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ОглавлениеThis study mainly examines Paul Auster’s New York and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul novels in the way the urban protagonists experience their respective cities and re-construct their own identities around them. As far as the theoretical framework is concerned, Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia” and the idea of “The Third Space” theorized by Homi Bhabha are used for Auster’s and Pamuk’s novels, respectively. Furthermore, for Auster and Pamuk make the other person and the spaces of the other person central to reimagining subjectivity, Levinas’s ethics will also be employed as an interpretive strategy. While the present study will be breaking new ground in the application of the theories of Foucault to New York City, Bhabha to Istanbul and Levinas to both of them, it is at the same time the first study to bring Auster’s and Pamuk’s works together and establish a dialogue between these two very different textual universes and cultures that are poles apart. Moreover, Auster and Pamuk are chosen for this study in order to challenge the contemporary theories on the crises of the urban spaces and urban dwellers. Bringing Auster’s and Pamuk’s works together illuminates the need for a reevaluation of the contemporary negative outlook on the city and its inhabitants. That is, this study will expand the reader’s awareness and understanding of how spaces and their inhabitants can be viewed from a positive angle. Thus, it is the aim of this comparative approach to present the reader with more nuanced, complex and diversified sets of examples about how urban individuals, from two very different cities, might transform themselves and approach their own cities creatively, constructively and ethically. In a wider context, by bringing Auster and Pamuk together, I aim to challenge spatial and cultural stereotyping and dismantle commonly held beliefs about Americanness and Turkishness and thus pave the way for looking at discourses such as “clash of civilizations,” “margin” (Istanbul) and “center” (New York), the belated and the advanced from a critical point of view. It is hoped that putting into dialogue such different cities and writers together, this study disrupts discriminatory discourses, otherings, negative stereotypes which every city, region and nation constructs about one another. Therefore, a comparative point of view is believed to effect reconciliation of opposed geographic, cultural, and political locations and spaces.
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1.1 Urban and Identity Crises in the Humanities and Social Sciences
The following part extensively focuses on the current debates and literary imaginings about the crises of the city and its dwellers that emerged towards the end of the twentieth century in social sciences and urban literature. In addition, I will point out how urban spaces and subjects in the works of Auster and Pamuk have also so far been underestimated by many critics. Thus, this study gives an insight into the dominant but incomplete discourses about contemporary cities and their dwellers and provides one of the reasons behind my re-analyzing and bringing Auster’s and Pamuk’s city novels together.
For decades, in literary imagination, the pre-modern and modern city has had a dynamic unity and cultural distinctiveness. Although it has often been portrayed as a realm of sin, corruption, and downfall, it could still be read as a text. As Zeynep Harputlu in “Mapping Poverty in Late-Victorian Fiction” points out, the urban poor of George Gissing’s and Arthur Morrison’s city novels, for instance, are “explicitly identified and narrated through mapping poverty with a naturalistic representation of smaller spatial units within the borders of impoverished districts”(41). As Harputlu further argues, both authors presented a “detailed account of social-class stratification among the lower classes and rehumanised them in their environment with their everyday life struggles and concerns” (54). In a similar vein, Caroline Rosenthal in her article “North American Urban Fiction” states that “[w];hile the city was often portrayed as being destructive and erosive, its overwhelming energy was nonetheless celebrated by transferring it into a readable urban text” (243). As can be seen, pre-modern and modern city authors offered richly textured, varied and true pictures of the city. I believe what Orhan Pamuk says in an interview for BBC World Service in 2003 is an excellent example of what the modern city probably evokes in one’s mind:
If you have a vision of a city as a main hero, characters, in a way, are also instruments for you to see the city rather than their inner depths. And the inner depths of the characters are also deduced from the city, as in Dostoevsky. You have all these perspectives moving around in the city and to imagine them in our mind’s eye gives a correct and precise image of the city. Then it’s impossible to distinguish the character from the city, the city from the character. There’s another thing, and that is the sounds—things that you hear in each city that are different. In western cities the sound of the subway or metro is very particular and it stays in your spirit and whenever you hear it in a film, suddenly all the memories of the city wake up in you. In Istanbul it’s the “vvvvoooooot”—sirens of the boats, the “chck” from the chimney, waves of the Bosphorus hitting the quays along with the seagulls and old-fashioned little boats— “putu putu putu” kind of ←14 | 15→thing. These are the things that immediately, if I close my eyes and you give it to me in another corner of the world, make Istanbul suddenly appear in my mind’s eye. (“Sense of the City”)
As this passage indicates, modern cities were distinguished; moreover, the rhythms of the modern city could, in their most intimate and intense aspects, be experienced, felt, sensed and retold. However, cities from the 1980s onwards have undergone drastic changes. They have been challenged by the forces of globalization, new technologies of communication, immigration and mass culture. For instance, in his book S, M, L, XL, Rem Koolhaas defines the contemporary metropolis as “generic”: This is a city without characteristics, a city without center, without identity and without history (1250). In an interview with John Armitage, Paul Virilio expresses a similar view by pointing out that contemporary cities are technologized: They are “based on a sort of atmospheric politics related to the immediacy, ubiquity and instantaneity of information and communications technologies. Unlike geopolitical cites, the cities of the beyond are not anchored in urban concentration, in agglomeration, or even in accumulation but, rather, in the acceleration of the electromagnetic waves of information and communications technologies” (2). As a result, he says, “this indefinable ‘place’ usurps all our previous understandings of the reality and materiality of geopolitical cities, of, if you like, particular real places and specific material cities” (2–3). Various sociologists are of similar opinion. Thomas Bender, for instance, defines the contemporary city as “a theme park for tourists than a civic center where values and experiences are shared” (“City Lite”). Likewise, Sharon Zukin finds it as the “space of consumption,” Klaus Scherpe as “nowhere city,” Fredric Jameson as the “message-saturated space,” Marc Augé as “non-place” and Manuel Castells as the “space of flows.”
Apart from that, it is argued that in contemporary cityscapes which are marked by high-rises, commercial plazas, mass media and shopping streets, the urban dwellers have become disoriented, de-centered and bewildered. David Livingstone notes that human geographers are concerned about “the disappearance of the human agent as a thinking, feeling subject from the geographical conversation” (339). Likewise, Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism asserts that the new experience of the metropolis is marked by the loss of human dominance over his surroundings. He maintains that although the latter is produced by the humans, it turns into a field of overwhelming force and transcends “the capacities of the individual human body…to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to ←15 | 16→map its position in a mappable external world” (44).1 Jonathan Rutherford also articulates the very essence of this condition with the following words:
In this postmodern, ‘wide-open’ world our bodies are bereft of those spatial and temporal co-ordinates essential for historicity, for a consciousness of our own collective and personal past, ‘Not belonging’, a sense of unreality, isolation and being fundamentally ‘out of touch’ with the world become endemic in such a culture. (24)
As can be seen, urban critics generally point out the overwhelming nature of the city and how it has rendered the individual isolated, spatially and temporally disoriented. Thus, as Günther H. Lenz in “Mapping Postmodern New York City: Reconfiguring Urban Space, Metropolitan Culture, and Urban Fiction. An Introduction” argues, it has become difficult “to ‘read’ the city as a ‘text’, to narrate the city or city life, as the concepts of ‘the city’ and of ‘subjects’ living in the city were seen as having become ‘derealized’ ” (15).
This dominant negative outlook on the city and its dwellers is not limited to urban planners, architects and sociologists, but it is also observable in contemporary US American and non-Western urban fictions as well. A recent example is John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) in which the destructive dimension of New York City is narrated in the following way:
All around them [Ahmad and Mr. Levy] up Eighth Avenue to Broadway, the great city crawls with people, some smartly dressed, many of them shabby, a few beautiful but most not, all reduced by the towering structures around them to the size of insects, but scuttling, hurrying, intent in the milky morning sun upon some plan or scheme or hope they are hugging to themselves, their reason for living another day, each one of them impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and self-preservation. That, and only that. (310)
Similarly, in Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog (2015), New York is about unveiling illusions: the illusion of American dream and global capitalism. Thus, New York is portrayed as a city that “looks ragged,” with even the glittering “three-quarters built Freedom Tower” appearing like “a gargantuan remnant” of the city’s glory days: “the Belt is as worn-down as ever,” and “[t];he same battered NYPD saloons lurk roadside with the same lethargic and dangerous cops inside them” (219). Moreover, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2007), a book that comments on ←16 | 17→contemporary problems from the distance of hundred years, offers a negative portrait of the late twentieth-century city life. It reflects the ongoing lameness and inefficacy of the urban inhabitants in North American cities:
So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. (171)
As this passage indicates, Pynchon depicts a city in which everyone is hopelessly isolated and immobilized in their amnesiac identities.2 It seems that the idea of “reading the city as a text” does not seem to be a viable perspective anymore in the time of globalization and new electronic media of communication.
Notably, viewing the city negatively finds its correlation in the literary analyses of Auster’s fictions as well. The metropolitan spaces and the dwellers of New York have either been neglected or they have been charged with adverse meanings. For instance, Brian Jarvis in Reflections on the ‘City of Glass’ points out that Auster assiduously avoids urban pastoral and picturesque and presents “a description of a journey which amounts to little more than a page of street names” (88). According to William G. Little, City of Glass has a specific geographical and historical setting, but
the location frequently transforms into a kind of anti-topos, a place of absence. Framed as a traditional detective story, in which so often the mystery is solved upon disclosure of a hidden location, Auster’s text repeatedly refuses hermeneutical and topographical orientation, yielding nothing in acts of narrative and environmental emptying out. (150)
While for Little, Auster’s New York is a symbol of urban absence, for Chris Tysh, it signifies dissemination, decay and, above all, opaque chaos which degrades our notions of identity, culture and language (47). Furthermore, Alan Bilton argues that in Ghosts, “There is no outside to Blue’s apartment” and maintains that “between the typed pages of each man’s [Blue’s and Black’s] little cell lies a void, a black hole which language cannot penetrate” (72). Regarding Moon Palace, Markku Salmela in “The Bliss of Being Lost” points out that “[t];he motifs of voluntary starvation and material exhaustion” that feature so prominently in In the Country of Last Things can also be found in Moon Palace, and this invokes “similar images of an open, arid landscape even when the scenes are set in the middle of the city” (132).
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Similarly, the discourse on the crisis of urban spaces pervades the concept of urban subjectivity as well. It is argued that the city has a disruptive impact on its inhabitants. Indeed, the analyses of Auster’s novels in terms of subjectivity revolve around fragmentation and disappearance of the individual from the spaces of New York.3 Matthew McKean, for instance, states that City of Glass is about “multiple, mistaken, and confused identities” (103). Lucia-Hedviga Pascariu, in her analysis of In the Country of Last Things, interprets the main character Anna’s struggle for life in apocalyptic New York as “a futile attempt”: “Anna cannot establish a sense of where and who she is, she tries to invest the city with a sense of meaning, which becomes another futile attempt, as there cannot be meaning in a place constantly devolving and heading to its demise” (679). Steven E. Alford’s comment gives the general view of how Auster’s New York and his characters are read. He states thus
In Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, we encounter genuinely puzzling characters and spaces: characters disappear from the space of the novel, characters seek to lose themselves by wandering through unfamiliar space, characters employ space as an arena for hermetic communication, and still other characters design utopian spaces based on their fears and misapprehensions. (613)
As can be seen, there is a tendency among scholars to dwell on the weak aspects of the city and its dwellers. I agree with them to a certain extent, but one of the main aims of this present study is to resuscitate and bring a positive criticism on urban fiction, in this case, Auster’s city novels and characters.
On the other hand, non-European cities are not exempt from the social, geographical and cultural transformations of metropolitan cities such as New York. Istanbul is certainly one of them. The imposition of nationalist and westernization projects on the city during the first half of the twentieth century, combined with the internal migration, rapid urbanization, globalization, regime breakdowns and Islamic interventions during the second half of the twentieth century, have caused severe changes in the nature of Istanbul, raising new issues and challenges for the texture of the city, its dwellers and its representation in fiction. In their article, Kees Christiaanse, Mark Michaeli and Tim Rieniets discuss the changes that Istanbul has undergone in the following way:
About 15 years ago, it was still possible to enjoy the bustling urbanity stemming from the mixtures of people, neighbourhoods and activities in Istanbul. Then, the flair of ←18 | 19→ancient Constantinople’s rich cultural diversity and proximity to the Asian continent was abundant. Today these characteristics are threatened by a wave of technology and modernisation. On the one hand this shows the emancipation and economic prosperity Turkey has achieved, but it has also introduced global structural challenges regarding mobility, urban renewal, social stratification and sprawl, as well as spatial and functional segregation at an unprecedented scale. (“Istanbul’s Spatial Dynamics”)
As can be seen, sociologically and geographically oriented urban studies which investigated Istanbul’s demography, social and cultural structure, similar to New York, foregrounded the destructive aspects of these transformations. In particular, cultural studies have for a long time interpreted Istanbul as an ambivalent and shaky space. As Çağlar Keyder also states, “In the well-known cliché, Istanbul is said to be the bridge between two continents and two civilizations. Yet, often in its history this privileged location is experienced negatively, as a fracture” (9). Meltem Ahıska in “Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern” also states that according to modernization theorists such as Bernard Lewis, Turkey could still not cross the bridge and is fated to an ever-appearing critical choice between the East and the West, which is inscribed on its essential space (358). Moreover, Nurdan Gürbilek in “Dandies and Originals” points out that social, cultural and literary criticism in Turkey “is mostly the criticism of a lack, a critique devoted to demonstrating what Turkish society, culture, or literature lacks” (599). The following argument of Nuri Eren, a sociologist, is a case in point. He speaks negatively of Turkey:
Of all nations in the world, Turkey is unique in having failed to forge a consistent image of herself, is she of Europe or of the East? Is she a modern nation-state or a feudalist association wallowing in the Middle Ages? Is she a popular democracy or a camouflaged group dictatorship? Aware of their lack of articulateness in the international discourse, the Turks blame themselves for the confusion. (249)
It is inevitable that processes of modernization, rapid urbanization and Turkey’s unique position itself have had harmful impact on Istanbul and its inhabitants. Indeed, there are several contemporary novels of Istanbul that deal with the above-mentioned problematics.
In Hotel Constantinople (2015), for instance, Zülfü Livaneli portrays Istanbul as a quintessentially pop-arabesque cultured city, whose inhabitants are swept away by Western attitudes, habits and values and are preoccupied with TV shows, football matches, slogans, and social media such as twitter. At the same time, this is an Istanbul embroiled in mushrooming expensive residential complexes with foreign sounding names, starred hotels, urban skyline of skyscrapers, shopping malls and business centers. Livaneli’s novel is, hence, concerned with the negative portrayal of the capitalist organization of space, language and culture. ←19 | 20→Another example that highlights how the city and its inhabitants are in crisis is Bilge Karasu’s Night (1979). Night is about a paranoiac city, most probably Istanbul, rife with blackness, secrets, rumours, curfews, murders, deception and fear. The atmosphere of chaos and the theme of lost identities are intensified by anonymous, unreliable narrators and footnotes that either comment on the composition process of the text or on the preceding texts. Encompassing all of these, the city is portrayed as a conundrum, a labyrinth of signs where one never gets a definitive purchase on anything or anyone. The novel also points to the collapse of the information age into misinformation and propaganda machine, which transforms the city into a place of isolation, delusion, facade and false friendships.
In Ahmet Ümit’s The Rhapsody of Beyoǧlu (2003) too, Istanbul loses its referent points and is on its way to become a homogeneous and ordinary city. That is, the novel reflects on how Beyoǧlu which had been the hub of cultural activities has turned into a nest of dirty relations and commercialized spaces. Cafe Eptalofos, for instance, which had been built in the 1870s and had been the meeting point of writers such as Sait Faik, Behcet Necatigil, Edip Cansever and Atilla Ilhan has become a simple Burger King restaurant, which exudes unpleasant smells (292). The cosmopolitanism of Istanbul (as the name of the cafe indicates) seems to be destroyed by the forces of globalization. The damaging transformations Istanbul has undergone have been reflected by another contemporary writer Burhan Sönmez in his novel Istanbul Istanbul: A Novel (2016) as well. Here, the city of Istanbul is depicted by four prisoners, who for unknown reasons are imprisoned in a cramped two-by-one-meter prison cell beneath the thronging city. One of the prisoner Uncle Küheylan tells his inmates nostalgically: “This tired city had been bursting with energy in the past, had had a glorious sultanate, but had now drifted off to sleep. Like magnificent mansions, magnificent stories were also buried under the rubble. Istanbul dwellers who believed that worshipped the past and read novels that spoke of old times” (149). In a critical tone, Uncle Küheylan continues: “They were hopelessly in love with bygone eras, but they scorned the city where they opened their eyes every morning. They heaped concrete upon concrete and built domes that mimicked one another” (150). Similar to Joseph O’Neill’s New York, Istanbul is a city that has had its day. Told from a subterranean prison, Istanbul seems to have disappeared, thus, existing only in the imagination of the inhabitants.
Furthermore, Istanbul, through Sayru Usman (Sayru:Patient and Us: Mind) a schizoid character and writer in Selim İleri’s Mel’un: Bir Us Yarılması (2013), becomes a schizoid city like its protagonist. It is a befuddled, lost, melancholic, rootless and forsaken city where binaries dominate every aspect of life from ←20 | 21→literature and history classes to the kitchens of Istanbullites: “From ladle to eggbeater, chef’s fork to possibly never used roast beef, and to ham knives, everything was there… Binaries even in kitchenware!” (19) Furthermore, it is a city that is befuddled: “Tulip Era that is praised to the skies in our literature class because of Yahya Kemal becomes an era of shame in our history class. Which one is it?” (71) Besides, “You are living in the middle of two realms and you are stuck between the two, and you do not have any idea” (438), Usman writes. Alienated from his society, Usman transforms Istanbul into a city of words through his allusions to Turkish and foreign artists and men of letters such as Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Kafka, Charles Dickens, Muhsin Ertuğrul, Tevfik Fikret, Ahmet Haşim, Yahya Kemal, Abdülhak Hamit Tarhan, Halide Edip Adıvar and Sait Faik Abasıyanık as well as through his writings ranging from history, literature, music and painting to politics. Again, this novel circulates around the theme of the city as a site of dispossession and loss where enforced forgetting and voluntary oblivion affects personal and historical memories as well as the cultural and physical landscape of the city of Istanbul. As my examples so far demonstrate, Istanbul is represented as dominated by the culture and objects of conspicuous consumption, forces of homogenization, mindless westernization and sometimes as a city of signs that confuses the reader. The inhabitants, on the other hand, seem to be unable to connect to the material city of Istanbul anymore; they feel disoriented, befuddled and disengaged from their city.
Similar to Auster, Pamuk too has been counted as an author who writes unfavorably about his city. In general, his Istanbul is regarded as an essential space, where merely ingrained binaries such as the East versus the West, Islam versus Christianity, secular versus Islam and local versus global are played out. For instance, Leonard Stone in “Minarets and Plastic Bags” states that, Pamuk’s books are about “the tension between East and West, the pull of an Islamic past and the lure of modern European manners and materialism” (198). The relation between the Westerner and the Easterner in The White Castle is read by Zekiye Antakyalioğlu “as a seventeenth-century story about an Ottoman master and his Italian slave who appear as doppelgangers” (666). Moreover, in My Name is Red, according to Rezzan Kocaöner Silkü, “Orhan Pamuk as a writer who bridges the Eastern and Western cultures with a sense of double-consciousness well portrays the burden and the misery of the traditional Ottoman miniaturists” (“Nation and Narration”). In a similar vein, in his article “Islam, Melancholy, and Sad, Concrete Minarets,” Ian Almond argues that, Pamuk’s The White Castle and The Black Book in their own ways “breathe certain sadnesses” in that,
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Their plots are wandering and discursive, their tones reflective yet distant, their styles making curious use of an oxymoronically comic melancholy. The settings of his books seem to underline this tristesse which clings to every line of Pamuk’s prose: the gentle despair and nostalgia of the Venetian prisoner in The White Castle…and of course the ‘sadness of Istanbul streets in the rain’ in The Black Book. (75)
Besides, Istanbullite characters have been interpreted as inert, melancholic, indecisive, nostalgic and self-depreciating subjects. For instance, Almond regarding the characters of The White Castle and The Black Book makes the following comment:
Perhaps most keenly of all, it is the endings of Pamuk’s novels which express this modern, post-Romantic version of melancholy, a sadness which seems to combine the pain of unrequited love with the discovery that there are no grand narratives-or rather, that there are only narratives, stories whose only secret is that there is no secret, no supernatural source, no cosmic meaning beneath them…. All these endings mirror the sadness of a protagonist who has finally realised that he does not have a self, that his narratives possess no super-cosmic significance, that his life no longer has an object of adoration. (75)
Again, I agree with these comments but to a certain extent. This study does not deny the dilemmas of Pamuk’s characters, who vacillate between the West and the East; yet it claims that this is, as in the case of Auster, one aspect of the reality. This present study argues that in his novels, Pamuk problematizes the binary categories such as the West/the East, self/other, modern/traditional and offers more nuanced and enriched representations of Istanbul and its dwellers. Cities are not non-places or homogenized spaces, neither are the inhabitants devoid of any critical agency. We must move beyond the lament of spaces and their inhabitants and think that space and its production can never be completely controlled; there are always active dwellers who participate in counter-practices about the use and purpose of spaces.
In order to explore what productive and progressive possibilities Auster and Pamuk ascribe to their cities and characters, I divide this study into two parts. Part I deals with Auster and Part II is devoted to Pamuk’s work. The first chapter of Part I, which is the theory chapter, fleshes out Foucault’s theoretical work, especially his concept of heterotopia. Drawing on the premise that the other is indispensable for both Auster’s and Pamuk’s subjects’ becoming ethical selves, in the second part of Chapter 1, I will elaborate on Levinas’s ethics.
The second chapter of Part I, “The Construction of Heterotopias of Deviation and Ethical Self in City of Glass,” will examine City of Glass. The novel discusses how the main character – by walking through the streets of New York ←22 | 23→City – creates heterotopias of deviation, which allow him to transgress the norms and limits of the self and thereby construct an ethical self and hospitable space.
Chapter 3, “Gaze-to-Gaze, Flesh-to Flesh: Glimpses of Alterity and Altericidal Relations in Ghosts,” discusses the second novel of the trilogy, Ghosts. In Ghosts, heterotopia emerges as a crisis heterotopia which functions as a heterotopian mirror. This heterotopian mirror becomes a journey into exploring the impossibility of gazing the other and the dangers of attempting to do so. Eventually, the extent to which Ghosts underlines the need for an understanding of an asymmetrical relationship with the other, where the other is not graspable and reduced to the consciousness of the self, will be analyzed.
“The Construction of the Listening Eye/I in The Locked Room” analyzed in the fourth chapter explores how a room can as well act as a heterotopian space, as an alternate spatial and social ordering; more specifically, as a site of cultural and social resistance. The chapter also analyzes how the locked room where the other lives lends itself to an ethical interpretation because it makes the subject realize the unreachable nature of the other and gives room for a relation of unsaying and alterity.
Further examining the radical constructions of other spaces, Chapter 5, “In the Country of Last Things: A Journey into a Thousand of Heterotopias of Resistance,” explores how In the Country of Last Things engages with mutually constitutive spaces: the dominating public spaces of the city and heterotopias of resistance of the characters. By examining the ways in which relations between space, power and the self are interwoven, this chapter shows how even in most constricting urban spaces the subjects can establish ethical relationships and make a positive and ethical impact on the world they live in by creating textual, private and bodily spaces on their own.
The last chapter of Part I, “Heterotopical Investigations into History/Time and Geography/Space in Moon Palace,” focuses on Moon Palace. It discusses Marco Fogg’s radical excursions across heterotopic spaces such as the Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other American landscapes, especially the American West in order to find his ancestors and define his place in the world. Dealing with the past by making spatial movements allows Fogg as well as his grandfather Thomas Effing to take charge of and give voice to the culturally repressed, silenced and forgotten others. Consequently, in Moon Palace history becomes an arena for the democratization of cultural memory and proves itself to be a kind of ethical practice.
Part II of this study is devoted to Pamuk’s novels, The White Castle, The Black Book and My Name is Red. As already indicated, Pamuk’s works revolve around Istanbul and its inhabitants. Istanbul is a city which belongs neither to the West ←23 | 24→nor to the East, literally existing as a threshold between two spaces. Therefore, throughout this part, it is held that the postcolonial critic Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space is suitable for the analyses of Pamuk’s novels. Accordingly, the first chapter of Part II will elaborate Bhabha’s theory of the Third Space and its relevance for Turkish society. Bhabha’s concept allows this study to interpret Istanbul not as “fracture” but as “articulation” and its inhabitants as enunciative subjects.
Chapter 2 of Part II, “Unhomely Ethics and Radical Fellowship in The White Castle,” analyzes The White Castle, which is set in the seventeenth century and is told by a Venetian narrator, who is taken as a prisoner in Istanbul. The Westerner slave’s confrontation with the Easterner master Hoja evokes Bhabha’s conceptions of mimicry, the stereotype and the uncanny as well as Levinas’s ethics of subjectivity and inassimilable other. Thus, the objective of this chapter is to demonstrate how Pamuk attempts to expand further the theme of self-other relations and the ethical and political questions it poses by dismantling established paradigms of East–West relations.
The third chapter, “The Inscription of Belatedness as Extra-modernity in The Black Book,” examines another work by Pamuk, The Black Book, which follows Galip and Celâl’s movements through the subterranean and subconscious spaces of the Turkish nation. This chapter explores how, by juxtaposing such Eastern practices as Sufism, Hurufism and hüzün on the secular, modern and public spaces of Istanbul, Galip and Celâl attempt to transform the “belatedness” of Turkey into “extra-modernity,” which displays a nation and a Turkish subject that is at once spiritual and secular, traditional and modern, and material and sublime.
The fourth chapter of Part II, “Identity and Memory Wars, and Glimpses of Hybridity in the Third Space of My Name is Red,” analyzes My Name is Red, a murder story taking place in the sixteenth century Ottoman Empire and reflecting the world of the miniaturists. This chapter, hence, explores how Pamuk portrays the precarious side of living in-between two borders and the problematic as well as painful processes of cultural transformation. At the same time, with a concentration on yet another Third Space concept characterized by hybridity, Pamuk reconceptualizes the Turkish nation as hybrid and offers hybridity as a solution to cultural chauvinism. Furthermore, I will argue how Pamuk’s hybrid text itself defies such totalizing ideologies as religious absolutism and essentialist nationalism and becomes an excellent example of the Third Space narrative that promulgates hybridity, democracy and freedom of speech. It will also be argued that the ethicality of his novel stems mainly from offering response-ability to one’s roots on the one hand and hybridity and openness to another culture on the other.
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The conclusion part brings together all the different perspectives raised in the previous chapters and indicates that each novel gives out a different voice which is distinct; however, each is in harmony with the voices of the other novels. This chapter mostly dwells on the similarities of these authors and shows that there is a similar outlook on space and the others on both sides, rather than a “clash of civilizations.” Lastly, in this chapter, possible areas of future studies are pointed out.
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1 See also Edward W. Soja. “Heterotopologies: A remembrance of other spaces in the citadel LA. In Postmodern Cities et spaces.” Eds. S. Watson and K. Gibson. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1995) 14–34; Georges Benko. “Introduction: Modernity, Postmodernity and the Social Sciences.” In Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 23; Richard Sennett. The Fall of Public Man. (New York: Knopf 1974).
2 See also Richard Price’s Clockers (1992), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls (1992), which represent a range of urban characters and settings, whose protagonists yield to contemporary corruptions offered by the city.
3 See Steven E. Alford. “Spaced-Out: Signification and Space in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.” Contemporary Literature 36, 4 1995, 613–632; Allan Bilton. An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction. New York: New York UP, 2003; William G. Little. “Nothing to Go On: Paul Auster’s City of Glass.” Contemporary Literature 38/1, 1997 133–163; Carsten Springer. Crises: The Works of Paul Auster. (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2001).
