inquiry, is verified by her death reports. Apart from Ikmen‘s personal history and the story of Albanian blood feuds, the plot incorporates another sub-story that revives the atmosphere of a feudal world. The victim recently had surgery in England to give one of his kidneys to his lover Felicity, which caused resentment on the victim‘s part against Felicity‘s eccentric family. Felicity‘s father is a gangster selling refugees‘ body parts to rich Europeans, while his brother is led by Felicity herself to believe that they are both vampires. When Rifat visits Felicity‘s house to tell them how he feels about the whole family, he is murdered by the father and his corpse is attacked by the brother. The fear of reverse colonialism surrounding the vampire myth, threatening the London metropolis, is shipped back to Istanbul; yet even in this ‗feudal‘ world, the mere possibility of belief in vampire stories sounds too exaggerated and out of context. In the final analysis, neither the tribal world inside the city nor the obscure vampire connection can be designated as the reason for the murder: in each case it is far more personal, coincidental and idiosyncratic to such an extent that it cannot be generalized as racial. In various other detective stories set in Istanbul, the possibility of a larger motivation for crimes, such as political intrigues, is negated by the real motivation that is a lot more personal and less metaphorical. 84 The ‗literal,‘ ‗political‘ space of Istanbul is 84 The following random examples from contemporary western detective fiction set in Istanbul might be helpful in terms of presenting the political motivation for crime as a red herring. In A Dead Man in Istanbul 165 suggested (and the reader readily accepts it, having been unwittingly trained by the established canon), but used only to confuse the reader. The real secret that needs to be finally revealed has nothing to do with Istanbul‘s peculiarity: it could have happened anywhere, which moves the story closer to home. Ethnic conflict is posited as a possibility, but subdued by the personal motivations of the characters. If we look at the history of the city, Nadel‘s Istanbul emerges as an exaggerated version of the multi-ethnic Ottoman capital, for which Nadel sounds sympathetic, if not wholly nostalgic. Indeed, Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire for centuries, was defined by European writers as the center of a cosmopolitan gathering, a ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- by Michael Pearce, set in 1911, Seymour, an officer of the special Branch, arrives in Istanbul in order to investigate the suspicious circumstances of the death of the Second Secretary of the British Embassy, who died while swimming the Dardanelles Straits. It is out of the tension between two conflicting hypotheses – that it was a Romantic attempt to revive Leander‘s / Byron‘s legend or that he was on a spying excursion to find out a suitable place for a military expedition– that the narrative originates and is extended. What is more, this tension is still maintained at the end of the novel when the investigation is resolved. According to Inspector Seymour, the Second Secretary initially set out to imitate the romantic attempt to swim the Dardanelles- from Abydos to Sestos. On learning that there might be mines on the Abydos side, he decided to switch his direction, from Sestos to Abydos, so that he can inspect the mines, if they ever existed at all. This is only the starting point of a chain of conflicting hypotheses, whose common point is to provide a tension between personal and political motivations. The murder is apparently committed by Ahmet, a dancing boy who has also killed an actress, Miss Kassim. Ahmet killed the Second Secretary at the instigation of Prince Selim, who was close friends with the Secretary but soon got jealous of him. Ahmet killed Miss Kassim, as Seymour explains, ―at the instigation of Mr. Cubuklu, who was acting on behalf of Prince Hafiz and trying to thwart Selim‘s attempt to present himself as a progressive and a modernizer. May I say that I think Mr. Cubuklu also saw himself as acting on behalf of conservative court circles who were shocked at Selim‘s open flirtation with a woman [Miss Kassim] they regarded as totally unsuitable‖ (204). In The Light of Day, written by Eric Ambler, the protagonist, Arthur Abdel Simpson, meets an Englishman in Greece, who asks him to drive his car to Istanbul and meet him there. Although the circumstances look quite suspicious, Simpson agrees, since this is not the first time that he is involved with illegal transactions. When the car is inspected at the Turkish border (only coincidentally because Simpson‘s passport, unbeknownst to him, expired), the police find ―tear-gas grenades, concussion grenades, smoke grenades, six pistols, six times twenty rounds of ammunition‖ (69). According to the Inspector, this is enough equipment for making a surprise attack on some important person, and they become suspicious of the supporters of the former régime. The police release Simpson on condition that he act as a spy for them. Simpson spends many months with the Englishman and his friends, which constitute an international group –appropriately designed to fire the reader‘s imagination about an international conspiracy against the Turks- and finally finds out that their intention is not related to a political conspiracy at all but to break into the treasure room of the Topkapi Palace in order to satisfy their personal motivation to become rich. 166 multi-ethnic environment. During the foundation of the Republic, however, Istanbul was consciously left out, precisely because of its close connection to the Empire and the Ottoman Sultan. 85 In his article, ―Depopulated Cosmopolitanism: The Cultures of Integration, Concealment, and Evacuation in Istanbul,‖ Benton Jay Komins asserts that ―In the new Turkish Republic, cosmopolitan Istanbul would be reconfigured ideologically as subordinate to the Turks‘ new central Anatolian capital of Ankara‖ (367). In addition to its subordination, Istanbul is ―otherized‖, treated as an outcast or a deviant case in contemporary texts which can no longer draw on the city‘s associations with the Empire and the nation, yet cannot dispose of the haunting past either. Moreover, Istanbul‘s mythic significance as a multi-ethnic city has also been disturbed through the displacement of minority populations due to various state policies. In the light of the major change in the history of the city –from the capital of an Empire to the largest city of a nation-state and the diminishing population of ethnic minorities– Nadel‘s portrayal of the city as a melting pot deserves further examination. As a frequent visitor to the city and an avid reader of the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, Nadel is surely aware of her distorting perspective. 86 She deliberates over her novels‘ manifest cosmopolitan character in an interview with a 85 Following the defeat in the First World War, Vahdettin, the Ottoman Sultan, expressed his interest in the English mandate while he tried to prevent the Founder of the Republic, Ataturk, from organizing the remaining troops to fight a war of independence. As a result, Ankara, as a more ‗neutral‘ and central city of the Asia Minor was chosen as the new capital of the emerging nation. 86 As a flȃneuse, Nadel strolls around neighborhoods where the action of her novels takes place. In her interview with Muhsin Ozturk, she relates that she walks for hours in the city. Her initial route that was mostly around touristic places has recently changed into far-away and neglected neighborhoods such as Sariyer along the northern shore of the Bosphorus. Another frequented location is the cemetery of Uskudar, which she finds soothing and peaceful- uncannily reminiscent of the way European travelogues felt about the location. (http://www.aksiyon.com.tr/detay.php?id=2343) 167 Turkish journalist, and considers how it compares to her own country. As Nadel points out in the interview, two facts –that a major part of the action takes place in historical neighborhoods and that the cosmopolitan face of the city is foregrounded- are crucial for her fiction to be appealing for a world-wide audience, which might be interpreted as a practical strategy to evoke an exotic locale that would make her books more marketable: Such neighborhoods and cosmopolitanism might not be that important for the natives of a country, but if you are thinking of being published in distant countries such as Australia and United States, then you choose these neighborhoods and themes to provide familiarity for them. (…) If I needed to think of a similar place in England, I would prefer places like the London Tower which has both a historical and a modern life. (Aksiyon, 27.01.2003) 87 While the textual uncanny provides familiarity with the historical parts of Istanbul to the western audience, the multi-ethnic character of the city is a common experience for all metropolitan centers in the post-imperial world. As a response to the question about whether the character of the Armenian [sic] officer in the police department (despite its implausibility) is a necessary component to prove the cosmopolitanism of the city, Nadel explains that writing about characters coming from different backgrounds is a way to create tension that is crucial for a detective novel. Yet, there is something peculiar about Istanbul, Nadel adds: To me, there is something very interesting about this place. It might not be to that extent now, but since the period of the Empire, until recently, this has been a city in which different ethnic groups were allowed as much as possible to live together. The Ottoman experience seems interesting and very different from our own. The British Empire assimilates people. In the Ottoman case, on the other 87 This interview is published on the website of a Turkish magazine, Aksiyon, http://www.aksiyon.com.tr/detay.php?id=2343. The translations of this and the following quotations into English are my own. 168 hand, there is freedom. Everyone can speak his language, practice his religion –in other words, can be accepted with his real identity. 88 The conflict between a familiar and an unfamiliar world in Nadel‘s representations of Istanbul enable the European perspective to recognize the stranger ‗at home.‘ The experience of return to the heimlich, the diversity at home, as a result of the encounter with what was initially considered to be the unfamiliar domain –the chaotic population of Istanbul– can be seen as perpetuating the analogy between one‘s hometown, particularly London, and Constantinople in nineteenth-century European travelers‘ accounts. In The Other Empire: British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire, Filiz Turhan argues that the Ottoman Empire in general, and the city of Constantinople in particular, were used as sliding signifiers by British Romantic writers. The decaying Empire represented failing imperialism as a counterimage to the British Empire, which performed imperialism successfully, in sharp contrast to the Ottomans. Hence, the British Romantics were both attracted and repulsed by their own image turned upside down. Borrowing from Mary Louise Pratt‘s conception of ‗contact zones,‘ which are ‗―…… social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination….‘ ‖ (Imperial Eyes 4), Turhan argues that ―What is significant about Constantinople as a contact zone is that the domestic center of the powerful and expansionist empire, is the same as the colonial frontier‖ (113). As an imperial centre, Constantinople might have looked familiar, especially to an English traveler; yet, the co-habitation of what the western traveler 88 http://www.aksiyon.com.tr/detay.php?id=2343 169 perceives as ‗the colonizer and the colonized‘ –that is, the simultaneous existence of various minorities– poses an unfamiliar sight. As Turhan points out, (…) the city of Constantinople acted as a fruitful counterimage of empire because the very shape of the empire, exemplified in the administration of its capital city, fundamentally differed from that of the English. This can be seen in two distinct ways. The first is the ambiguous domestic/political space of the Imperial Harem. (…) this aspect of the Ottomans exemplified the opposite of the increasingly pervasive ideal of separate spheres of commerce and politics versus domesticity in England. The second is the city‘s status as crossroads of race, culture, and religion. (…) What is of utmost uncannniness is that the capital itself (not just the frontiers of empire) is a contact zone organized along racial, religious, and national lines. (108) Adapting Turhan‘s argument about British romantic writers, I argue that the somewhat exaggerated multicultural environment of the city is particularly crucial in understanding how a contemporary English writer portrays the multiculturalism that has been a major question for many cities at home. Nadel‘s reinsertion of the counterimage of the long bygone imperial city as congregating subject peoples into proximate space, therefore, elucidates (post-) colonial fear of homogenization in the modern world –as opposed to the ‗recognizability‘ of the population in the Ottomans, as Nadel comments in the interview above.– Keeping the counterimage intact and elsewhere is a further reassurance that the plight of the cosmopolitan European metropolis in the post-imperial age, despite similarities, is comfortably differentiated because of the conflict and crime potential within ethnic groups in today‘s Istanbul. In other words, Istanbul is posited as if it were the future that did not happen in Europe. As various examples from Nadel‘s fiction discussed above demonstrate, Istanbul offers a geography onto which the fears of the uncontrollable chaos and of racial mixing as a consequence of modernity are 170 projected, expressed, made legible; hence, purified in the cathartic moment of realization that the victim is killed as a result of personal reasons that can even be justified as self- defense. That is the moment the story finally expectedly, in other words, ‗familiarly‘ returns back to the heimlich both structurally, as a classic detective fiction move in which everything comes back to the family, and thematically, as a circuitous route to the heterogeneous experiences that define London and the East End. As Istanbul and the East End start to look alike, the increasing possibilities of confining the former within the latter as liminal part of London and vice versa enable control and power over both and help exonerate one through the other. 89 If we go back to the epigraph of this chapter and re-consider it as a way of conclusion, what is ―remote‖ in this case is the Istanbul crowd which is ―already close at hand.‖ With its generic structure in which ―something is uncanny –that is how it begins. But at the same time one must search for that remoter ‗something,‘ which is already close 89 The association of Istanbul with the East End is a common motif in both travelogues and detective fiction. See the following passage as an example from Michael Pearce‘s book published in 2005: ―It was swelteringly hot and by the time he reached the Galata Bridge his shirt was drenched with sweat. He paused for a moment by the bridge, looking down into the water and at the array of ships, and gathering his breath. Seymour liked docks. He had spent all his life within a mile of the London docks. Even when he had been posted to the Special Branch he had continued to work in that area, where his skill at languages helped him with the immigrants who abounded there. He came from an immigrant family himself, back a little way. His grandfather had come from Poland, his mother from Hungary. They had landed in the docks and then, like so many other immigrant families, had stayed. Seymour had grown up there among the many languages of the East End and had noticed it and began to take him round with him. This in turn had led to the police noticing him and eventually to his joining the police. He had become known as ‗the languages man‘ and so when the Foreign Office had asked for someone with knowledge of foreign languages his name had been the one that was put forward. But it wasn‘t just the languages. His upbringing had given him a sense of the people and lives behind the languages. That sense was missing here; but now, as he went about on foot, hearing the talk and seeing the people, he began to capture it a little. The Arabic and Turkish he could not understand, although he was beginning to grasp them a little. But there were other languages in the streets, too, Italian and German and French, and these he had no difficulty with. For all the differences, this part of Istanbul was not actually that different from the East End‖ (A Dead Man in Istanbul 49). 171 at hand,‖ detective genre perhaps only provides a certain format in which the obsessive desire of western detective fiction set in Istanbul to restore the ‗lost text‘ –of the pre- modern world or the structured multiethnic community of Constantinople– back to its place, finds a comforting home. The structure of detective fiction correlates to the belatedness imbedded in the Istanbul canon in which certain themes, ideas, events, or what Bloch calls ―the darkness at the beginning‖ precede the existent body of literature: So we are now prepared for the style itself, knitting and knotting; for its characteristics, which are threefold, closely intertwined and full of intention. First comes the suspense associated with guessing, pointing itself, in detective-like manner, to the second characteristic, that of unmasking and discovering, with special emphasis on what is remote, often the most important source of information. And the act of discovery leads, in the third instance, to events that must first be wrested from their pre-narrative, un-narrated state. The third aspect is the most characteristic of the detective story, rendering it unmistakably independent of the detective figure. Before the first word of the first chapter something happened, but no one knows what, apparently not even the narrator. A dim focal point exist, as yet unrecognized, whither and thither the entire truckload of ensuing events is mobilized –a crime, usually murder, precedes the beginning. In all other narrative forms both deeds and misdeeds develop before the omnipresent reader. Here, on the contrary, the reader is absent when the misdeed occurs, a misdeed that, though conveniently home-delivered, shuns the light of day and lingers in the background of the story. It must be brought to light and this process itself is the exclusive theme. The obscure deed is not even presented in a prelude, for it is as yet unpresentable, except through a process of reconstruction from investigation and evidence. (Bloch 249) In addition to the restoration of a more orderly world at the end, Nadel‘s fiction points at the transition from the ‗nonexistent‘ and the lost text of modern travelers to a more structured narrative. Let us consider the ways in which Jason Goodwin moves one step further than Nadel by parodying the whole literary canon on which he bases his novels and bringing forth the idea of the lost text more poignantly, which will allow us to make a 172 transition from nostalgia to melancholy in the last chapter about contemporary Turkish authors writing on Istanbul. iii) The Historiographical Detective Fiction in Jason Goodwin‟s Ottoman Detective Series Jason Goodwin‘s images of the city, ranging from the description of the first encounter to details of the cityscape, are predicated on the established discourse commonly encountered in travelogues. The travelers‘ typical ordering of the spatial layout is reiterated in the portrayal of ―the Frenchman,‖ Lefèvre‘s, first encounter with the city in The Snake Stone: Maximilien Lefèvre leaned over the rail and plugged his cheroot into the surf which seethed from the ship‘s hull. Seraglio Point was developing on the port bow, its trees still black and massy in the early light. As the ship rounded the Point, revealing the Galata Tower on the heights of Pera, Lefèvre pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve to wipe his hands; his skin was clammy from the salt air. (…) Slowly the Stamboul shore of the Golden Horn came into view, a procession of domes and minarets which surged forwards, one by one, and then modestly retired. Below the domes, cascading down to the busy waterfront, the roofs of Istanbul were glowing red and orange in the first sunlight. This was the panorama that visitors always admired: Constantinople, Istanbul, city of patriarchs and sultans, the busy kaleidoscope of the gorgeous east, the pride of fifteen centuries. The disappointment came later. (2-3) 90 90 In contrast to his fictional account, Goodwin‘s description of his ‗real‘ encounter with the city does not lead to disappointment. At the end of The Janissary Tree, in the Acknowledgements section, Goodwin notes that ―It‘s been a few years since we tramped down together [with my wife] from Poland to Turkey, saw the storks flying North across the Sea of Marmara, and took our final steps toward the domes of Istanbul and the great Bosphorus below, into the city that had fed our imaginations for six months. We were not disappointed‖ (302). 173 Even the chronology of the travelogues (i.e. the first panoramic view of the city, followed by disappointment, particularly at the sight of street dogs) can be comfortably traced in Goodwin‘s book: When the first crime is committed by taking advantage of the deserted streets and of the circulating volume of the call to prayer, the only witnesses are two ill- conditioned dogs, which seem to have sprung from the pages of the travelers‘ accounts: ―When the men had gone, a yellow dog came cautiously out of a nearby doorway. A second dog slunk forward on its belly and crouched close by, whining hopefully. Its tail thumped the ground. The first dog gave a low growl, and showed its teeth‖ (2). The instant during which the legendary street dogs of Constantinople are momentarily revived as part of the narrative is further illuminated by a later instructional section, voiced by one of the characters substituting for the author‘s omniscient perspective. Such informative –and interruptive– passages, which are quite uncommon in detective novels, do not seem to be a necessary component of the plot structure. The interruption concerning the plight of street dogs occurs after one of the characters, Dr. Millingen, goes out for a walk in the Pera district: Dr. Millingen faced the street, flexed his stick, and began to walk. Nobody ever could say how, or even why, the dogs had come to Istanbul. Some people supposed that they had been there always, even in the time of the Greeks; others, that they invaded the city at the time of the Conquest, dropping down from the Balkans to prowl through the blasted streets and the ruins in the fields, where they formed into packs and carved out territories for themselves which still held good to the present day. But nobody really knew. Nobody, Dr. Millingen had realised long ago, much cared. Not a breed, but all alike, these rough-coated yellow dogs with short legs, large jaws and feathery curving tails spent most of the day slumped in all the alleys, gateways, thoroughfares and backstreets of the ancient city, with one eye closed and the other lazily absorbing the activities of the people around them. It took a visitor to see them properly, and a relatively recent resident like Dr. Millingen, 174 trained in habits of scientific observation, to see them with a forensic eye; to everyone else they were so much a part of the fabric of the city, so perfectly integrated into their own mental map of a district, that had all the dogs simply vanished from the streets one night, people would have had only the uneasy impression that something had changed; and nine out of ten Stambouliots would have been hard pressed to say what. The dogs did not impinge. They almost never bit a child, ran amok in the market, or stole the butcher‘s sausages. You stepped over a dog sleeping in a doorway; you skirted a muddle of dogs sprawled in a patch of sunlight in the middle of the road; you tossed in bed when the howling and barking of the dogs at night grew more than usually intolerable; and you never noticed that they existed at all. (SS 33-34) In another such ‗moment‘ of recurrent images, Dr. Millingen deliberates over the peculiarity of sedan chairs in Constantinople, which reminds one of how Mrs. Baillie associates them with a vanished world. Indeed, even the reference to Edinburgh can be interpreted as the English traveler‘s attempt to identify correlations between this foreign city and other such unfamiliar/un-English and provincial sites: Dr. Millingen came down the steps of his house and climbed into the sedan chair waiting for him in the road. The chair-men shouldered their burden and began to lope placidly through the crowd streaming downhill towards the Pera landing stage. Dr. Millingen settled his hands on the clasp of his leather bag. Edinburgh, he thought, had prepared him for much: but nothing could ever quite reconcile him to a sedan chair. The sultan had ordered it, of course, so there was little point in refusing the apparent honour –and as a mode of transport it was certainly well- suited to the steep and convoluted streets of modern Pera, where a horse might struggle through the crowd, or slip on the cobblestones going downhill. But Millingen always felt ridiculous, and exposed: like a cherry on an iced cake. (SS 243) The fact that Dr. Millingen is a ―real‖ character who actually lived in Constantinople complicates the generic boundaries of the narrative, while his questionable ‗treatment‘ of Lord Byron on his death bed, which was suspected by some circles to be inadequate to cure Byron -hence the main reason for his death,- suggests 175 further connections between Goodwin‘s book and previous travelers‘ accounts, such as Lord Byron‘s travel notes. In demonstrating the obvious connections between the literary canon and Jason Goodwin‘s novels, my ultimate goal is to indicate that the city is presented as the embodiment of a lost text, incorporated both structurally and thematically into his narrative. Goodwin‘s historiographical fiction, which portrays a city in transition, is saturated with the idea of loss, much in the same way that European travelers recount loss in describing the belated geography of Constantinople, as if describing it were to witness one‘s past at the moment of losing it. In invoking the literary canon, however, Goodwin‘s modern adaptation of this trope transforms its meaning and introduces a productive relationship with the past. Yashim‘s identity as a flâneur strongly evokes historical awareness, which is crucial to resist cultural amnesia. As Graeme Gilloch comments, … the flȃneur appears as a figure who is sensitive to, and appreciative of, a secret counter-history of the city, one concealed by its monumental facades and deceptive surfaces. The flȃneur not only rubs shoulders with the crowd, he also ‗brushes history against the grain.‘ The city is thereby transformed, not into a text to be read, but into a plethora of overlapping texts, a palimpsest to be deciphered. (Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations 222) The eunuch detective Yashim Tagolu strolls around the streets of the city to witness an age fading away in every aspect of society, while his melancholic soul, fully aware of the irretrievability of the past, refuses to mourn so as not to bring it to conclusion. Nadel‘s nostalgia, which freezes time to the extent of bringing a picturesque world as it were to the present, morphs in Goodwin‘s fiction into a particular understanding of nostalgia that is intricately related to melancholy. 176 In its emphasis on the idea of the ‗lost text,‘ Goodwin‘s imaginative reconstruction of the nineteenth-century Ottoman capital resurrects the various forgotten and buried ‗texts‘ of this long bygone era in the history of the city. The plot structure in The Janissary Tree and The Snake Stone develops through a continuous unmasking of a hidden narrative that further leads to the unexpected disclosure of other stories; the main idea behind the storyline in both novels is to unravel the mystery surrounding an obscure text in order to shed light on the events of the day. In The Janissary Tree, the driving force of the narrative is a Sufi poem, left anonymously for Yashim on the Janissary Tree. Located at the heart of the Hippodrome, the Janissary Tree plays a symbolic role in Goodwin‘s first book by not only reiterating the canonical importance of this site, but also by drawing attention to the story of this still ‗living thing,‘ usually neglected in travelers‘ accounts that give priority to the surrounding monumental architecture. The poem reads: ―Unknowing / And knowing nothing of unknowing, / They spread. /Flee. /Unknowing / And knowing nothing of unknowing, /They seek. / Teach them. / Unknowing /And knowing nothing of unknowing, / They sleep. /Wake them. /Unknowing / And knowing nothing of unknowing, / The silent few become one with the Core. / Approach.‖ (JT 109). The initial version left on the Janissary Tree is incomplete: as Yashim looks for the complete version, he not only unearths a longer text but comes to an understanding of the meaning of the poem that reflects the resentment of the old soldiers belonging to the Sufi sect, the Janissaries, for being violently suppressed. Learning of the plans for a Janissary resurrection, Yashim is lead into revealing yet another plot that presented the upcoming 177 threat of the Janissary revolt only as a red herring: the real plot is arranged by the Seraskier, the commander-in-chief of the New Guard, attempting to overthrow the Sultan and build an ―Ottoman Republic.‖ While the Seraskier is supported by the Russians –who have historically been presented as dreaming about the capture of Constantinople to have better access to the Mediterranean– he plans to get hold of the throne by creating chaos in the city. In this fast-paced narrative, each moment of disclosure leads to other mysteries and hidden narratives of the old capital. Goodwin‘s objective is both to bring to light those narratives and to stress their arabesque nature. The dominance of red herrings and sub-plots in The Snake Stone produces a similar effect of delay and deferral of the origins of crime. At the beginning of The Snake Stone, two violent acts perpetrated against two Greek citizens –the beating of George, a merchant trader, and the murder of Goulandris, a bookseller in the Grand Bazaar – followed by the murders of an Albanian waterman and a Jewish moneylender, strongly suggest hate crime as the main motivation+ 91 This scenario juxtaposes ethnic factions with the peacefully sequenced snapshots of diverse characters continuing on with their ordinary lives in their own quarters, segregated from each other, if not in direct combat. 91 When Yashim interviews other merchants in the Grand Bazaar during his investigation of Goulandris‘ murder, the reluctance of one of the Armenian merchants who refers to Goulandris as ‗a stubborn old Greek‘ causes Yashim to strongly consider ethnic crime as the main reason: [Yashim] was reminded of another stubborn old Greek, his friend George, beaten and left for dead in the street. Like Goulandris he, too, was a trader. ‗What do you know about the Hetira, Malakian?‘ Malakian rubbed the edge of one of his enormous flat ears between his forefinger and thumb. ‗Ask a Greek, efendi. This is something Greek. I would not know.‘ ‗But the word means something to you.‘ Malakian frowned. ‗This is my shop, Yashim efendi, in the bazaar, like always. It is cheap here, yes. In Pera you will find many new shops –but Pera is expensive. Yashim shook his head. ‗I don‘t understand.‘ ‗I am stubborn man, like Goulandris. But I am not Greek. So.‘ ‗Why would the Hetira want to drive out Greeks?‘ Malakian said nothing, but he shrugged, slowly. (The Snake Stone 38-39). 178 The collective restlessness settled over the city is further intensified with the image of the Sultan on his death bed and the juxtaposition of the dissolution of his body with the air of corruption in the Ottoman capital. The implication of ethnic conflict leads Yashim to Hetira, a secret anti-Ottoman Greek society, whose ultimate goal is to restore the Byzantine Empire, which exposes yet another suppressed history in the process of solving the real source of crime. Meanwhile, the French archeologist, Max Lefèvre, who, having read in a book about Byzantine treasures buried in the underground cisterns written by the sixteenth-century French traveler Petrus Gyllius, comes to Constantinople with the hope of finding the precious relics that were hidden at the moment the Ottomans invaded the city in 1453, and is brutally murdered. 92 The layers of history that are typically related to the archeology of the city find a correlation with its textual representations, in which every text is built upon the preceding ones. The striking thing about the particular copy of Gyllius‘ arcane book, which Lefèvre owns and which is later passed on to Yashim‘s possession, is the insistence on the multiplicity of the city‘s identity: on the one hand, Gyllius writes about the Ottoman city in the sixteenth century 92 Some people still believe that the chalice and the plate in question were in reality the Holy Grail, which adds another twist to the obsessive search for ‗origins‘ in Constantinople. As Validé Sultan informs Yashim at the end of the novel, the story about the Holy Grail should not be taken as a legend but as truth, whose secrecy is passed down from one sultan to the next. Since the Sultan‘s son refused to see his dying father, the Sultan confided in the validé before his death, as she informs Yashim: ―At the time of the Conquest, …. when the Turks took Istanbul, a priest was saying Mass in the Great Church. He was using the holiest relics of the Byzantine church, the cup and the plate used at the Last Supper, but when the Turks broke in, he disappeared. (…) Mehmed the Conqueror, …. had taken the city from the Greeks. But afterwards he needed their support, of course. The Greek Patriarch agreed to treat the sultan as his overlord. But as for the relics, neither of them could accept that the other should possess them. Do you understand? (…) The watermen‘s guild, yes. They were always Albanians. You know what that means. Some Catholic, some Orthodox. And some, in time, were Muslims, too. But the first religion of the Albanian, as they say, is Albania. They call themselves the Sons of the Eagle‖ (305). After persuading both Yashim and the reader about the ‗truth‘ behind this so-called legend, validé‘s concluding remarks of the novel that whimsically announce that ‗you can‘t believe everything that you read in books, n’est-ce pas?” (306) encourages yet another re-reading of the previous commentary about the Holy Grail. 179 while keeping an eye on what has been left of Byzantium of Justinian‘s day, which he read about in an old text from fifth century. On the other hand, the marginal notes taken by the original owner of the book, the Italian traveler Delmonico, reveal his reflections on Gyllius‘ text, which was written forty years before his visit to Constantinople. The moment the two plots –the brutal serial killings of people among the cosmopolitan population of Constantinople, tentatively connected to the Hetira, and Lefèvre‘s search for the relics– are about to converge, the story descends to the vaulted underground cisterns which are ruled by the ancient watermen guild, mainly consisting of Albanians. As Yashim‘s interview with the sou naziry, the chief of the watermen‘s guild, demonstrates, the murders were committed by the watermen who were given the mission of protecting the relics ever since Constantinople‘s conquest by the Ottoman in 1453. The story about Hetira, then, has no direct relation to the mystery story; yet, its narration adds additional perspectives to the account of the Byzantine past of the city, resurrected with the story of the Albanian watermen as the heirs to the traditions of the Roman Empire and its world-famous aqueducts. Among the dizzying dissonance of stories, neighborhoods and characters, some of which consistently shed their identities throughout the novels, what gets revealed as a final impression left for the reader is the city‘s dynamic image as a progressing and continuously revised narrative of which even Yashim falls short of providing a holistic reading: Yashim shook his head. However long you lived, however well you thought you knew this city, there was always something else to learn. Sometimes he thought that Istanbul was just a mass of codes, as baffling and intricate as its impenetrable alleys: a silent clamor of inherited signs, private languages, veiled gestures. He 180 thought of the soup master and his coriander. So many little rules. So many unknown habits. (JT 124) Indeed, the main character is perhaps the city itself and its enigmatic existence. Although the various lost texts are restored in the novels themselves, they nevertheless translate into a view of the city as permanently lost: that is the ultimate point the actual city is textualized. Istanbul in contemporary western detective fiction is either a remote reality or an unrealistic present, made present by the recycling of travel narratives, which –far from being lost– are constantly reappearing. 181 CHAPTER V: The Spectral City of Contemporary Turkish Writers Writing within and Against the Western Literary Canon on Istanbul In a recent informal dissertation workshop in which students presented sections from their projects in progress, I started my own session by showing old pictures of Istanbul painted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century western artists. Ottoman palaces, mosques, Byzantine cisterns, Greek churches in ruins, synagogues in the backstreets, the famous Galata Bridge portrayed from different perspectives, the streets of the city depicted in their accentuated picturesque reality –all slid one after another. ―How does old Istanbul look to you?‖ I asked the audience, consisting mainly of American colleagues. ―A totally different world –I am tempted to say, a world belonging to One Thousand and One Nights,‖ one of them responded. Others followed with further descriptions of the city as an exotic, oriental, and more emphatically, a distant world. ―That is exactly how it appears to me. These palaces, these ruins –I sometimes tell myself unbelievingly that I live in the city in which once upon a time the Byzantine princes, sultans, harem girls, janissaries lived,‖ I surprised them. I then showed an excerpt from an old text written in Ottoman Turkish, side by side with the Latinized alphabet of the modernized Turkish language. A similar series of responses followed, posing the unfamiliarity of the Ottoman scripture against the familiarity, if not full comprehensibility, of Turkish scripted in Latin alphabet. As I was preparing to move on 182 to the core of my presentation, which included close readings of some of the lesser known Turkish authors in the West, and their different ways of historicizing the past from which they were estranged –that is, the second and third sections of this chapter, – one of the listeners interrupted: ―But don‘t you read about the Ottoman past in your history classes? Why does it look strange to you –it is your own history!‖ What followed was a long diversion from my original plan, in which I explained the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, the explanation which now constitutes the first section of the third chapter: ―On the contrary, we read it over and over,‖ I answered, ―so that we forget about it and think of it as a remote past and feel convinced that our past and our present are separate from each other, much in the same way that western travelers envisioned the uncanny geography of the city around the Golden Horn. The past is ours – but not ours at the same time.‖ Then I explained at length the reasons for the defamiliarization that happens with every act of repetition and recuperation of the past, especially when the narration of the past incorporates, consciously or not, a clear demarcation between the Ottoman past and the present Turkish Republic. ―Even my own account fractures history again, for the purpose of making it –that is, the distinction between the past and the present- ‗clear‘,‖ I added: ―Is there a way to tell this story without breaking it over and over?‖ The rest of my presentation, a condensed version of what will be argued in this chapter, attempted to illustrate how the engagement with the city‘s past as an unbroken continuity presents itself as a challenge to a contemporary Turkish author, (or anyone, for that matter) who is increasingly defamiliarized from the Ottoman city as a result of the 183 systematically administered statist ideology that cherishes the nation‘s new capital in Ankara. As has previously been pointed out and will be further clarified throughout this chapter, Istanbul –once the capital of the Ottoman and Byzantine Empires– plays a crucial role within the politics of remembering. 93 In the following separate sections, I examine the ways in which three contemporary authors, Orhan Pamuk, Nazlı Eray and Oya Baydar, among others writing in the period since 1980, propose alternative perspectives on Istanbul –its past and present- which pose a substantial challenge to both the official history and the literary history of the city. Initially planned as the introduction of my dissertation, this last chapter on contemporary Turkish fiction about Istanbul is written retrospectively, if not conclusively, and should be read likewise. A retrospective reading will allow for a better understanding of the circularity and reflectivity of the literary canon on Istanbul; it will also contextualize the additional complications of writing about Istanbul for local writers. Indeed, the examination of Turkish authors after the establishment of the western literary canon attempts neither to highlight a hierarchical structure nor to characterize local representations as imitative of western writing on the city. Notwithstanding my emphasis on the underivative status of Turkish authors, however, I place equal stress on the way local representations of the city respond, and do 93 In his research on the post-1980s resurgence of criticism against Kemalist ideology, Martin Stokes explicates the significance of the city within the national imaginary: ―In a society in which the state of being modern is cast so insistently in terms of forgetting, and in which the modern is so organically connected to the institutions of the nation-state, remembering becomes both a problem and a matter of cultural elaboration. This is not because the state is incapable of making people forget but because the politics of forgetting paradoxically demands the preservation of a variety of things to demonstrate the necessity of their having been forgotten. When one of these objects in the repertoire of the ‗forgotten‘ is an entire city, and one that currently houses at least one-sixth of the nation‘s population, the city itself is likely to occupy a large and significant problem in the national imaginary –a problem that springs out of the experience of modern nationalism itself‖ (―The Beloved Istanbul‖ 240). 184 so ineluctably, to western literary texts, including nineteenth-century travelogues and contemporary detective fiction. Their responses inaugurate the invention of a new literary tradition about Istanbul, built upon and against the preceding western canon. The initial stage of engagement with the western texts gradually turns into a dialogue with oneself, a rediscovery of one‘s voice and identity. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt proposes to study European travel literature along with ‗autoethnographic expressions,‘ which she defines as ―instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer‘s own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations‖ (7). Although Turkish history is not precisely one of ―colonized subjects,‖ the consciousness of the presence of the West, together with the debates over westernization that started in the nineteenth century and came all the way down to the present age, have shaped almost every text in Turkish literature written in the last two centuries. ‗Autoethnographic expression,‘ as described by Pratt, modifies and resists the colonizer‘s narrative –which takes the form of travel writing– and introduces alternative stories about the same historical facts, which then travel to the European metropolises, motivating the western audience to think of their own version of reality in non-Eurocentric terms. What is interesting and perhaps contradictory in the Turkish case is that the history of modernization, from the perspective of the founding Turkish elite, is very much a story of appropriation rather than resistance. Hence, many literary texts, 185 especially those produced at the turn of the century, celebrate appropriation (i.e. westernization). Looking at the ways western perspectives, especially with respect to travel writing on Istanbul, are appropriated by Turkish authors might nevertheless suggest that ‗autoethnographic expression‘ in Turkey‘s case takes a form similar to that of Pratt‘s colonial subjects, since every act of imitation necessarily resists and changes the original. The new urban consciousness introduced by contemporary local writers, among whom Orhan Pamuk is the best known at home and abroad, especially since his Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, is predicated on layers of belatedness –that is, the canonical gesture of belatedness in writing about Istanbul is doubled by the domination of western writers and the imposition of a sense of cultural belatedness vis-à-vis European modernity in a non-western geography. In Istanbul: Memories and the City, a collection of autobiographical sketches and essays about the history of the city, Pamuk succinctly describes how the western perspective is introjected by the Turkish writer: My own troubled interest in even the most unreliable western travel writers does not issue from a simple love-hate relationship or blend of a confused anguish and a longing for approval. Leaving aside various official documents and a handful of city columnists who scolded Istanbullus [natives of Istanbul] for their poor comportment in the streets, Istanbullus themselves wrote very little about their city until the beginning of the twentieth century. The living, breathing city –its streets, its atmosphere, its smells, the rich variety of its everyday life- is something that only literature can convey, and for centuries the only literature our city inspired was penned by Westerners. (239-240) In the section suggestively entitled ―Under Western Eyes,‖ from which the paragraph above is extracted, and in other sections that examine the literary history of Istanbul, Pamuk references both Turkish (and Ottoman-Turkish) and non-Turkish writers, including Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Edmondo de Amicis, 186 Alphonse-Marie Louis de Lamartine, André Gide, Pierre Loti, Hans Christian Andersen, Mark Twain, memoirist Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, poet Yahya Kemal, the novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, journalist-historian Reşat Ekrem Koçu, and the columnist Ahmet Rasim. While Pamuk‘s choice of non-Turkish texts is significantly diverse, cross- cultural, and from different periods, local examples are much more limited and strictly modern: the earliest one (with the exception of Evliya Çelebi from the sixteenth century) is from the 1870s. The western influence is observed not only in literary texts, but also in painting: ―If we see our city in black and white, it‘s partly because we know it from the engravings left to us by western artists; the glorious colors of its past were never painted by local hands. There is no Ottoman painting that can easily accommodate our visual tastes‖ (44). The preeminence of western texts in Pamuk‘s book then becomes more than a personal choice: it is merely an outcome of the availability of resources, as he explains in accounting for his ‗troubled interest‘ in western travelers‘ accounts. Moreover, the Turkish writer‘s organic dependence on the western tradition of Istanbul writing is, in the final analysis, more than a mutual relationship between the artist and the long-standing canon. It is also a consequence of the fact that the western gaze is imbedded within the Turkish artist. ―Why this fixation with the thoughts of western travelers, what they did on visits to the city, what they wrote to their mothers?‖ Pamuk questions, and sets out to elucidate the process of internalization: It‘s partly that many times I‘ve identified with a number of them (Nerval, Flaubert, de Amicis) and –just as I once had to identify myself with Utrillo in order to paint Istanbul- it was by falling under their influence and contesting with them by turns that I forged my own identity. It‘s also because so few of Istanbul‘s own writers have paid their city any attention whatsoever. 187 Whatever we call it-false consciousness, fantasy, or old-style ideology- there is, in each of our heads, a half-legible, half-secret text that makes sense of what we‘ve done in life. And for each of us in Istanbul, a large section of this text is given over to what western observers have said about us. For people like me, Istanbullus with one foot in each culture, the ‗western traveler‘ is often not a real person; he can be my own creation, my fantasy, even my own reflection. But being unable to depend on tradition alone as my text, I am grateful to the outsider who can offer me a complementary version- whether a piece of writing, a painting, or a film. So whenever I sense the absence of western eyes, I become my own Westerner. (287-288) 94 The significant difference of scope between local and western traditions, combined with his self-conscious positioning, poses a crucial artistic dilemma for Pamuk and other local writers: How does a contemporary Turkish writer, writing on Istanbul, find an original voice for himself 95 or herself within the tradition of Istanbul writing, if that tradition is deeply rooted in western perspectives, whose influence is spectral, if not in direct 94 Later on in the same chapter, Pamuk continues to explain the way he feels estranged in his own city, followed by the process through which he internalizes the western perspective: Especially when reading the western travelers of the nineteenth century- perhaps because they wrote about familiar things in words I could easily understand- I realize ‘my’ city is not really mine. Just as it is when I am contemplating the skyline and the angles most familiar to me- from Galata and Cihangir, where I am writing these lines- so it is, too, when I see the city through the words and images of Westerners who saw it before me; at times like these I must face my own uncertainties about the city and my tenuous place in it. I will often feel as if I’ve become one with that western traveler, plunging with him into the thick of life, counting, weighing, categorizing, judging, and in so doing often usurping his dreams, to become at once the object and subject of the western gaze. As I waver back and forth, sometimes seeing the city from within and sometimes from without, I feel as I do when I am wandering the streets, caught in a stream of slippery contradictory thoughts, not quite belonging to this place and not quite a stranger. This is how the people of Istanbul have felt for the last 150 years. (emphasis mine 289) Mediated through the European gaze, the Turkish writer‘s perception of the city determines his/her identity as a writer. That means, the native Turkish writer, who is narrating the melancholic space of Istanbul, introjects the European perspective while recounting the city‘s spirit. According to Pamuk, it is precisely through this introjection that the Turkish writer is able to forge an identity for himself. 95 A noticeable gap in Pamuk‘s choice of texts is that not one of them is written by a female author. Considering the fact that there were many memoirs and journals written by English and French female visitors (usually accompanying their husbands to Istanbul as in the case of Lady Montagu and Julia Pardoe) during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, this seems like a significant omission. What is more, most of these female visitors were actually invited to Turkish houses, which means that they were admitted inside the rooms- unlike many male visitors/writers‘ lack of access to indoors, a crucial absence that Pamuk points out in western travelers‘ accounts, disregarding female perspectives (Istanbul: Memories and the City 277). 188 command? Does the local writer‘s search for originality differ from the typically canonical desire to be original, which is a point of frustration for any author, regardless of nationality? While looking for his own place within the literary tradition, Pamuk, along with the western writers, consults his local predecessors, ‗the four lonely melancholic writers‘, 96 as he designates them in Istanbul: Memories and the City: But it is these four heroes, whom I will discuss from time to time in this book, whose poems, novels, stories, articles, memoirs, and encyclopedias opened my eyes to the soul of the city in which I live. For these four melancholic writers drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West; they are the ones who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live. (111) In his discussion of the French influence on most of these Turkish writers, Pamuk describes the latter‘s texts as consciously crafted to evoke the ruins of the empire in order to create an authentic voice: All these writers were, at one point in their lives, dazzled by the brilliance of western (and particularly French) art and literature. The poet Yahya Kemal spent nine years in Paris, and it was from the poetry of Verlaine and Mallermé that he drew the idea of ‗pure poetry‘ that he would adapt to his own purposes later on, when he went in search of a ‗nationalist‘ poetics. Tanpinar, who looked up to Yahya Kemal almost as a father, was an admirer of the same poets and of Valery too. And A.S. Hisar, in common with Yahya Kemal and Tanpinar held Andre Gide in the highest esteem. It was from Theophile Gautier, another author greatly admired by Yahya Kemal, that Tanpinar learned how to put a landscape into words. (111) (…) 96 Pamuk is referring to the poet, Yahya Kemal, journalist-historian Reşat Ekrem Koçu, novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and the memoirist Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar. 189 From the aesthetics they acquired in France, they knew enough to realize that in Turkey they would never achieve a voice as strong and authentic as Mallermé’s or Proust’s. But after long deliberation they found an important and authentic subject: the decline and fall of the great empire into which they were born. Their deep understanding of Ottoman civilization and its irreversible decline helped them avoid the traps of watered-down nostalgia, simple historic pride, or the virulent nationalism and communitarianism to which so many of their contemporaries succumbed, and it became the basis for the beginnings of a poetics of the past. The Istanbul in which they lived was a city littered with the ruins of the great fall, but it was their city. If they gave themselves to melancholic poems about loss and destruction, they would, they discovered, find a voice all their own. (my emphasis 113) Pamuk highlights ‗synthesis‘ between the forms of French writing and local insights as the determining factor in forging an original voice. Let us take a long digression, in the next section, to go back to the ‗beginnings‘ of this curious relationship between Turkish literature and the question of mimicry in order to better comprehend Pamuk‘s assertion. Against this background, we will then interrogate, in the following sections, the way in which the position of imitation has the potential to turn into a position of subjectivity. Citation, imitation, repetition, which are all considered as characteristic of the Istanbul canon, have different connotations within the Turkish context. I will argue that Turkish writers will make use of these characteristics as self-criticism and a way to explore the pitfalls of Turkish modernity. The Prehistory of the Turkish Novel: Tanzimat and Beyond Although the concern for being ‗late‘ to European modernity –hence, the need, if not desire, to ―imitate‖ it– had been an increasing anxiety for the Ottomans since the end of the sixteenth century when the Empire started to lose power, the period that is of relevance here is the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly 1870-1890, when 190 the novel as a genre entered Ottoman culture. The adaptation of the novel genre was a conscious attempt to imitate the western literary form against which the local culture and values were ferociously guarded from ―contamination.‖ As Hulya Adak argues, In the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman writers embraced European genres such as the novel, memoir, and biography through translations or adaptations of European works. The novelistic genre became the literary expression par excellence of the modern, taking the place of indigenous genres, such as divan poetry, folk poetry, storytelling (meddah), and folk theater, which were labeled ‗childish‘ and ‗uninformed‘ (Moran 10,15), hence, unfit to represent westernization or maturation and enlightenment. (22) The pioneering novelists, Namik Kemal, Ahmet Midhat, Sami Paşazade Sezai, Nabizade Nazım, Emin Nihad, Mizancı Murat and Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, advocated the adaptation of European literary genres; yet, what they actually aimed to achieve was a successful synthesis of western –particularly French– form and the indigenous qualities of Ottoman cultural context. 97 It is, therefore, crucial to locate the origins of the Turkish novel as part of an ‗official‘ modernization project in which literature appears as only one of the various institutions that needed to be ―reformed‖ for the purpose of catching up with western civilization. 98 Indeed, the earlier novelists were also known as Tanzimat 97 For further information on the origins of the Turkish novel, see Ahmet Evin, Origins and the Development of Turkish Novel. Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1983, and Robert Finn. The Early Turkish Novel. Istanbul: Isis Press, 1984. 98 The move towards the West can be seen in all cultural arenas, including music. A noted sociologist, Ziya Gokalp, who has lived at the turn of the century (1876-1924) and influenced the Turkish republicans including the founder of the Republic, differentiates between hars (culture) and medeniyet (civilization): ―hars is national while medeniyet is international … For example, in the European and American continents, among all European nations, there is a common Western civilization. Within this civilization, there are separate and independent British, French and German cultures‖ (qtd. in Ergin 29). According to Gokalp, Turkish national music should be a synthesis of Turkish culture and civilization. Writing in 1923 (the year the Republic was founded), he asserts that ―Today we are faced with three kinds of music: Eastern music, Western music, folk music. Which one of them will be ours? Eastern music is a morbid music and non-national. Folk music represents our culture. Western music is the music of our new civilization. Thus, neither should be foreign to us. Our national music, therefore, is to be born from a synthesis of our folk music and Western music. Our folk music provides us with a rich treasure of melodies. By collecting and 191 novelists, named after the reformist aura of the Tanzimat (1839-1876) that was enacted as a series of state-sponsored political reforms. Hence, Pamuk‘s articulation of the internalized gaze of the western subject is partially related to his identity as a novelist, which originated in the dilemma between keeping one‘s interior –the authentic Ottoman culture– intact, and accepting the ‗exterior‘ –western forms and institutions– unconditionally. In Babalar ve Oğullar: Tanzimat Romanının Epistemolojik Temelleri (Fathers and Sons: The Epistemological Foundations of the Tanzimat Novel), a groundbreaking critical work on Tanzimat novelists, Turkish scholar and literary critic Jale Parla locates the canonical novels of the period within their historical context. According to Parla, the silence of the once-authoritative Sultan, who is now seen as inefficient and needy, is replaced by the authorial, didactic, paternal voice of Tanzimat authors. The common image of the Tanzimat period is that of a child that needs to be protected; hence, the authority of the writer. The authorial voice is also closely related to the question of authenticity. Being the ‗origin‘ of the Turkish novel and yet still peripheral to the ‗real origin‘ (the European novel), a persistent theme of the Tanzimat novel is an exploration of authentic culture, whose ambiguity, or impossibility, creates melancholic texts, despite the patronizing voice. A major concern of Tanzimat writers is how to find an ‗authentic voice,‘ within a foreign product that they do not fully control. The fact that the origin of the Turkish novel revolves around the problematization of mimicry and the inability to be ‗authentic‘ will be suggestive for the following sections ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- arranging them on the basis of the Western musical techniques, we shall have both a national and a modern music‖ (Gökalp 300). 192 in which I will examine Pamuk‘s assertion that all local writers of Istanbul are ‗under western eyes.‘ A valuable resource to test the validity of Pamuk‘s argument is an article, written by the literary critic Nurdan Gürbilek, that focuses on a single Tanzimat novel, The Carriage Affair. In disagreement with some interpretations of it as satire, Gürbilek argues that the book quite literally illustrates ―… the inevitable snobbism at the origin of our own identities, the self we call the original Turkish spirit” (―Dandies and Originals‖ 615). If that is the case, then all Turkish writers, including Pamuk, display this original Turkish spirit through their melancholic search for origins, followed by the unavoidable mimicry of western writers. That is the point at which mimicry moves closer to authenticity. This is not to suggest that Turkish identity is based on imitation, but that synthesis has been a major concern for such a long time that it is now impossible, even pointless, to attempt to clearly distinguish the two components that have been seamlessly integrated into each other. As Gürbilek argues, The mainstream critical opinion is that Tanzimat novelists filled their novels with clichés stolen from Western writers, with puppets complete strangers to us since they lacked introspection. Now it is time to move one step further. What if that is what they saw there? When they were looking inside themselves, what if someone else –a deformed and a distorted figure but someone else indeed– looked back at them? What if the place called inside consists of an outside? (―Dandies and Originals,‖ 615) With her explicit skepticism about what constitutes ‗authenticity,‘ Gürbilek succinctly points out the fatal entanglements of the interior and the exterior. Considering that the Tanzimat period marks a significant transitional period in which the spirit of the age was marked by radical westernization projects, the search for authenticity, generated by the idea of ‗lack,‘ can be seen as a common point of all belatedly modernized cultures in 193 which the act of comparison is unavoidable, if not necessarily derivative. In her analysis, Gürbilek makes a case for the ―comparative‖ origins of Turkish identity while she points out a similar thread in the Turkish novel tradition. She thus re-interprets and re-defines the discourse around ‗lack‘ as being comparative: ―Thus statements of lack … are typical of a critical stance that positions itself from the very start as a comparative one, presuming that it becomes convincing only when it talks about something the ‗other‘ has but ‗we‘ don‘t have, pointing out to the persistent lack, the irremovable deficiency, the unyielding inadequacy of its objects: Turkish culture‖ (599). In addition to Gürbilek, various Turkish scholars have recently started to question the emphasis on the concept of lack, which, as they contend, is nothing more than an unavoidable evocation of comparison. This critical project has invigorated discussions of Turkish literature as a belatedly modernized tradition, and re-directed them from a hierarchical classification to an occasion that provides equal grounds of comparison among various literary traditions. In a recent article, titled ―Modernity and its Fallen Languages: Tanpinar‘s Hasret, Benjamin‘s Melancholy,‖ Nergis Ertürk takes up the same issue from a different perspective and draws attention to the ―absent presence‖ of Turkish Literature in the emergence of comparative literature as a discipline, which, according to a number of critics, [Edward Said (1983); Emily Apter (1995); Aamir Mufti (2000)] originates in Istanbul. According to these accounts, the city harbored the pioneering scholars in the field, such as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, both of whom lived in the Turkish city for some time during the mid-twentieth century, in between their exile from Germany and the journey to the United States. In contrast to the overemphasis 194 on spatial origins, which is a highly contestable theory because of its reductionist association of literature with geography –but which I lack space here to discuss at length– what is surprisingly absent in these critics accounts‘, as Ertürk illustrates, is modern Turkish language and literature, produced upon the very geographical grounds on which comparative literature, in theory, emerged: … though modern Turkish literature has been and is still generally studied and taught through the frame of a national canon, what we call national language and literature was a problem of comparison in (and for) Istanbul long before Spitzer and Auerbach arrived there. Ottoman and Turkish language and literature, in other words, have been dealing literally with the problem of comparability with Europe at least since the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire was peripherally integrated into the economic and political sphere of global capitalist modernity—and, unlike colonial modernities, integrated without direct European colonial rule. (42) That is the background against which Ertürk compares Tanpınar with Benjamin upon common grounds rather than doing a derivative reading of the former out of the latter‘s writings. 99 Various successors of the Tanzimat novelists continued to explore this double bind of comparison throughout the traumatic period of transition from the Empire to the Republic, during which time Istanbul played a dysfunctional role in the formation of the Turkish national identity. Istanbul‘s multiethnic population and intricate ties to the imperial past, together with its occupation by European powers during the First World War, rendered the city an unlikely candidate to stage the emergence of a ―pure‖ nation- 99 In addition to ‗the problem of comparison‘ in relation to the West, which can be defined in spatial terms, modern Turkish literature is temporarily juxtaposed with the old Ottoman literary tradition, and indeed defined by comparison. This aspect of self-comparison in Turkish literature will not be examined in this chapter not only because it deserves a separate chapter, consisting of an extensive bibliography on Ottoman literary tradition, but also, and more fundamentally, my purpose is to examine the contemporary Turkish texts in relation to the western literary canon on Istanbul. 195 state. The period between the two world wars, which marks the acceleration of nationalist movements and the initial stages of the foundation of the nation, coincides with Turkish novelists‘ general sense of alienation from, if not downright aversion to Istanbul, and increasing interest in the countryside and Anatolian villages. 100 According to Parla, the novel, traditionally seen as a vehicle for social reform in the works of early Turkish novelists, continues to serve, during the republican era, to help transform the society under the Kemalist project (Parla, ―The Wounded Tongue‖ 28). What was an additional challenge for turn-of-the-century writers was the ‗linguistic crisis‘ they had to cope with because of the language reform that took place after the foundation of the Republic and the attempted severing of ties with the Ottoman past. Among these writers, the poet, novelist, essayist, and literary critic, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962), is undoubtedly the most prominent figure of modern Turkish literature. Moreover, his identity as an urban writer and a pioneering artist in introducing a new urban consciousness of Istanbul compels an individual discussion of his books in any critical work that focuses on literary representations of Istanbul. Let us first clarify the immediate effects of the language reform on Tanpınar and his contemporaries, and then briefly mention his crucial role within the literary canon on Istanbul. Despite Tanpınar‘s unrivaled legacy in bringing forth a whole new set of concerns for modern subjects writing about Istanbul, his work will not be examined in detail for periodization reasons that will be clarified in the rest of this section. 100 See Çimen Günay‘s informative article, ―A Panoramic Look at Turkish Fiction‖ at http://tulp.leidenuniv.nl/content_docs/wap/cg4.pdf . Çimen refers to Ömer Seyfettin‘s Yalnız Efe (The Lonesome Lad, 1910) and Refik Halit Karay‘s Memleket Hikayeleri (Homeland Stories, 1919) as two examples of ‗village novels.‘ 196 As part of the various republican westernization projects implemented between 1922 and 1935, the reforms that affected language use were instigated at two separate stages: adoption of Latin phonetic orthography in lieu of the Arabo-Persian alphabet in 1928, and purging the Turkish language of its Arabic and Persian vocabulary and syntax in 1936. 101 This drastic change, as Adak argues, ―… disconnected people from the Ottoman past and the Middle Eastern Islamic world…‖ (22). Located at this significant transitional period between old and new worlds, the literary productions of Tanpınar and his contemporaries function as archival work that puts on stage what it is like to be literally on the threshold –an overused image for Istanbul and Turkish history in general, that needs to be re-visited and purged of its platitude in their particular case. In the words of Ahmet Haşim, a contemporary of Tanpınar, the effects of writing on the threshold take the form of the uncanny: 101 In her article ‗The Wounded Tongue: Turkey‘s Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel,‘ Jale Parla describes the way the language reform effected the society at large: ―When the language reform was undertaken, Atatürk‘s object was to invent an ahistorical, primordial, homogeneous essence of Turkishness that would manifest itself in the diverse Anatolian civilizations and achieve its final materialization in the formation of the Turkish republic. This construct necessitated the formulation of a new history as well. At the First History Convention, held in 1932, participants presented papers arguing that the original Turks of central Asia had migrated all over the globe to create the world‘s greatest civilizations, from the Hittite and Sumerian to the Chinese and European (Parla and Davison 78). The language of all these civilizations were said to have evolved from an ur-Turkish, a claim that the conference papers called the ‗Sun-Language Theory‘ (Lewis 57-74). The invented language, together with the invented history, was expected to map a new national homeland, Anatolia, the territory reclaimed by the Independence War. That territory, ethnically still impure despite a series of ethnic cleansings conducted throughout the nineteenth century, could be homogenized under the umbrella of a national language. Hence, what was intended by the language reform went beyond mere linguistic purification. It sought to obliterate a recent past too complicated, complex, and heterogeneous to deal with and evoke a distant past whose glorious resurrection would be achieved by the reclamation of a lost tongue. (…) So, on the one hand, there was this attempt at dehistoricizing or ahistoricizing history and, on the other hand, a specific, intentional historicizing, which entailed a spatiotemporal invention to inspire in the population the notion of a nation –with its geopolitical mapping, collective memories of heroic deeds, membership in a superior ‗race,‘ possession of an Ursprache or a Grundsprache, and construction of a national linguistics‖ (Parla 30). For more information on Turkish language reform, see Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 197 For the last three days, while I write, I watch curiously the grappling of alien words [of Persian and Arabic origin] with the new letters on the white page. These words written with letters, the outlets of which were the nose and the throat, cannot find their sounds on the keyboard of the new alphabet to make themselves heard. In a sentence, these words sound like the muffled, ugly screams of people who have lost their voices. (qtd. in Ertürk 49) Hence, with a particular emphasis on the aftermath of linguistic modernization, the uncanny effects of modernity are both contextually and structurally unleashed, in the form of an experience that happens at precisely the point in between the past and present, old and new, East and West. Employing a methodology similar to that used to interpret nineteenth-century travelogues about Constantinople, it is possible to examine the modern condition both contextually (what exactly is lost and how does a contemporary writer come to terms with that loss?) and structurally (what exactly is lost in language and how is that expressed using a language in crisis?) in contemporary Turkish texts. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the significance of linguistic experimentations of Turkish writers both in the past and in the present, I focus only on the contextual ramifications since the structural condition of the modern in Turkish texts would require an exhaustive list of translations into English, accompanied by explanatory notes about the unique ways in which modernized Turkish has the potential to problematize the erasure of Ottoman-Turkish. It should be noted in passing, however, that (despite the unbalanced grounds for comparing the two) the structural impasse, the unavoidable repetition, experienced through what I have coined as ‗the textual uncanny‘ in western travelers‘ accounts in Constantinople finds a contrasting world of linguistic vibrancy and creativity in contemporary Turkish texts written about Istanbul. 198 The role of literature after the language reform, then, is to provide a means to mourn for loss, or to have ‗a special status as bearer of loss,‘ as Ertürk puts it (49), but also to be the very reason for mourning itself, by re-enacting the new language over and over, with every single word, that replaces, hence, forgets, the lost language of the old world. One can, therefore, generalize the literary works, particularly novels, produced after the Tanzimat period as turning into lost texts themselves in the process of looking for lost texts of the past. The politics of mourning in and of language / in and of Istanbul is most effectively performed in Tanpınar‘s book-length essay, Beş Şehir [1946; ―Five Cities‖] in which he writes about Ankara, Erzurum, Konya, Bursa and Istanbul, the five significant historical cities of the Ottoman Empire. Living through the collapse of the Empire and the proclamation of the Republic, Tanpınar writes about a bygone era that he witnesses at the moment of eternally disappearing. While he acknowledges that every city undergoes transformation, an argument that is presented by a canonical reference to Charles Baudelaire‘s ‗Le Cygne,‘ Tanpınar asserts that Istanbul‘s metamorphosis is a unique case since the city completely shed its former identity during the years from 1908 till 1923 (122). His book is, therefore, a recording of a past time that is irretrievably lost. As a contemporary author, Orhan Pamuk deliberates over the possibilities of using Tanpınar‘s work as archival material: What makes Tanpınar valuable for me, what makes him profitable, exceptional, inspiring for me, is his painful and skillful harboring of the conflicts I have been talking about, his desire to found a museum, the museum of our past culture, with authority and grandeur, at the same time as he reads Ulysses in French translation and thinks, ‗As they are doing these things in the West, what am I doing here?‘ (qtd. in Parla, ―The Wounded Tongue‖ 36) 199 Tanpınar‘s metropolitan reflections have undoubtedly been a source of inspiration for various other contemporary writers as well. It is a point of consensus among eminent literary scholars, sociologists, and urban theorists [Göknar (2006); Köksal (2005); Moran (1994); Parla (2008); Robins (1996); Stokes (2000)] that since the 1980s, the Turkish cultural scene has witnessed a resurgent concern for the elements that were suppressed and obliterated by the amnesiac state- sponsored reforms. What Köksal defines as ‗a new literature‘ 102 and Robins refers to as ‗the return of the repressed of [the] elements that were repressed in the Kemalist culture (religion, ethnic diversity, the imperial heritage)‘ signal a growing interest in the engagement with the past that provides a platform from which the nationalist republican ideology is questioned, challenged, and transformed (‗Interrupting identities‘ 72). 103 It is no coincidence that the self-reflexive environment of the post-1980 period also marks a return, in Turkish literature, to using Istanbul as a literary scene, through which dissident voices of countermodernity can be articulated. 104 In her work on nostalgia, Svetlana 102 Köksal indicates that ―This new literature emerging after the 1980 coup corresponds to a new era where the literary elite returned to ‗the individual‘, away from the politically self-conscious literary texts of the 1960s and 1970s. During this period of confession and self-criticism, intellectuals and writers turned to issues and themes they had ignored until then‖ (85). 103 In ―The Wounded Tongue: Turkey‘s Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel,‖ Parla illustrates the way the post-1980s in Turkish literature is an important period for engagement with various literary experiments as a means of challenging the language reform and its restrictions. 104 While the neo-Ottomanism and linguistic emancipation of the post 1980s period is associated with a world-wide postmodern movement, its local context is usually neglected. As Erdağ Göknar explains, ―Writers of the generation after the last major military coup (September 12, 1980) –which affected all aspects of Turkish politics, society, and culture and broadly represented the transition between leftist- socialist and neoliberal worldviews –have been increasingly free to resurrect Ottoman history and ‗Ottomanesque‘ language. In literature, this led to drastic changes as writers responded to the political transformations by moving away from social issues and realism in a manner that questioned grand narratives of nationalism/Kemalism and socialism through aesthetic experimentation with content and form. Though these trends could be more generally labeled as part of international postmodernism, their 200 Boym points out the communal value of the city in imagining a future for itself ‗by improvising on its past,‘ an insight which is also valid for contemporary Istanbul: ―The city becomes an alternative cosmos for collective identification, recovery of other temporalities and reinvention of tradition‖ (75-76). In each of the three authors‘ works, Istanbul is transformed into a ghost city, first, by the mechanisms of modernity, and secondly, by the authors themselves who attempt to reinstate a community in which the uncanny, which is projected back by the local perspectives, is a haunting presence of the everyday life. Hence, the uncanny is a product of modernity, but it is also a counter discourse on modernity. 105 Pamuk‘s conception of hüzün, collective melancholy that pervades the whole society in Istanbul, is strongly related to the ruins of the empire, the constant reminders of a bygone past that one continuously –and accidentally– runs into during daily perambulations in the city. Nazlı Eray‘s Istanbul, teeming with ghost characters, asserts the uncanny world of the city against the rationalized world of Ankara. Oya Baydar builds up her story around two contrasting parts of the city, and in doing so, ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- manifestation in the Turkish context can be further described and specified as expressions of post- Kemalism, postsocialism, and, most importantly, neo-Ottomanism. In the Turkish case, the prefix post- should be read as signifying a movement away from long-held socialist ideals, Anatolian realism, and an ironic return to Ottoman/Islamic history. Postmodernism in Turkish literature was a movement of rewriting and excavating the model forms of the previous fifty years. In other words, it forecasted the shortcomings, failures, and idealism of various projects of modernization. It did not, as is sometimes expressed, indicate a dismissal or failure of modernism but rather introduced multiplicity to a rigid, universal, Eurocentric hierarchy of progress and development. Neo-Ottomanism implied a reassessment and reappropriation of disregarded cultural history and identity before World War I, including manifestations of Islam. Understandings of style and aesthetics changed in this era as authors experimented with form while being drawn to the possibilities of multiethnic, multireligious settings and characters from various Ottoman walks of life and classes. In an authoritarian political context, the limits of nationalism were discursively transcended, historical and cultural borders were crossed. Thus, in the wake of the 1980 coup, along with nonrealist and fantastic genres, the Ottoman historical novel gained currency‖ (34). 105 For a similar argument about the uncanny in a different context, see Chiyoko Kawakami‘s article, ―The Metropolitan Uncanny in the Works of Izumi Kyoka: A Counter-Discourse on Japan‘s Modernization.‖ Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 59:2 (Dec.,1999). 559-583. 201 brings to daylight the secrets of the two sites that are located in the city‘s unconscious: Anemas Dungeons, one of the most ancient, and forgotten, sites of the city from the Byzantine era, and Küçük Armutlu, unspecified in the narrative, where a mass hunger strike occurred in 2000, to protest the individual confinement of leftist political prisoners in F-type prisons –a recent history whose secrets are buried as deeply as what is hidden in the dungeons of Anemas. My purpose in bringing these seemingly unrelated texts together is threefold: Firstly, I attempt to demonstrate the alternative ways in which a contemporary Turkish writer is engaged with the historicization of the city‘s past. Secondly, I continue to trace the figures of the flȃneur and the detective, which have played a prominent role in the previous chapters. Thirdly, as an extension of the idea of the ‗lost text‘ that appears in contemporary accounts of the city, I look at how the hidden narratives of different historical periods, which are unearthed in these texts, serve as a means to carve out a special site for the uncanny within the modern condition. In that sense, one can consider this final chapter as conclusive in terms of finally restoring the lost text of the city. The current chapter‘s emphasis on the highly loaded term ‗mimicry‘ requires at least a brief examination of how I consider this term in relation to Homi Bhabha‘s by now canonical article on the subject ‗Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalance of Colonial Discourse‘ in The Location of Culture. With the reservation that Turkey cannot be comfortably located on either of the positions within the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, what is valuable in Bhabha‘s theory of mimicry for the Turkish case is the emergence of ambivalence, displacement, and incompleteness in the 202 act of imitation. The nature of the ambivalence and its consequences in the Turkish case, however, is radically different from Bhabha‘s understanding of the concept. Bhabha posits the ‗displacing gaze of the colonized subject‘ against the ‗reforming civilizing mission‘ of the colonizer: the former threatens the latter through mimicry that infringes on mockery (86). The mimicry employed in the Turkish case, which is not a confrontation with the western subject as such, but rather a return to oneself, i.e. to the ‗colonizer‘ internalized within – displays and creates ambivalence within the Turkish subject herself. According to Bhabha, ‗the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and ‗partial‘ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence‖ (89). Mimicry, in the works of Tanzimat novelists and in later examples of modern and contemporary literature, turns into self-surveillance. This important distinction will be a starting point to understand the way Orhan Pamuk‘s articulation of collective melancholy with respect to Istanbul, which will be examined in the following section, functions as both impoverishment and assertion of the self. i) Orhan Pamuk‟s City of Collective Melancholy In Istanbul: Memories and the City, [2003] Orhan Pamuk (1952- ) brings together autobiographical, historical, literary and visual data about Istanbul. 106 His childhood memories are inevitably saturated with Istanbul‘s ties to imperial and national history. 106 In addition to the accompanying photos, taken by Pamuk himself during various strolls in the city streets, there are many other photos collected from multiple sources. Pamuk adds a reference section about the photographs at the end of the book in order to clarify the source for each photo: they have a remarkably wide range such as the extensive collection of the Turkish photographer Ara Guler, archives of Selahattin Giz, Istanbul City Council collections, Thomas Allom engravings and the like. 203 The autobiographical is seamlessly integrated into the historical, with each chapter on a different source of information about the city, sporadically inserted as if to defy a hierarchical organization of these multiple sources. While Pamuk, a native of the city, strolls around various autobiographical, historical, visual and literary texts about Istanbul, he also walks in the streets of the city in search of a lost past that is both private and public. This section aims to consider the flȃneur’s melancholic spirit (or the pathological condition of incomplete mourning) in relation to Pamuk‘s articulation of hüzün, collective melancholy, which is a starting point for challenging certain taboos around the Ottoman past of the modernized secular Republic of Turkey. The rejuvenation of the ‗lost object,‘ in the form of the ghost past, enables Pamuk not only to contest the grand narrative of the nation but also to juxtapose mourning to melancholy as a defining characteristic of the city, a characteristic that is subsequently projected onto its inhabitants. The peculiar transmission of the city‘s spirit to the souls of its inhabitants is facilitated through the collective mood of melancholy that appears ―not as the melancholy of a solitary person but the black mood shared by millions of people together‖ (92). ―The hüzün of an entire city‖ emanates from the city space whose history breeds disillusionment, decline and loss of self-respect in comparison with the overshadowing European other and the ‗glorious‘ past of the imperial city. Although I start by discussing the way Pamuk provides a critique of Turkish modernity, my ultimate purpose is to touch upon the way his book opens up possibilities for reading the distress of modern existence, which transgresses local and regional concerns. 204 Let us begin with a brief summary of Sigmund Freud‘s theorization of mourning and melancholy and then locate Pamuk‘s conception of hüzün in relation to these two concepts. In ‗Mourning and Melancholia,‘ Freud differentiates mourning, a healthy reaction to a ‗lost object‘ from the pathological condition of the melancholy: ―Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so on. As an effect of the same influences, melancholia instead of a state of grief develops in some people, whom we consequently suspect of a morbid pathological disposition‖ (164). 107 As Freud explains, grief is a temporary period during which normal life is suspended so that the mourning person gradually comes to terms with the ‗loss‘ by accepting its irretrievable, yet replaceable, position. That is the moment the subject in grief is withdrawn from its object of loss. The melancholiac, on the other hand, needs medical treatment since s/he declines to confront the loss of the object –a person, a thing or an abstract ideal. Refusing to mourn for the loss, s/he keeps the lost object within his/her own ego –which leads to self-impoverishment. In contrast to the clear demarcation between subject and object during the process of mourning, melancholic inhibition causes the two to overlap: ―Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, so that the latter could henceforth be criticized by a special mental faculty like an object, like the forsaken object. In this way the loss of the object became transformed into a cleavage between the criticizing faculty of the ego and the ego as altered by the identification‖ (171). The 107 In referencing Freud, I use ‗melancholia‘ as a clinical case although my ultimate purpose is to consider how this pathological condition reflects on ‗melancholy,‘ a common sentiment of the human mind that turns into a collective expression in Orhan Pamuk‘s terminology. 205 identification of the ego with the abandoned object hence results in self-destructive practices: ―In grief the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any effort and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and chastised‖ (167). What is being targeted in such self-criticism is, in reality, the love- object itself that has now been internalized to such an extent that it creates a split in one‘s ego: ―one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, looks upon it as an object‖ (168). The melancholic patient‘s typical oscillation between fluctuating states of mood such as love and hate, or narcissism and inferiority, can therefore be explained by the introjection of the object by the subject. Indeed, the most dominant sentiment in melancholia is ambivalence towards the love-object –and towards oneself. Clinically regarded as an unhealthy condition, the process of self-degradation of the melancholic person, as Freud diagnoses, paradoxically involves self-awareness precisely because the patient is able to accurately describe the situation she finds herself: ―When in his exacerbation of self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, for all we know it may be that he has come very near to self- knowledge; we only wonder why a man must become ill before he can discover truth of this kind‖ (166). In reading Pamuk‘s hüzün against Freud‘s theorization, it is my intention to draw attention to this self-redemptive value of melancholy that follows the 206 entanglement of subject and object and the resulting self-impoverishment, which concurrently functions as self-recognition. Pamuk‘s conception of hüzün is complicated –one that needs to be examined on multiple levels, including public and private, local and global dimensions. To simplify, we will disentangle his understanding of hüzün into three components: 1) melancholic reaction to the Ottoman past as the lost object, 2) melancholic reaction to a lost object that takes the form of an abstraction such as ‗fatherland,‘ ‗liberty,‘ ‗an ideal.‘ In Pamuk, this abstraction, as has already been discussed in the previous section, is predicated on the ‗lack‘ experienced by the Turkish writer, in relation to what appears as a western literary canon, but in reality, is a more general conception of belatedness to (European) modernization as a historical process, 3) the projection of this collective melancholy from the self (Turkish writer/natives of the city/Turkish society in general) to the cityscape so that the city is both the object and the subject of melancholy (i.e. ‗the shadow of the object fell upon the ego‘). This shifting position causes the urban space to be an intermediary between the self and the lost object (western ideal, Ottoman past). Let us now examine these three aspects of hüzün individually and interrogate their relationship with each other and with Freudian melancholy. ―For me [Istanbul] has always been a city of ruins and of end-of empire melancholy. I‘ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own,‖ contends Orhan Pamuk (6). His assertion underlines the fact that, serving as the capital of a grand, yet defeated Empire, the fate of the city 207 parallels that of Ottomans, although past glory still haunts the contemporary scene even after the fall, that was followed by the foundation of the Republic. As Pamuk indicates, Still the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved‘s clothes, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums. (29-30) The modernization project initiated by the Republican elite was a conscious attempt to break away from the Ottoman past, which was associated with underdevelopment and Islamic autocracy, against which the new Republic emerged as a substitute. However, the past was never completely disposed of, neither could the present grow into a self- sufficient identity. Despite the original intention of replacing loss, the secularization/modernization/republicanism of the emerging present was not enough to alleviate pain since the city was never fully ‗modernized. 108 As Christopher de Bellaigue argues, ―Pamuk‘s achievement in ‗Istanbul‘ is to show the human damage done by Ataturk‘s revolution without succumbing to the benighted nostalgia of many Turkish Islamists‖ (―A Walker in the City‖ from www.orhanpamuk.net). Pamuk‘s revisionist reading of Ottoman history from a progressive perspective carries utmost importance, especially since he is able to address and challenge both the nostalgic impulse of the 108 In The remaking of Istanbul: portrait of an Ottoman city in the nineteenth century, Zeynep Çelik demonstrates this failure of substitution as follows: ―The ambitious goal of the Ottoman political elite to bring Istanbul up to the standards of the European capitals could produce only a piecemeal ‗regularization‘ of the urban fabric. Consequently, the city lost the integrity of its Turkish-Islamic character, but did not achieve a uniformly Western façade- even in the quarters largely inhabited by Europeans‖ (xvi). 208 Islamists and the obsessive focus on the present by the secularists: the two sides of the polar opposition in Turkish society today. Secondly, Pamuk identifies himself as a melancholic writer precisely because he has internalized the love-object as an ideal –the western perspective on the city of Istanbul. Since the emergence of the Turkish novel, the canonical belatedness and the sense of historical belatedness have always been inextricably linked to each other. Starting out from his peripheral existence to European writers and cities, and carrying ‗no sense of living in a great world capital, but rather in a poor provincial city,‘ Pamuk insists that such an ‗inferiority complex‘ pervades all Istanbullus who are ‗under western eyes‘ (246). The simultaneous fascination and repulsion of the western world, which can be observed in literary works since the Tanzimat novel, resonates with the ambivalent attitude of the melancholic subject. As Akcan argues, As long as we are speaking about a collective melancholy, the cause of this melancholy is no longer the loss of something previously possessed, but rather exclusion from or the lack of an ideal. As long as the historical process of modernization is defined as a ‗Western‘ ideal –namely, as a process whose torch is carried by the ‗West‘ –this inscribed ideal becomes an unattainable lost ideal for the subject who is categorized as the ‗non- Western‘ in the first place. (―Melancholies of Istanbul‖ 42) Being confronted with the European other, the Turkish subject experiences loss as primordial lack. In this account, one cannot talk about a specific object of loss. What I have outlined above as the first aspect of hüzün is a self-inflicted form of self- impoverishment for being deprived of the object of desire one never possessed –always opted for but also tried to avoid. The history of westernization for Ottoman/Turkish 209 history is an uncanny process of internalization in which one repeatedly returns to oneself with reproach and humiliation, every time the lost object/lack is evoked: Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire gloom, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like an incurable disease. It is resignation that nourished Istanbul’s inward-looking soul. To see the city in black and white, to see the haze that sits over it and breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to the crowded streets; if it‘s winter, every man on the Galata Bridge will be wearing the same pale, drab, shadowy clothes. The Istanbullus of my era have shunned the vibrant reds, greens, and oranges of their rich, proud ancestors; to foreign visitors, it looks as if they have done so deliberately, to make a moral point. They have not- but there is in their dense gloom a suggestion of modesty. This is how you dress in a black-and-white city, they seem to be saying; this is how you grieve for a city that has been in decline for a hundred and fifty years. (emphasis mine 42) Although the ‗lost beloved‘s possessions‘ –anything that is associated with the Ottoman past– are thrown away in an attempt to erase the memories of the lost object, the past comes back with a vengeance as urban markers imprinted in the cityscape. Even if the subject were willing to come to terms with loss, it is the city itself that constantly activates melancholic reaction towards the Ottoman past and towards the unrealized western ideal. Projected onto the cityscape by its inhabitants, melancholy infiltrates the city as well to such an extent that ―the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of hüzün‖ (94). This is the third aspect of Pamuk‘s hüzün: while the self is melancholic for the lost object as an abstract ideal, the cityscape functions as a locus in which this abstraction finds a palpable existence in the physical space, i.e. the ruins, and the architecture. This curious projection is described in the section titled ‗To be Unhappy is to Hate Oneself and One‘s City,‖ as a kind of transmission through which ―[the city‘s] 210 melancholy begins to seep into me and from me into it…‖ (317). Istanbul is the object of melancholy; yet the city itself is melancholic as well. Being the city of ruins, Istanbul is engaged in a continuous dialogue with its remains that declare the past to be perpetually shifting. Walking in the city, one constantly, and accidentally, runs into the remains of the past that are carved on the urban landscape, becoming constant reminders of the old days: ―No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner- the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques- inflict heartache on all who live among them,‖ contends Pamuk (101). Istanbul‘s space is unique in that it has the potential to contain the city‘s double melancholy: On the one hand, it is induced by the lack of a ‗western‘ ideal; on the other hand, it is caused by the loss of something concrete (the Ottoman past) that once used to compete with that ideal. Indeed, it is precisely in this conjoinment of the post-imperial world and the postcolonized third world, belonging to neither of them but displaying characteristics of both, that Istanbul‘s cityscape can be regarded as the locus in which the subject introjects the object. This conjoinment also marks the moment the city‘s landscape becomes both the subject and object of melancholy. Perhaps that is why mourning in/of Istanbul is a contradiction in terms: the past will never be acclaimed as a finished ‗object‘, nor will it be resolved for this city whose history is multi-layered. Depending on a variety of subject positions that bemoan loss in relation to Istanbul, the city, now transformed from the position of the object to that of the subject, activates multiple reactions while retaining its ‗unattainable,‘ yet 211 inexhaustible, symbolic value in travelers‘ accounts, or in detective stories and contemporary Turkish fiction. Pamuk‘s hüzün turns into a melancholic pathological condition when the ‗lost object,‘ (i.e. the city and what is projected on and through it) carries different connotations for each of these diverse communities, both western and eastern, sharing the same urban space or writing about it. The incompleteness and suspension of the melancholic condition in which the city finds itself formulates an ―open relation to the past [which] finally allows us to gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects‖ (Eng and Kazanjian 4). As various re-readings of Sigmund Freud‘s essay ‗Mourning and Melancholia‘ emphasize, (i.e. David Eng and David Kazanjian‘s Loss) I consider melancholy‘s positive connotations that enable an enduring relationship with the past: Loss as a whole embraces this counterintuitive perspective. Instead of imputing to loss a purely negative quality, the essays in this collection apprehend it as productive rather than pathological, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary. Indeed, they assert that the pervasive losses of the twentieth century are laden with creative, political potential. They insist that, if loss is known only by what remains of it, then the politics and ethics of mourning lie in the interpretation of what remains— how remains are produced and animated, how they are read and sustained. (Preface ix) 109 Similarly, the remains are turned into what Pamuk calls a ‗life-affirming‘ drive, when they are used to create an alternative space through which one can take the various connotations of collective melancholy –lack, loss, imitation– as a starting point: 109 Like various re-readings of Freud‘s essay, Slavoj Zizek‘s interpretation also emphasizes the creative impulse imbedded in melancholy: ―Against Freud, one should assert the conceptual and ethical primacy of melancholy: in the process of loss, there is always a remainder which cannot be integrated through the work of mourning, and the ultimate fidelity is fidelity to this remainder. Mourning is a kind of betrayal, the ‗second killing‘ of the (lost) object, while the melancholic subject remains faithful to the lost object, refusing to renounce his or her attachment to it‖ (141). 212 Hüzün teaches endurance in times of poverty and deprivation; it also encourages us to read life and the history of the city in reverse. It allows the people of Istanbul to think of defeat and poverty not as a historical end point but as an honorable beginning, fixed long before they were born. So the honor we derive from it can be rather misleading. But it does suggest that Istanbul does not bear its hüzün as an incurable illness that has spread throughout the city, as an immutable poverty to be endured like grief, or even as an awkward and perplexing failure to be viewed and judged in black and white; it bears its hüzün with honor. (104-105) The productive aspect of hüzün is to be ‗an honorable beginning‘ to read the history ‗in reverse‘ so that it is possible to come to terms with the city‘s ambivalent identity. Indeed, the insistence of the collectivity of hüzün posits Pamuk‘s Istanbul as the author‘s own search for both his own identity and the identity of his community, city and nation. The transition from the private to the public is indeed subtle and posited as if it were unavoidable –strongly echoing Fredric Jameson‘s argument about the emergence of national allegory in third world countries. In an interview, for instance, Pamuk suggestively moves from describing his competitive relationship with his brother to the ‗theme of impersonation‘ that Turkey encounters in her relationship with western culture (―The Paris Review Interview‖ 368). What Pamuk calls a ‗schizophrenic‘ identity, which is attributed to Turkey‘s ‗having two spirits, belonging to two different cultures, having two souls,‘ is strongly evocative of the split within one‘s ego after internalizing the lost object. For Pamuk, this process has constructive consequences: ―If you worry too much about one part of you killing the other, you‘ll be left with a single spirit. This is worse than having the sickness. This is my theory‖ (369). Against this background, if we re-visit the idea of synthesis and Pamuk‘s questioning of ‗originality‘ within the Istanbul canon, which was pointed out in the first half of this chapter‘s introduction, what is synthesized is perhaps the two different 213 narrations of the uncanny –one that accentuates defamiliarization, and the other that builds upon that defamiliarization to invent a new tradition. That is how the uncanny is both a result of and a remedy for modernity. The modern uncanny, caused by loss or lack in Turkish society, might have debilitating effects; nevertheless, it comes back with a vengeance in Pamuk‘s work and finds expression in an obsessive desire to look for the ‗lost text.‘ In bringing together various texts from an infinitely large collection, including ancient engravings, old photographs, old anecdotes, and literary texts by both Turkish and western authors, together with personal memories that provide a critique of the modernization process, Pamuk appears not only as a flȃneur, but also embodies the figure of the collector, collecting lost, forgotten, or eradicated texts–echoing Benjamin‘s methodology in The Arcades Project. Thus Pamuk merges with the figure of the detective who is engaged with the legibility of the urban text. In its emphasis on the lost text, Istanbul recalls Pamuk‘s fictional work, all of which –with the exception of Kar [2002; Snow (2004)] – is set in Istanbul, and is poignantly saturated with the idea of the lost text. While his first two novels, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları [1982; Cevdet Bey and His Sons] and Sessiz Ev [1983; The Silent House], not yet translated into English, stand out from the rest of his novels in their realist mode, it is starting with his third novel, Beyaz Kale [1985; The White Castle (1990)], set in the seventeenth century, that Pamuk becomes intensely engaged with the ‗Ottoman theme‘ and the idea of the lost text (Göknar 35). The preface to The White Castle, for instance, recounts a Turkish scholar‘s discovery of an old manuscript in the uncatalogued archives of Istanbul, and his peculiar method of translating it from Ottoman to modernized 214 Turkish: ―… after reading a couple of sentences from the manuscript I kept on the table, I‘d go to another table in the other room where I kept my papers and try to narrate in today‘s idiom the sense of what remained in my mind‖ (12). This frame narrative introduces the main story, which is about the intense relationship between an Ottoman master and his Italian slave, who exchange identities at the end of the novel. While the Ottoman manuscript belongs to the Italian slave (who lived in Istanbul after exchanging identities with his master, Hoja), the translated text constitutes the novel, The White Castle. The process through which this text is translated from Ottoman to modernized Turkish literalizes the trope of the lost text in the emphasis on the ‗unreadibility‘ of the original text for the modern reader, but it also effectively illustrates the simultaneous loss and recovery that accompanies the revival of the lost text. Moreover, it reflects on the main theme of the novel –that identity is mutually constructed; it is a process that inevitably consists of loss, on the one hand, with the imitation of the other, and reinvention of oneself on the other. According to Erdağ Göknar, ‗narrative redemption‘ lies at the center of Pamuk‘s fiction: ―Pamuk‘s authority emerges from his act of setting up an aesthetic relation between narratives: the Ottoman manuscript / The White Castle, a mysterious book / The New Life, the sultan‘s secret book / My Name is Red, a book of poems / Snow, a draft / its revision, an encoding / a reencoding, the original / its translation, etc. Like Darvinoğlu (the framed narrator in The White Castle), Pamuk ‗translates‘ post-1980s Turkish dilemmas through the medium of an Ottoman context‖ (37). Hence, Pamuk‘s oeuvre can be regarded, both literally and figuratively, as a search for a lost text and its subsequent recovery. Taken from this perspective, the content of the 215 lost text loses its significance since it is the search for it that determines the reinvention of the tradition. This loss and recovery evoke a common trope in detective fiction, in which something else is accidentally unearthed in looking for a lost text, whose actual content is eradicated in the process. In Edgar Allan Poe‘s The Purloined Letter, for instance, the reader is never informed about the content of the letter. Sharing many characteristics of detective fiction, Pamuk‘s novels and his non- fictional collection of essays, Istanbul: Memories and the City, give voice to the past as a momentary image. What is finally so melancholic about Pamuk‘s text is the fact that his narrative does not securely replace the ‗eternal image‘; it only unsettles it. In that sense, it is striking that Istanbul: Memories and the City concludes with a personal narrative of the moment at which Pamuk‘s dispute with his mother, who expresses her discontent about his artistic pursuit at the cost of quitting architecture school, terminates with his self- confident and blunt announcement that ―he will be a writer‖ (368). Commenting on the endings of Pamuk‘s novels, Ian Almond points out their common point as 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‖ (75). It is Orhan Pamuk‘s artistic achievement that he is able to project that sadness effectively onto the reader who is conscious, if not mournful, about the irreplaceability of the grand narrative with the author‘s story. 216 ii) Fantastic Encounters in and with the City: Nazlı Eray‟s Beyoğlu’nda Gezersin (You Stroll Around Beyoğlu) One of the most prolific contemporary Turkish writers, Nazlı Eray (1945- ) has published over thirty books, consisting of novels and short story collections. 110 While her work has been recognized in Turkey through several prestigious awards, Eray is most renowned for being a pioneering artist in introducing the fantastic as a literary mode into contemporary Turkish literature and consistently producing it to create alternative worlds in her fiction. The fantastic employed in her work is closely related to the way Todorov locates the genre in between ‗the marvelous‘ and ‗the uncanny‘ in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre [1970]. The ‗marvelous‘ evokes an alternative reality in the form of a supernatural world teeming with magic, spirits, and demons. On the other hand, ‗the uncanny‘ (l’etrange) is described as a genre in which all the strange events of the plot are finally resolved by justifying their causes in explainable terms. The fantastic emerges in between these two genres: the defining feature of the fantastic works is the lack of a clear narrative resolution that functions as a demarcation between the marvelous, which can be explained only by supernatural forces, and the uncanny, which is justifiable by the natural laws of the world. The fantastic, can therefore be seen as a challenge to the realist tradition in the novel genre. Considering the long history of the realist novel in the Turkish literary tradition, which served the ‗correct‘ form of westernization during Tanzimat, and the formation of 110 As Sibel Erol points out, although some of her short stories (‗Monte Kristo,‘ ‗Underdevelopment Pharmacy‘ and ‗The Cellular Engineer) and her novels (Orpheus) are published in English, a large body of her work still awaits to be translated. See Sibel Erol‘s ‗Introduction‘ to Orpheus for further information. 217 the nation-state during the republican and post-republican periods, Eray‘s use of the fantastic should be regarded as a counter-discourse on the literary tradition as well as on the history of modernity in Turkey. 111 It is no surprise that while setting out to establish a realist tradition during the Tanzimat period, the ‗fathers‘ of the Turkish novel looked down upon the fantastic elements, supernatural events narrated in the oral tradition, to the point of dismissing them as ‗childish.‘ (Moran Vol. 3, 63). The outcast status of the fantastic in Turkish literature continued well into the second half of the twentieth century. Acknowledged as a prominent figure in contemporary literature, Nazlı Eray, with her literary experimentations and persistent use of the fantastic, breaks away from a limited understanding of literature written for social reform; yet, still maintains a critical stance against the oppressive mechanisms of Turkish society. This section will focus on one of her recent novels, Beyoğlu’nda Gezersin (2005; You Wander Around Beyoğlu) in an attempt to illustrate how Eray‘s engagement with the historicization of Istanbul by using elements of the fantastic genre –combined with the incorporation of the detective story as a sub-text– unleashes the city‘s history as a ghost past that forces its way into the present as part of everyday urban encounters. The accidental and quotidian nature of the uncanny with respect to Istanbul‘s space will be a significant point to consider as a general framework in contemporary Turkish texts, which, I argue, invent a new tradition; yet, do so in less institutional terms than do the Tanzimat novelists. 111 It should be noted in passing that I do not posit Eray‘s critique of modernity as part of a clearly articulated writerly agenda. As is observed in the particular use of the fantastic in her fiction and also in her own words, expressed in interviews, she is writing just ‗to make people happy.‘ The fact that she does not have an evident political agenda helps her rid literature of the shadow of its social mission cast since Tanzimat, yet still engaging with some of the major issues that have been in existence since the emergence of the novel. 218 In Nazlı Eray‘s work, the fantastic emerges out of a tension between a meticulously identified, factual setting and the haunting presence of the past which appears almost as a character in the novel. Indeed, the more the present location is described in insistent detail, the more the past seems uncanny. Among the three major cities –Ankara, Istanbul, Fethiye– in which Beyoğlu’nda Gezersin is set, a majority of the action develops in the first two cities. 112 The main character, an anonymous female narrator living in Ankara (carrying strong autobiographical resonances), walks in the streets of the three cities in the past and the present, running into the other characters of the novel, most of whom lived in earlier historical periods and are now dead. It is the presence of these ghost characters from the past, and the fast-paced transit of the narrator among the cities and between the past and the present, that adds the element of the supernatural to what otherwise appears as a realistic and autobiographical narrative. Eray‘s urban ghosts are an agglomeration of fictional and real, ordinary and bizarre characters, all of which carry a certain enigmatic quality that portrays them as ‗lost texts‘ whose secret history is gradually unearthed throughout the narrative. A common point of all characters is their marginality: as social misfits, their stories have either been forgotten or inadequately narrated. Let us take a moment to focus on some of these characters individually and discuss the remaining figures in the rest of the chapter. 112 Going back and forth between two cities, Istanbul and Ankara, the frame story of the novel posits the former as some unknown, mysterious past against the matter-of-factness of the latter whose presentness, solidified in the way Ankara represents the ‗present‘ time of the narrative and secondly, serves as the locus where ‗real events‘ take place as opposed to the dominance of the fantastical in Istanbul. As Stokes points out in relation to Pamuk‘s fiction, ―Burying of the past is part of the city‘s ‗incomprehensible‘ nature; the past has to be excavated with an act of the imagination, and the present can only be redeemed through this kind of excavation. This not only requires imagination but a rejection of a certain notion of ‗reality‘ –on the surface, there for everybody to see (like Ankara)‖ (―Beloved Istanbul‖ 231). 219 Madam Tamara, a Russian woman who married a rich Turk and settled down in Istanbul in the 1950s, soon earning a notorious name for her secret love affairs, is undoubtedly the most enigmatic character in the novel. She is partly fictional, partly real, based on a Russian woman Eray heard her family members talk about during her childhood. The most disputed aspect of the ‗real‘ Tamara‘s life story was her suspicious murder: she was found dead in a Beyoğlu hotel in 1958, although the circumstances of the homicide are still unresolved in the fictional time when Eray is impersonated by the novel‘s adult narrator. It is through the character of Madam Tamara and the neighborhoods of Istanbul in which these characters roam in the present and/or in the past, crossing each others‘ paths, and they connect, with the single common goal of getting hold of Tamara‘s diary, the woman herself, and the city –all three intertwined. Meanwhile, Madam Tamara randomly appears before the characters, all of whom have, in their own ways, fallen in love with her, or have been involved in relationships that have somewhat been incomplete, leaving them unsatisfied with the present and in search of the past. Şeyh Küçük Hüseyin Efendi (Sheikh Small Hüseyin Effendi), a pseudo-guide to the narrator in helping her meet the other characters, is based on a real sheikh who died in 1930 and was buried in the Eyüp cemetery. His marginal status stems first from his being a sheikh (a religious leader of a tribe/community, who is oftentimes considered by its followers to possess special skills) in a secular state. Secondly, since an important Jewish businessman, Üzeyir Garih, was stabbed to death in the Eyüp Cemetery in 2001, the sufi- sheikh‘s name has been involved in a heated discussion. Garih was killed while he was 220 visiting the tomb of Hüseyin Effendi as part of his regular routine, which led to discussions about the prevalence of the Sheikh‘s followers –especially among the Jewish population in contemporary Turkish society,– and generated various conspiracy theories about the Jewish people acting against the secular state of Turkey. The murderer, Yener Yermez, documented as mentally disturbed, was arrested shortly after the crime: according to Yermez‘s testimony, he killed Garih when he refused to give him money. The most surprising point about Hüseyin Effendi in the novel is that his characterization is only tangentially related to this turbulent history: In an interview, Nazlı Eray mentions that she accidentally passed by the sheikh‘s grave years before the notorious event when she was walking around the Eyüp cemetery. 113 Another ‗real‘ character that is based on yet another accidental encounter is Tayyareci [airman] Fethi Bey, who was the first martyr in the Air Force. In the novel, the narrator runs into an empty pedestal in a deserted park in Fethiye: the attached sign, on which is imprinted ‗Martyr Lieutenant Fethi Bey, (1884-1914),‘ announces the soon-to- be erected statue (16). A visit to the nearby Tourist Information adds only a little more information about Fethi Bey‘s life: he was among the first group of Turkish pilots in the Air Force, testing out planes –the first and very primitive productions of Turkish Aviation History. Fethi Bey and his assistant took off in February 1914, headed to Damascus, Syria, but the plane crushed on the way for unknown reasons. This fatal accident caused such immense grief at the time that it was nationally commemorated through an elegiac song sung by Sebilci Hafız Hüseyin whom the narrator meets in the novel and hears sing 113 http://www.yenisafak.com.tr/arsiv/2005/mart/17/kultur.html 221 his elegy as background music in the park. 114 Hence, Eray elaborates on the brief information provided by official history, and brings Fethi Bey to life in the novel. In resurrecting the ghosts of these two characters, Fethi Bey as a heroic, yet forgotten, figure in the national history, and Hüseyin Effendi as a highly contested name associated with non-secular history, Eray suggests that we are perhaps running into the traces of similar figures on a daily basis, either passing by without wondering about their history, or not even noticing the subtle signs of their continuing existence (i.e. an isolated cemetery located right next to a busy street, or a statue in an obscure park). What is surprising for the reader, then, is not the appearance of the ghosts themselves but their hidden stories elusively carved on the urban cartography. The novel confronts the modern individual with her capacity to be surprised, or even shocked, by the extraordinary nature of her ostensibly familiar habitat. Two other characters, who appear in fictional TV shows, increase the defamiliarizing effect that pervades the novel. The advice given by the psychologist in an evening programme, Deli Saati (‗Mad Hour‘) leads to further dilemmas and misunderstandings. Far from ‗curing‘ his neurotic patients –some of whom are the main characters in the novel, – who tell him about their problems on the phone, the doctor simplifies their troubles by randomly prescribing a pill or advising them to increase the dosage. 115 The heightened miscommunication and the absurdity of the phone conversations demonstrate the failure of ‗modern methods‘ when faced with complicated 114 Although Hafız Hüseyin is not as significant as the other figures, his profession (hafiz being one who has memorized the Koran) contributes to the eclectic background of the novel‘s characters. 115 The doctor also functions as a connecting figure, since all the other characters, sooner or later, either visit him in his office or consult him during the programme. 222 situations such as schizophrenia, superstitious beliefs, split personalities (in one case, for instance, one of them relying on the other because of his agoraphobia), and melancholic attachment to an object, a person, or one‘s past. In the other TV show, Mazi Kalbimde Yaradır (‗The Past is a Wound in My Heart‘), the main objective is to stage ‗the past.‘ ‗Coincidentally‘ connected to the narrator‘s current thoughts or the places she has just visited, this programme seems to be a conscious attempt to transform the narrator‘s experience in Beyoğlu into a narrativized framework. The novel starts by portraying her as a flȃneuse strolling around Beyoğlu: ―How different was the time period I was currently living through. I had suddenly felt that I went into a time that belonged to somebody else (to a complete stranger)‖ (17). 116 Only a page later, the narrator realizes that she ―is in an old Istanbul‖ (18). The fast-paced metropolitan existence, combined with Turkish modernizing reforms intended to cast off the past, has increasingly detached the urban dwellers from their surroundings and their pasts. In the eccentric TV show, presented by the charismatic host, Ulvi Ak, the past is made palpable to a disturbing degree, which produces an opposite effect on both the reader and the narrator: one feels far from being close to the past. The background, decorated with antique furniture, consistently evoking old times, combined with each session‘s focus on a dead person, or a location from the past, creates, more than anything else, self-alienation and doubt about one‘s present condition. Along the same lines as the effects produced by these TV programmes, the fortuneteller Süleyman (also based on a real character), working in a coffee shop in Beyoğlu, reads people‘s minds from coffee 116 Since the novel has not been in translation yet, I have translated the quotes into English throughout the paper. 223 cups and then ‗burns‘ them on a CD. Hence, the uncanny is presented as a product of modernity, embodied in various forms of modern technology. One could have never been so close to oneself as to actually ‗watch‘ one‘s own thoughts –yet so alienated at the same time. To show how alienation, aggravated by modern technology, leads to the loss of self-recognition is not surprising in itself –what Eray does instead, to produce a shock effect, is to posit extreme self-alienation as the only means to achieve self-recognition. If one‘s past, one‘s life, seem to belong to somebody else, there is little effort to make it familiar. On the contrary, the novel persistently strives to increase feelings of estrangement. In that sense, the uncanny is also presented as a remedy to modernity. Eray‘s representation of the city‘s temporal and spatial layout posits the past and present as both disconnected; and yet dizzyingly connected to each other. Hence, she inserts the haunting presence of the past into today‘s present; yet, displays the past‘s uncanny aspects. By adding layers of defamiliarization to this already alienating world, Nazlı Eray evokes a self-generated uncanny effect as everyday experience: the city is, in reality, teeming with ghosts, who leave traces of their unusual histories as they roam the streets that are supposedly familiar terrain for their native population. Within the fantastic elements of the novel, the shocking point is not only the ghostly status of the characters, but the circumstances in which they were turned into ghosts. Eray‘s is an effective, if capricious, technique in which the reader or the character, against one‘s will, returns back to the previous stage when the modernizing face of the city caused alienation in the first 224 place. That is the moment at which what I will call ‗the reflexive uncanny‘ emerges as both a product of and a remedy for modernity. Eray‘s understanding of the function of literature is contingent upon a fluctuation between a real world and a fantastic realm, which is a source for the ‗reflexive uncanny‘ effect in her novels. In an interview, Eray explains that her purpose in writing fantastic fiction is not to escape from the real world, but ―to create a world that does not exist outside of and independently of what is being narrated, to embroider the lives of the people there, in all their richness as if they are English lace, to pull in the reader into this world, making him/her feel as if this world really exists, and then pull the plug and put an end to it. This is writing. (qtd. in Erol xi). The fact that Eray finally ‗puts an end‘ to the fantasy of the other world counters the escapist impulse that is mistakenly associated with fantastic literature. It also shows her concern to provide a means through which it is guaranteed that readers will not stay eternally in the comfort of the world she has created, but will go back to reality with fresh eyes. That is perhaps part of the reason why Eray responds to the question of ‗what happened to Fethi Bey at the end of the novel,‘ sounding slightly annoyed: ‗Whatever happened to Fethi Bey had already happened (before the novel starts). He is dead. He is one of the first martyrs in the Air Force. His taking off with that plane in 1914 is like going to the moon. I admire his courage. Some people‘s lives came to an end, finished. Their stories are already written, by other pens, other souls. I am resurrecting them, and you are asking me about their end. Life is like this –for instance, is something, which started two and a half month ago, finished now? … My novel is like that too, it goes on. But there is no end.‘ 117 117 http://www.milliyet.com.tr/ozel/kitap/080305/03.html 225 The emphasis on the open-ended aspect of her fiction not only creates an analogy with real life itself, but also points to the ultimate goal as defamiliarization: the significance of what really happened to Fethi Bey in the novel is perhaps less important than what could have happened to Fethi Bey in real life, but did not –so that Eray opens up a space for the possibilities that never happened. Indeed, the reader is confronted with a defamiliarizing effect that takes the form of continuous oscillation between the consolation of a ready- made reality and the attractions of an alternative world. These two aspects could be successfully synthesized if one were to read the urban signs of the past imprinted on the cityscape. A similar form of defamiliarization is at stake in Eray‘s relationship to the literary canon about Istanbul. Unlike Orhan Pamuk‘s Istanbul, Eray‘s work does not display a consciously crafted intellectual engagement with the western writers. Nevertheless, her representation of the city, particularly its spatial layout, perpetuates certain stereotypical images. Most significantly, Istanbul‘s uncanny geography around the Golden Horn plays a critical role in the development of the plot structure. The hidden dichotomy between Beyoğlu and Eyüp (the old Turkish quarter,) in Eray‘s text, perpetuates the explicit opposition outlined in the previous texts, while at the same time disrupting it with major changes to the tradition. The Pierre Loti café on the heights of Eyüp is one of the major locations frequented by Eray‘s characters –more specifically by the narrator and the doubles, Nazmi and Arif. Earlier on in the narrative, an anonymous call (which is apparently Arif as we, the readers, later on infer from the scattered narrative) to the TV programme, 226 ―Mad Hour,‖ reveals that Arif is unable to go out alone and is desperately attached to Nazmi who comes to Eyüp -to the Pierre Loti café- everyday. Despite being unhappy about Nazmi‘s choice, he nevertheless accompanies him –storming him with reproaches on the way: ‗Aren‘t you fed up with this place, Nazmi? Every morning we leave the house – headed directly towards here. There is no life here. Shadow of the old world is cast everywhere. Let‘s go to lively places. Where there are people. Let‘s go to places where people laugh, fight. This place is silent. There is nobody around. Only long cypress trees. I get depressed, bored. I‘m suffocating here!‘ (84) Even though Arif doesn‘t specify where exactly he would prefer to go instead, Nazmi answers him back by saying that Arif is free to go alone to Beyoğlu if he desires to be among a crowd. Fed up with Arif‘s complaints, Nazmi finally agrees to go to Beyoğlu, where Arif meets Madam Tamara and falls in love with her on the spot. Thus, Beyoğlu‘s association with entertainment, night life, and alluring atmosphere passes on to Eray‘s text, while Eyüp‘s gloominess, which is encountered in older texts, is preserved. The Eyüp cemetery, one of the few which have remained intact from previous centuries, is an important factor in producing a gloomy, yet peaceful effect on the visitor. When questioned about setting parts of her novel in Eyüp, Eray talks about the cemetery in words that are strikingly reminiscent of the travelers‘ observations about how life and death is lightheartedly intertwined in Turkish cemeteries. Similarly, Eray mentions that the Eyüp cemetery, which is a unique case among other metropolitan centers across the world, does not really evoke death, and stresses its mystical atmosphere, where she 227 accidentally ran into the sheikh‘s gravestone and then passed through the tombs to ‗get lost in the city‘s hustle and bustle,‘ closeby. 118 Written a century before Eray‘s text, Pierre Loti‘s Aziyadé is also set in Eyüp: ―It is a gloomy spot, this Eyoub, the very heart of Islam, which contains the sacred mosque, where the Sultans are consecrated. Some fierce old dervishes and the guardians of the holy tombs are the only inhabitants of this quarter, which is the most fanatical and ultra Moslem district of the whole city‖ (53). A century later, Eray works with the same associations. Her character, Arif, echoes Loti when the former complains about the solitude of the location, which is enjoyable for both Nazmi and the narrator. ―Here at Eyoub, a man is very far from his own kind, and, at night, he is very much alone; but the peace he enjoys is compensation‖ (99), writes Loti, and each of his conflicting remarks could be seen as expressed by Arif and Nazmi respectively. In contrast to Eyüp, Pera/Beyoğlu is where balls take place all around the neighborhood, arranged by different communities such as Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Italians and the like (Bareilles 73, Nerval 566). Almost every character in Beyoğlu’nda Gezersin, particularly the streetseller Naki, 119 who is in possession of Madam Tamara‘s diary, is enchanted by the glamour of Beyoğlu, and associates Tamara with the Beyoğlu district. 120 The surreal description of the neighborhood and its pronounced enigma aptly 118 http://www.milliyet.com.tr/ozel/kitap/080305/03.html 119 Naki is a streetseller in Ankara, selling ‗boza‘ which is a thick non-alcoholic drink. Selling boza is a winter-time nightly job: the seller walks in the streets carrying a big can of boza and routinely stops to call out ‗Boza‘ loudly so that anyone who wants to buy the drink can come up to the window to summon the streetseller. 120 Being the most accessible quarter to European travelers, Pera was extensively mentioned in nineteenth- century travelogues, which created a ‗mythic‘ version of the city. Pera was also the most textualized part of 228 indicate the subconsciously inherited legacy of Pera‘s representation in literature. Madam Tamara‘s unfathomable, ghost-like presence, much like Pera‘s position, dominates the scene at a distance. Although Naki has never been in Beyoğlu, he visits the city in his imagination every night after reading parts of the diary, and then stops by the narrator‘s apartment every night to recount to her what he has read. Equally interested in Tamara, the narrator asks him if she can borrow the diary for a while; yet the streetseller cannot part from it even for a single night: ―I read that diary until sunrise every night. It is impossible for me to give it away. That glaring world, those pages touched by female sensitivity, those Istanbul nights, Markiz Bakery, meetings with the tailor Figaro, high- heeled shoes bought from Pacikakis [ ....] Understand? I cannot give it away‖ (118). On other occasions, Naki is very successful at describing all the details of Beyoğlu life that have been rooted in his imagination. Holding the ‗secret text‘ in his hands, Naki, the least pretentious character of the novel, is paradoxically both the fortunate owner of the diary, and its hopeless victim. Enjoying the textualized Beyoğlu for a temporary period, Naki finally defies the whole tradition when he comes to a point where the text is no longer satisfactory. Another anonymous call to the ―Mad Hour‖ reveals that Naki has fallen in love with a city and with a woman living between the lines of a diary (165). When the doctor quite openly asks his problem, Naki replies that he would like to ―attain the real ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the city. This is perhaps why in Eray‘s novel, Beyoglu is associated with a Russian (i.e., foreign) woman, and why the Ottoman past, mostly encountered in Beyoğlu in the novel, has the status of a melancholic lost object. (notes, Russett). On the other hand, a more literal reading would incorporate the historical foundations of the reason why the mysterious Russian female expatriate, mostly associated with Beyoğlu is a common motif in contemporary works (i.e. Barbara Nadel‘s Belshazzar’s Daughter). More than two hundred thousand white Russians came to Istanbul after the October Revolution and settled in Pera/Beyoğlu. For further information, see Jak Deleon‘s The White Russians in Istanbul. Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi Publications, 1995. 229 woman and the real city‖ (165). Naki‘s desire strongly parallels the subtext hidden behind the façade of almost all the texts studied in this work. In a way, he is the caricature of the whole tradition which has romanticized Pera to such an extent that what the authors/travelers have experienced, enjoyed, and loved was finally textualized in order to be well-preserved against a decaying Empire. It is precisely because of the desire to get hold of the real city that the European traveler roams the streets (mainly in Pera, though most of them challenge the boundaries and opt to see beyond) while simultaneously producing yet another text that is in pursuit of attaining the real city but never realizing it. In this endless chain of texts, perhaps the conclusion of Beyoğlu’nda Gezersin could be seen as a recovery of the lost text and the city. If the actual lost text is Tamara‘s dairy, then the novel itself serves as a recovery of the lost text: in replacing Tamara‘s diary, the novel, through which the content of the diary is only partially related, surpasses the lost text. In doing so, it also brings the lost city back to the narrator: ‗I felt a strange movement in my heart. Hüseyin Effendi, Madam Tamara, fortuneteller Süleyman … Beyoğlu with all its memories, people, blackened buildings, pidgeon‘s twitterings, the tram‘s roar –all of which I wrapped around my neck like a scarf …. On the one hand, all these were present, on the other they were gone/not present. I had gotten hold of them, and the city‘s neighborhoods – they were all mine, I knew. I had caught up with the city I had slipped through my fingers. With its old residents, memories, songs, gossip and murders committed in hotel rooms, the city had surrendered itself back to me.‘ (262) This is the moment the narrator‘s identity collides with that of the writer‘s. At the end of the novel, Naki apologizes to the narrator for detaining her every night, talking about a diary, a woman from old times and a city. She replies that she is not bored at all, and she adds: ―I also narrate such things‖ (263). With its manifest emphasis on the act of narration, reminiscent of Pamuk‘s conclusion in Istanbul, this moment in the novel is 230 significant for multiple reasons, and should therefore be taken as more than a usual postmodern technique. Most significantly, it lays open the ongoing doubleness between the narrator and the streetseller Naki, which has been hinted in the nightly conversations about their common obsessive attachment both to Madam Tamara and the city of Istanbul. It is also the epitome of the climactic moment that renders it possible to finally recover the lost text only through an act of doubling. Despite their radical differences in gender, social status, and age, both Naki and the narrator desire to get hold of the city. This common goal, shared by almost all the characters in the novel, constructs split personalities between the narrator and the rest of the figures. In one of the most suggestive moments in the novel, Tamara asks the narrator to exchange identities with her for 48 hours. The narrator accepts unhesitatingly, although she is later confronted with the frightening reality that she might lose herself and be forever imprisoned in the other‘s identity and in an unresolved past, (due to Tamara‘s suspicious murder,) should Tamara decide never to come back –hence, turning the only ‗real‘ character of the story into a ghost. In order to put an end to her nightmarish experience as Madam Tamara, the narrator finally manages to reclaim her identity by breaking away from the past and the double life in which she is imprisoned. To reclaim loss, one needs to lose oneself in the other. Starkly analogous to Pamuk‘s chronic focus on doubleness, as most effectively observed in The White Castle, Eray‘s interest in double identity could certainly be interpreted as a canonical gesture in the Turkish novel, which is founded upon the question of doubleness and imitation. In the light of Eray‘s personal views as expressed 231 during interviews, and in consideration of her general use of the uncanny as an accidental device, however, I argue that Eray‘s work stands outside of both the national and the western literary tradition on Istanbul, precisely because she creates her own agenda even when she is using the city‘s common images and motifs that appear in both traditions (i.e. the dichotomy between Eyüp and Beyoğlu). In that sense, Eray‘s stance is radically different from that of Orhan Pamuk. Responding to a question about the reasons for her interest in ‗being somebody else,‘ ‗living somebody else‘s life or time,‘ Eray comments that she is just curious to experience a different existence than she is going through, and to see how she would do if she were given the chance to live a second life. 121 The fact that her perspective on double identity –which is a highly loaded term in the Turkish context– includes nothing about the western perspective internalized by the Turkish writer, illustrates her outsider status which disregards, underrates or is simply ignorant of the western literary canon on the city. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the variations, let us consider in the following section whether it is possible to decode certain definable characteristics of the emerging literary tradition on Istanbul in the works of Pamuk and Eray, after a brief examination of Oya Baydar‘s city novel, Erguvan Kapısı (The Gate of the Judas Tree; 2004). iii) Oya Baydar‟s Istanbul: Erguvan Kapısı (The Gate of the Judas Tree) and the Search for Dead Bodies in “The Country Killing Her Children” Oya Baydar (1940-) started her professional life as a teaching assistant in the Sociology Department at Istanbul University after graduating from the same department 121 http://www.yenisafak.com.tr/arsiv/2005/mart/17/kultur.html 232 in 1964. As a member of the socialist party, she was arrested and imprisoned during the 1971 coup and forced to quit academy. In the following years, she persisted in her antimilitarist activism as a journalist, writing in various leftist media. Because of her socialist identity, she was among the many writers, professors, and intellectuals who were sent to exile after the 1980 coup, which marked a more violent and determined intention to silence the Turkish left than the two previous coups. 122 Since her return in 1992, Baydar has been living in Istanbul and working as an editor, and also continuing with her literary work [Elveda Alyoşa (Goodbye Alyosha; 1991), Kedi Mektupları (Cat Letters; (1993), Hiçbiryer’e Dönüş (Return to Nowhere; 1998), Sıcak Külleri Kaldı (Its Hot Ashes Remained; 2001), Erguvan Kapısı (The Gate of the Judas Tree; 2004), Kayıp Söz (Lost Word; 2007]. Her relationship with writing, as she defines it, is a matter of necessity. In a recent interview I held with her on February 20, 2008, she stressed the fact that she is not writing professionally –especially when compared to writers such as Orhan Pamuk. ―I do not have a conscious writing adventure,‖ she said, ―I write only when I feel touched by something that I urgently need to write, scream out, and relate to others.‖ In many ways, Baydar‘s radical political position and attitude toward writing pose a contrast to both Eray‘s and Pamuk‘s pursuit of literature as a professional career. In many other ways, however, she either aligns with Eray for representing the female perspective, for not holding an open conversation with western literary canon on the city and being less 122 As Sibel Erol explains, ―September 12, 1980, after the political polarization of the left and right escalated during the late 1970s. The period‘s economic crisis together with the assassinations of prominent political figures led to a widespread expectation that the army would take over. The coup occurred after skirmishes between leftist and rightist factions caused the deaths of more than 600 people in July and August of 1980, and the resulting military government was in power from 1980 until the elections of 1983‖ (Introduction to Orpheus xiv). 233 intentional about creating an urban consciousness, or with Pamuk for her interest in the ruins imprinted on the cityscape. Although all three writers were born in Istanbul, they have developed varying relationships with the city, which is reflected in the autobiographical resonances that seep into their literary works. Pamuk‘s relation with the city has changed significantly in recent years, since he was threatened with murder by radical nationalist circles for his open criticism of the Kurdish massacres and the Armenian genocide. Since the beginning of 2007, he has been living in the United States. Yet, in Istanbul (2003), he points out that his unique perspective is indebted to having lived in the same city, the same street and even the same house for all his life. The memoir is ‗a record‘ for Pamuk, who realizes that he is forgetting his early childhood in the city: ―It‘s a record for myself. It is also a joy to write about it. (…) Actually, my intention was to write a book on Istanbul, not on myself. (…) So my intent was not initially to write an autobiography, but, to be honest, my city book was going to be autobiographical anyway‖ (Mirze 180). Unlike Pamuk, Eray left Istanbul in her 20s to live in Ankara for the rest of her life. Her self-acclaimed interest in certain cities (Sinop, Ankara, Fethiye, İzmir etc.) is explicit in her large body of work; yet, Beyoğlu’nda Gezersin is her first and only work in which Istanbul plays such a major role. As she points out in an interview, ―this (novel) is my reclamation of the city which I left years ago, and to be able to tell her once again that ‗you are mine.‘ ‖ 123 Like Pamuk, Nazlı Eray uses a ‗nostalgic‘ trope of Istanbul without lapsing into (imperialist) nostalgia, while looking for the traces of her childhood and adolescence in contemporary Istanbul. A 123 http://www.yenisafak.com.tr/arsiv/2005/mart/17/kultur.html 234 native to the city since his birth; another native who left the city willingly to live in Istanbul‘s ‗other‘, the capital Ankara; and an exiled socialist whose relationship with the city was interrupted for twelve years: To detect common points in the works of such a heterogeneous group would indeed support the claim that a new tradition on Istanbul is in the process of being shaped by local writers. Like those of Pamuk and Eray, Baydar‘s historicization of the city is contingent on what I call the ‗reflexive uncanny‘: In The Gate of the Judas Tree, Baydar is concerned with illustrating the alienation caused by the modernizing face of the city, but also attempts to sharpen this alienation, which produces a discomforting experience both for the characters and the readers of the novel. More than anything, it is the people themselves, their alienating politics and ‗otherization‘ of each other, that has made life difficult in this city. ―In essence, I wanted to write about the relation between faith and identity, one‘s alienation and otherization,‖ Baydar explains. 124 The narrative is an agglomeration of four different perspectives belonging to the four main characters who persistently confront each other as ‗the other‘: an Istanbul-born Greek, the Art Historian Professor Theodoros Zakharakis, living in the United States and a visitor to Istanbul in search of a Byzantine gate in the ancient walls of the old city; middle-aged exiled journalist Ülkü, (reminiscent of the author herself) who has returned to the country; Kerem Ali, a young man from a leftist organization conducting urban guerilla warfare mainly centered in Küçük Armutlu, a shanty-town located in the hills of the Bosphorus, not far from the most luxurious residences; a young woman, Derin, who settles down in 124 http://www.radikal.com.tr/ek_haber.php?ek=ktp&haberno=2775 235 Kerem Ali‘s community and tries to be accepted despite the dwellers‘ suspicions of her bourgeois background. All are looking for something, or somebody to connect with the past that is carved out in the many layers of the city‘s landscape, to which each character attributes a different meaning based on what Baydar calls ‗faith.‘ Professor Theo‘s thousands of years old ancient city is posed against Ülkü‘s activist years of her youth in 1970s –the peak years of the conflict between leftist and rightist groups, armed against each other in street fights– and Ali‘s and Derin‘s peripheral city of the present in Küçük Armutlu. Disconnected from the city, they struggle to construct their identity and to create a sense of belonging through their quests. The fairy-tale atmosphere of the book‘s opening paragraph is an effective way to introduce the theme of alienation, not only because it evokes a distant past, but also, and more prominently, because it displays the process of otherization from an unexpected perspective: In pursuit of those magical verses, written hundreds of years ago in a monastery by a monk, mocking history or rebelling against fate, gone almost blind while copying ancient manuscripts by hand, I returned to the city I had left as a child, in order to look for the Gate of the Judas Tree. My dad would say ‗the city from which we were exiled, not left: Our own country, our ancestors‘ land. When they came, we had been there for 2000 years.‘ They were the Muslim Turks, whom we learned, with some fear and more with admiration, in history classes –how Mehmed the Conqueror moved the ships on land to descend them inside the Golden Horn, and ransacked Byzantium to realize the Turk‘s dream. (9) 125 In this account, ‗the other‘ is the Turk narrated from the perspective of the Istanbul-born Greek, Theo, who ‗left‘ the city as a child. The book seems to announce, from the very 125 The translations from the original text are mine. 236 beginning, that this will be a narrative about the shifting perspectives on the question of the other, in a geography which has based its national foundations on a systematic method of otherization. The reason for ‗the other‘s‘ homecoming, in Theo‘s case, is an enigmatic poem he came across in Alexandria, while he was searching for a document about Byzantium history in an old bookshop. The poem, whose reliability is dubious, refers to a certain ‗Gate of Judas Tree‘ in the ancient city walls of Byzantium: ―To save the lost soul of the city, / through a secret, ruinous gate, he enters / through the Gate of Judas-Tree / a purple [the Turkish word for the color, ‗Erguvan‘ is the same as the name of the Judas-Tree] crown on his head / his wounds are purple [Judas-Tree] / following the shadow of a heretic monk, / advances towards holy wisdom‖ (9). 126 On the one hand, The Gate of the Judas Tree is a book about an unavoidable return to the object of desire (the city), from which one has been traumatically disconnected; on the other hand, it consistently portrays the city as a cryptic space, in which one does not feel at home. ―… In a romantic, and slightly flamboyant way,‖ Theo relates that, ―the only place I belong, my only dwelling, was Byzantium and Byzantium was a legend‖ (364). He finds comfort in his quest for the gate, which, he believes, will lead him to his home once it is found. During his perambulations in the ancient districts in search for the gate, Theo encounters a city that has gone through a radical transformation because of ‗the freeways, modern residences, skyscrapers, shanty towns, garbage dumps … that have eliminated 126 This is a fictional narrative written by the writer herself. In the novel, further research and the rest of the poem discovered during Theo‘s search, show that the poem renders the identity of the Saver ambiguous: ―/Hanged on how many trees, crucified on how many crosses /Exhausted, outcast, accursed, he got to the end of the road / is he Christ, or Judas, that literal victim / to save the lost soul of the city / adorns the gate of sin with purple [Judas-Tree]‖ (457). Thus, the suggestion is that the poem might be part of a heretic interpretation, according to which Judas was not a traitor. On the contrary, he was the one to be crucified instead of Christ –a subversive reading that violates the official readings of the Bible. 237 and rendered meaningless not only Porte Aurea, but all the gates in the Byzantine walls …‖ (21). Old streets named ‗Judas Tree‘ are now known as ‗Martyr İrfan Street‘ (23-24), or a neighborhood previously called ‗First of May‘ is now renamed after ‗The Army‘ (109). However, his unhomely status is as much related to the unfamiliarly modernized face of the city and his expatriate identity as to his marginalization because of his ‗faith‘ and his search for an obscure Byzantine gate in the contemporary city. Theo meets the most extreme hostility from Kerem Ali, since Ali‘s organization has mistaken Theo for an ‗American agent.‘ Theo marginalizes other characters in return. In one of the most suggestive moments in the novel, Theo, accompanied by Derin who is showing him the city including the shanty-towns, visits Küçük Armutlu and recounts the Byzantine past of the neighborhood to Derin and Kerem Ali: These lands used to be distant villages of Constantinople. There were monasteries on the hills, off the beaten path inside the forests and on cliffs, overlooking the Bosphorus. (…) The aristocrats who were tired of the Byzantine intrigues, those who wanted to turn their back on life, and to take refuge in God and in their faith, those who took the oath of virginity and dedicated themselves to Christ, those who became monks to flee their enemies ….. Monasteries in which those who refused this world, and who were in sorrow, took shelter… The more isolated, the more they are cut off from life, the higher the mountain, the closer they are to the sky in these shelters, the more blessed, the more respectable it is to be a monk. (…) There were many such examples in Byzantium. The more you suffer, the more strengthened is your faith and the closer you are to God. (…) Right here in Istinye, a Syrian Saint lived on a hill that used to be called Sostenion. … He spent his whole life (forty years, as is written in The Lives of Saints) on a pillar, in order to be close to the sky. (…) Who knows, maybe Saint Simeon‘s pillar was located exactly at this point, on this hill. (120) While Derin is able to respond to Theo‘s speculations, Kerem Ali feels alienated: ―There was something in their conversation that I could not follow, something foreign and disquieting, whose meaning I could not grasp. Something that made me feel lonely in my home, in my own community‖ (120). Theo‘s city is a distant world to Kerem Ali, who 238 feels his own city being threatened by this strange realm. Yet, the essence of the story about the monks is not actually so distant from his world. The mass hunger strike, which is about to start in a couple of weeks in Küçük Armutlu, at exactly the same location where Derin, Theo, and Kerem Ali stand, is based on an ideology similar to the one behind the monks‘ retreat into this faraway land in Constantinople. By putting these two worlds, sometimes in opposition, sometimes juxtaposed to each other, what Baydar points out is the potential of the city that can erupt into conflict but can also overlap. She also underlines the unbroken continuity between the past and the present, as a natural rhythm of the city, –and its violent disruption. In Baydar‘s fiction, each of the main characters connect to the past through a lost person –a victim of the turbulent history of Turkish modernization, based on a state-tradition and a military background. While Ülkü‘s son and Kerem Ali‘s elder brother, both belonging to the same leftist group, were killed in an ‗armed fight‘ (even though they never fired) with the police in a house operation, Ülkü‘s father, a top diplomat who knew ‗too much‘ of the nature of such operations, was assassinated. This recent history, reminiscent of real historical events from the same period, has not been redeemed –the present continues to create even more conflicts and produce unmourned bodies with another real incident, the mass hunger strike, in which more than a hundred people died. On the one hand, Baydar discloses the city‘s recent violent history that illuminates what she calls ‗the blood culture‘ of Turkish society, and disrupts the continuity of the ‗harmony,‘ or ‗toleration,‘ imbedded in the many layers of the city. 127 In doing so, she criticizes the society‘s indifference to death as 127 In an interview, Baydar refers to an expression that frequently appears in the novel –‗This country is killing her children‘– and underlines the fact that it is not a mere literary cliché: ―This is a country that is 239 much as the idea of ‗martyrdom‘ behind the mass hunger strike, whose logic is based upon the same grounds with the ‗blood culture,‘ inflicted by the state. On the other hand, she reads into the many overlapping layers of the city‘s past –particularly belief systems– piled up on each other. In both cases, Baydar juxtaposes the search for the lost text and the textualized city to the walking experience of the characters. On one of their walks in the city, for instance, Theo and Ülkü run into four women heavily clothed in long black feraces (long coats), praying inside a Muslim saint‘s shrine, located right next to the Byzantine monument, the Church of Saint Saviour in Chora. As Theo explains the history of the neighborhood, it is highly possible that the saint‘s shrine used to be a Christian mausoleum and that the women might as well be praying for the soul of the Christian saint as they are for Saint Ebu Saidül Hudri. In such moments, Baydar posits the historicization of the city as an everyday matter, as if it were walking in the streets. Indeed, all three writers, Pamuk, Eray, and Baydar, synthesize the urban experience as reading/detection with strolling around the city. Their characters are all compulsive walkers and pseudo-detectives. In that sense, these three writers, as representative cases of contemporary Turkish literature, resurrect the figure of the flȃneur that one encounters in nineteenth-century accounts. Different from the travelogues, in which the uncanny is experienced as everyday shock experience, Turkish examples reclaim familiarity by employing increasing effects of the uncanny. All openly secularists and westerners, they nevertheless show the debilitating effects of modernity and the ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- accustomed to death. I call it –somewhat unfairly– ‗the blood culture.‘ (…) We consider martyrdom as the highest achievement, celebrate victimizing and being victimized.‖ (http://www.radikal.com.tr/ek_haber.php?ek=ktp&haberno=2775) 240 traumatic disconnection with the past. The uncanny effects of the flȃneur’s everyday encounters, combined with a conscious employment of the uncanny in the pseudo- detective‘s search for a lost past/lost text, locate contemporary Turkish literature on Istanbul in between nineteenth-century travelogues and the contemporary western detective fiction in which the modern and the pre-modern worlds are superficially balanced. Nadel establishes the archaic and brings the past to the present as if it were untouched by the modern world whereas Goodwin feels obliged to travel back into the past to escape the current modernized face of the city. In the works of Pamuk, Eray, and Baydar, however, the temporal and spatial frames are intertwined. Hence, the city‘s ambivalence is preserved through what I call ‗the reflexive uncanny,‘ while questioning the reasons behind that ambivalence. Such questioning also poses challenges to the realism of the novel tradition in Turkish literature and of the nation-state. All three writers re-insert the uncanny into the cityscape in the form of a ghost past as a means to come to terms with loss and to feel ‗at home.‘ For Pamuk, the persistent presence of the melancholy of the ruins becomes a means to reflect on the imperial past from a liberal perspective. Eray uses the fantastic to resurrect the ghost characters posited against the actual locations of the present city. Baydar creates characters in a state of incomplete mourning for a close relative: the dead bodies of the deceased still haunt the living because of the unresolved mystery behind their deaths. Drawn from Baydar‘s extensive knowledge of the city‘s history and the wide scope of neighborhoods, ranging from satellite towns, forgotten Byzantine monuments, shanty towns and middle-class residences, her Istanbul, as in Pamuk and Eray‘s works, 241 has the potential to be panoramic; yet, the final image of the city in all three writers is still unmappable and incomprehensible. In that sense, they work against the panoptical perspective of the detective figure and the totalizing tendencies of contemporary western detective fiction, even when evoking certain tropes of the genre. With their open-ended conclusions, lack of resolution with respect to the plight of certain characters, the ‗inefficiency‘ of the pseudo-detective figures in restoring order and bringing back the lost text, celebration of an alternative vision rather than a factual reality, these works raise more questions than they can resolve at the end. They can be described as anti-detective novels developed out of narrative necessity or as Erol describes Eray‘s novel, Orpheus, as ―detective novel in reverse.‖ (Introduction xiii). None of the writers sets out to write (anti-)detective narratives, yet, the various parts of the plot structure converge to develop inevitably into a story of detection. The emerging local tradition on Istanbul is, if anything, a search for objects, memories, texts, urban debris –more for daily survival than a consciously outlined agenda of the novelists, who cannot be considered to share a common objective in their writings on the city. The search for lost texts, whether they are found or not, projects an image of the city as an agglomeration of fragments. Pamuk‘s archival search for western travelogues and paintings together with local writings on the city, combined with the objects and memories of his childhood and his long walks around the city, through which he observes the ruins from ancient worlds fading into the background of the city; Eray‘s narration of her childhood memories, and the forgotten lives of ‗unheroic‘ figures from history, followed by their resurrection in imaginary, unofficial ways, using the bits and pieces of information that are left behind; Baydar‘s 242 evocation of the city‘s recent political history in remembrance of the dead bodies still unmourned for and already forgotten, and her reference to the urban monuments such as Anemas Dungeons, rendered ‗unmonumental‘ due to lack of governmental incentive for historical preservation (which might also be ignoring other Byzantine gates –such as Theo‘s fictional gate– buried under the various layers of the present city): Istanbul is a site of remembering in contemporary Turkish literature. 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Surrey: Curzon, 1999. 15-33. 264 APPENDICES APPENDIX A ―When recording his observations on a country like Turkey, and on a people still so imperfectly known as the Turks, and when submitting those observations to public attention, a traveler may be exempted from the usual excuses (of modesty or affectation) deemed necessary to precede or accompany the descriptions of more familiar regions, whose inhabitants and institutions differ comparatively little from our own, and are every day brought before our eyes in the progress of public affairs, or in the familiar intercourse of society In our own language we have one standard work on Turkey, (Thornton‘s,) but even that is not free from many and serious errors: the spirit of enterprise and investigation which does honour to our country, has not been idle, and through a numerous collection of Travels much valuable information is certainly scattered, though perhaps few but literary men will be at the pains of extracting and condensing it, from so many heavy volumes. A work that should unite the valuable portions of the information on the Ottoman empire, we possess in our native authors; and that which is to be found in French, Italian, and German travelers, would be a desideratum for the general reader, and would tend to give something like stability to the popular ideas on Turkey, which are now as vague as those connected with fairy-land. But this is not my present business. All I have aimed at in the following sketches, is to furnish a few slight materials, to add to those already in our possession. The field is acknowledged to be vast, and every man, however far he may be from possessing the elaborate accuracy of a Tournefort, the vivacity of a Clarke, or the graphic skill of a Leake, if he will but see with his own eyes, and not through the medium of books, can hardly fail (even if he but glean where others have reaped) to collect something novel and interesting which has escaped his predecessors. It is more than probable, however, that my slight researches would have remained in the obscurity of my portfolio, or have been treasured up in my own mind with many other pleasurable recollections of travel, and would have sought no other issue than that afforded by conversation with an untravelled friend, or complacent listener; (for we of the itinerant genus must at least talk, and like a rough fox-hunt, half the pleasure of traveling, perhaps, consists in reflecting on the tales we shall have to tell, particularly when we extend our wanderings beyond the pale of civilization;) but I found myself in Turkey at a remarkable and eventful epoch, which afforded me an opportunity of 265 watching the movements of the Moslemins‘ minds when under the influences of calamity and excitement, and of tracing the operations of the sultan‘s new system and improvements. I was in Asia Minor at the date of the fatal conflict at Navarino –at Constantinople at the commencement of the Russian invasion; and were it but as an abstract study of the human mind, in a state imperfectly civilized, and modified by a very peculiar religious code, I flatter myself that my observations on the Turks during those trying circumstances, cannot be found wholly devoid of interest. Dr. Walsh, in his deservedly popular work, has given an able account of Sultan Mahmood‘s military reforms, which might seem to render further details unnecessary; but it was my fortune to see the development or extension of those plans, the progress made in them since the Doctor‘s departure from the country, and to watch the working of the new system in the most critical moments. Thus, taking up the subject where he left it, I consider a portion of my work an humble continuation of my predecessor‘s; whilst some details on the civil improvements of the Ottoman government, not noticed by Dr. Walsh, may pretend to entire novelty, which succeeding travellers will in their turn enlarge upon. The authorities from which I have drawn my connected sketch of Mahmood‘s life and reign, and the characters of several men who have figured on the dangerous theatre of Turkish politics, are such as I have good reasons to respect –they are persons born or bred in the country, or European residents who have passed many years of their lives in it, and have witnessed the scenes, and known (some of them intimately) the persons they described, motives of prudence (as regards themselves and their connexions in Turkey) necessitate the suppression of many names; but I may mention with confidence, as I do with gratitude, those of my friends Messrs. Constantine Zohrab, Edward Zohrab, R. Liston Elliot (the oriental secretary of the late embassy,) G. Wood, (one of our dragomans,) and Donald Sandison, of Constantinople; and Messrs. Wilkinsons, Borrell, Langdon, the late James Sandison, Cunningham, and Jasigi, of Smyrna. From these gentlemen I obtained various and interesting information, but it is to the first of them, (Mr. Constantine Zohrab,) that I am most deeply indebted. Of Armenian descent, he was born at Constantinople; the Turkish, from the disuse the idiom of his ancestors had fallen into, may be considered as his mother tongue, and perhaps to no Osmanli of Stambool is it more familiar. His father held a diplomatic situation in the Turkish capital, and from his childhood he has been in habits of familiarity or of intercourse with Turks of all classes. Mr. Thornton, the author of ‗The present State of Turkey,‘ married Mr. C. Z.‘s sister, and it is not depreciating the merits of the Englishman to suppose that he owed a portion of his information to his Levantine brother-in-law, who was so well calculated to furnish particulars concerning the extraordinary people among whom his life has passed. Mr. C. Zohrab has been, moreover, a traveler; he has visited England, (several times,) France, Russia, and most of the countries of the continent; and this, with his constant intercourse with Englishmen, 266 arising in part from his family connexions, and in part from his partnership as a merchant with Mr. Cartwright, (now our consul-general at Constantinople,) whilst it has emancipated him from the narrowness of mind incident to Levantines, and more especially to those of Pera, has enabled him also to draw comparisons, and to feel what is interesting and what otherwise to European research. The latter quality is most valuable, for in consulting natives of the country, the misfortune is, that they are almost sure to suppress as trite and trivial the very things that are most characteristic and amusing, if not the most important. My hearty old friend has not the least pretension in the world to literature or philosophy, (though he has a fund of information, the fruit of personal experience, and a rough-coated, good wearing sort of philosophy of his own,) but he is fond of talking of what he has seen, in the true spirit of a traveler, and one who has lived in the midst of ‗moving accidents;‘ and I always found his accounts deliciously quaint, bold, and animated. It used to be refreshing to me when oppressed by the ennui and stupidity of Pera, to get closeted for a whole long evening with Zohrab and our pipes, and to talk of Turkey, the Black Sea, England, and the mountains of Scotland. I could fill volumes with my friend‘s tales and odd remarks; -but if this enough. It will be seen that the disturbed state of public affairs, and bad health, prevented me from extending my excursions as I had proposed; but if my range of travel was not a wide one, I at least saw what I visited coolly and deliberately, and in this I differ from the generality of tourists, who pass so hurriedly from place to place, that they have no time for mature examination, and the result is a succession of pictures, weak, indistinct, and confused. The rather singular circumstances of there being only three Englishmen resident at Constantinople during my stay, in depriving me of the pleasure of the society of my countrymen, threw me on what resources I could find among the natives of the place. I cannot soothe myself with the belief that the personal circumstances of an author can have, or even ought to have, any thing to do with the success of his book, or the decision of his readers; but the fact that the following volume has been written under the unfavorable influences of almost uninterrupted ill health, may soften the severity of criticism, and account for my omitting many interesting details‖ (Charles MacFarlene, Constantinople in 1828 xi-xix). 267 APPENDIX B British Embassy –Pera Dear Sis, ….. awfully jolly. Ask a great deal after you. I am trying to write all my Impressions, just as you wanted me to, but there are so many I hardly know where to begin. Imagine you were trying to write a letter describing everything you ever saw in Grandmama‘s china cabinets, you know the thing –Cups all piled up helter skelter, & little saucers, & Shepherdesses & Coffeepots & colored sugar Pots, with domed lids: that‘s what the whole place seems like to me. Not to mention a blue riband of Water, on which the whole thing seems to rest –not the cabinet, I mean – Constantinople. Fizerly says the Turks don‘t give a thought for Yesterday or tomorrow –all Fatalists– he once went into the great church built by Justinian –Aya Sofia (in Greek, pls)– all disguised as a Mohammedan (Fizerly, I mean, not Justinian– whizz!) and says it‘s just awful, with nothing but some dinner gongs hanging in the corners to show what Ali Ottoman has done there in the last 400 years. He‘s a splendid fellow, Fizerly, and you should get to meet his Sister for he says, and I believe him, we shall be fast Friends. On the same line, though, I have passed my first Great Test in Diplomacy. Fizerly‘d hardly finished telling me Turks live for the moment when one of them shambled up to the Embassy door –they all wear cloaks, you see, and look like Wizards – Turks not doors, I mean –and declared himself to be a historian! Fizerly spoke some Turkish to him and the chap replied in perfect French. Fizerly and I exchanged glances –I thought I would die of laughter –but the Turk v serious and wanted to investigate Janissary regiments &c. The Amb says Istanbul is much duller without the Janissaries, Fizerly tells me. Not too dull for Yr loving bro., Frank (Jason Goodwin, The Janissary Tree 72-73). 268 APPENDIX C ―Just over a week later, in those leisurely days of 1911, he was sitting on the terrace of the British Embassy looking down on the dazzlingly blue waters of the Bosphorus, hearing the chink of ice in glasses, smelling the scent of roses and sweet peas, admiring the bougainvillea. Opposite him were Ponsonby and Rice-Cholmondely, members of the staff of the Embassy, Secretaries, he thought, although everyone here appeared to be a Secretary and none of them, as far as he could see, did any of the work that secretaries usually did (5). (…) Put it another way, as the men at the Foreign Office had done before he left: to the north of the Straits was Europe and to the south was Asia. Istanbul was the meeting place between East and West. And that, of course, was precisely the trouble (7). (…) And now here [Seymour] was in Istanbul, and he was sipping a good malt, and he was watching the blue sea, although from up here on Pera Hill he couldn‘t exactly hear it lisp and crisp. The British Embassy was on the brow of the hill and there were other legations stretched across the summit more or less in a line, commanding a beautiful outlook over the Bosphorus. Here in the European quarter the houses were spread out and there were trees everywhere. The Embassy itself was particularly well supplied with them. On one side the grounds touched those of the new Hotel Royal, which was where he was staying. Not his choice – it was where the Embassy had put him, and he devoutly hoped that they were the ones who were going to be paying. And then, going off at yet another tangent, was the Golden Horn, the huge harbour of Constantinople. And of Istanbul, too, which was the same place, only the Greeks called it Constantinople and the Turks called it Stamboul. [Seymour] was beginning to realize that this was significant. Up here on the heights the houses were stone. Down there, in the little, dark, crowded streets by the Galata Bridge, they were wooden. On his way up to the Embassy that afternoon he had gone through them. They had been full of people: street sellers trying to sell him peanuts and roses and sweets, beggars putting out their hands for bahkshish, men in vests and skull caps lounging in the doorways, veiled, dark-gowned women in bare feet with bread ringlets around their arms, children, everywhere. He had been assailed by smells: the sweet smell of donkey dung; the more exotic smells of sandalwood and incense; and, for some reason, strongly, the smell of new leather. 269 The smells and the people disappeared as he climbed the hill towards the Olympian heights of the Embassy. Descend, Seymour, descend. Which is what he did the next morning. Back down the hill, past a dismal graveyard, all dark cypresses and ruined tombs. Everywhere among the tombs there were what appeared to be milestones, only with a turban carved on top: the emblem of an entombed pasha, the cavass said. Sometimes it was surrounded by a host of little pillars: the pasha‘s wives and children, grouped in a kind of mortuary harem‖ (Pearce, A Dead Man in Istanbul 11-12). 270 APPENDIX D ―In a nearby café, the proprietor brought him a coffee while Yashim looked with unseeing eyes down the street. The noise of the tinsmiths insistently hammering had melded with a memory of that terrifying sound, ten years ago, of the Janissaries battering on their upturned cauldrons. It was an age-old signal that nobody in the palace, or in the streets, or in their homes in the city could misunderstand. It was the mother of all dins, and it hadn‘t meant that the Janissaries wanted more food. It meant that they wanted blood. Up through the centuries that driving and sinisterly insistent sound of the Janissaries beating on their cauldrons had been the prelude to death in the streets, men torn apart, the sacrifice of princes. Had it always been so? Yashim knew well what the Janissaries had achieved. Each man was selected from a levy of the empire‘s toughest, likeliest, most wide-awake Christian boys. Brought to Istanbul, renouncing the faith of the Balkan peasants who had borne them, swearing allegiance as slaves to the sultan mounted at their head, they became a corps. A terrifying fighting machine that the Ottoman sultans had unleashed against their enemies in Europe. If the Ottoman Empire inspired fear to the throughout the known world, it was the Janissaries who carried the fear to the throats of the unbelievers. The conquest of Sofia and Belgrade. Istanbul itself, wrested from the Greeks in 1453. The Arab peninsula and, with it, the Holy Cities. Mohacs, 1526, when the flower of Hungarian knighthood was cut down in the saddle and Suleiman the Magnificent led his men to Buda, and on, fleetingly, to the gates of Vienna. Rhodes and Cyprus, Egypt and the Sahara. Why, the Janissaries had even landed in France in 1566 and spent a year in Toulon. Until –who could say why? –the victories dried up. The terms of engagement changed. The Janissaries sought permission to marry. They petitioned for the right to take up trades when there was no fighting, to feed their families. They enrolled their sons into the corps, and the corps grew reluctant to fight. They were still dangerous: loaded with privilege, they lorded it over the common people of the city. Designed to die fighting at the lonely borders of an ever-expanding empire, they enjoyed all the license and immunity that the people and the sultan could bestow on men who would soon be martyrs. But they no longer sought to martyr themselves. The men who had been sent to terrify Europe made a simple discovery: it was easier –and far less dangerous- to terrorize at home. The palace made efforts to reason with them, efforts to discipline them. In 1618, Sultan Osman tried to overturn them: they had killed him, as Yashim knew, by the compression of his testicles, a mode of execution that left no traces on the body. Special man, special death. It was considered fitting for a member of the imperial family. Later 271 still, in 1635, Murad IV rounded up thirty thousand Janissaries and marched them to their deaths in Persia. But the corps survived. And slowly, painfully, the Ottomans had come to realize that they could no longer properly defend themselves. Unreliable as they were, the Janissaries still insisted on being the supreme military power: they had become unassailable. The common people were afraid of them. In trade, they exploited their privileges to become dangerous rivals. Their behavior was threatening and insolent, as they swaggered through the city streets, fully armed and wielding sticks, uttering loutish blasphemies. Outside the Topkapi Place, between Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque, lay an open space called the Atmeidan, the ancient Hippodrome of the Byzantines. In it grew a huge plane tree to which the Janissaries always rallied at the first sign of any trouble, for the blotched and peeling trunk of the Janissary Tree stood at the center of their world; as the palace lay at the center of Ottoman government, and Aya Sofia at the heart of religious faith. Beneath its branches the Janissaries divulged their grievances and secrets, and plotted mutinies. From the swaying limbs of the tree, too, they hanged the bodies of men who had displeased them: ministers, viziers, and court officials sacrificed to their bloodlust by a terrified succession of weak and vacillating sultans. Meanwhile, lands conquered by the sultan‘s armies in the name of Islam were being lost to the infidels: Hungary, Serbia, the Crimea. In Egypt, Ali Pasha the Albanian built on the experience of the Napoleonic invasion to train the fellahin as soldiers, Western-style. And when Greece disappeared, from the very heartland of an empire where every other man was Greek by speech, it was the final blow. The Egyptians had held the fort for a while: they were to be commended. They had drill and discipline; they had tactics and modern guns. The sultan read the message and began to train his own, Egyptian-style force: the seraskier‘s New Guard. That was ten years ago. The Sultan issued orders that the Janissaries should adopt the Western style of the New Guard, knowing that they would be provoked and affronted. And the Janissaries had rebelled on cue. Caring only for their own privileges, they turned on the palace and the fledgling New Guards. But they had grown stupid as well as lazy. They were loathed by the people. The sultan had made ready. When the Janissaries overturned their cauldrons on the night of Thursday, June 15, it took a day to accomplish by modern means what no one had managed to achieve in three hundred years. By the night of the 16 th , efficient modern gunnery had reduced their mutinous barracks to a smoldering ruin. Thousands were already dead: the rest, fleeing for their lives, died in the city streets, in the forests outside the walls, in the holes and lairs they crept into to survive. It was a trauma, Yashim reflected, from which the empire still waited to recover. Certain people might never recover at all‖ (Jason Goodwin, Janissary Tree 22-24).

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Asset Metadata

Creator Tekdemir, Hande (author)

Core Title Collective melancholy: Istanbul at the crossroads of history, space and memory

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2008-12

Publication Date 10/11/2008

Defense Date 08/06/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag detective fiction,Istanbul,melancholy,OAI-PMH Harvest,Orhan Pamuk,travel literature

Place Name Constantinople (city or populated place), Istanbul (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Russett, Margaret (committee chair), Lloyd, David (committee member), Norindr, Panivong (committee member)

Creator Email hande_tekdemir@yahoo.com,tekdemir@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1656

Unique identifier UC1158503

Identifier etd-Tekdemir-2357 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-123124 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1656 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Tekdemir-2357.pdf

Dmrecord 123124

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Tekdemir, Hande

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu