Basak Candar

The City as An Act of Memory: Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul: The Memories and the City is as much a history of Istanbul as a writing of the self. This paper will utilize Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur and Andreas Huyssen’s understanding of the urban palimpsests to analyze how Pamuk creates a narrative that functions simultaneously as a projection of the self and a palimpsestic projection of Istanbul. This paper argues the importance of understanding Pamuk’s Istanbul as a subjective perception.

Pamuk has spent his whole life in Istanbul and as such has a privileged position of watching Istanbul acquire its layers as a palimpsest; a stroll through Istanbul does not only entail seeing the city, but also functions as an act of memory.

In the memoir, the image of Istanbul is rewritten through the act of remembering and surfaces as a site of loss where the line between presence and absence is blurred continuously. Pamuk’s projection of Istanbul, then, conjures the present image of the city as an expression of its irretrievable past and as indelibly marked by the traces of this past. This trope of the palimpsestic city has a significant role in Pamuk’s memoir, establishing a deep connection between the acts of seeing, remembering, and writing. This particular projection allows Orhan Pamuk to subtly engage with the problematic and amnesic history of the Turkish Republic, the establishment of which relied on obliterating the very traces of a past empire that Pamuk sees all around the city.

Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Basak Candar received a B.A. in English and Hispanic Studies from Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. After working in Washington, DC for a year, she started a PhD program in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is currently working on questions of identity, exile, and collective/personal memory in 20th century Turkish Literature, with a focus on the effects of political transitions on literature.