In search of a past memory: Istanbul and the politics of memory in Orhan Pamuk’s work

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952, and his novels, especially The Black Book, The Museum of Innocence, and A Strangeness in My Mind depict a panorama of Istanbul of the years following his birth. In giving the reader the social, political, and physical picture of Istanbul of the post-1950 period, these novels provide a new politics of memory and even make the politics of memory the central element of all narratives. Taking memory as the central element in his “Istanbul novels”, Pamuk creates mnemonic scenes and images of the city and, with his new approach to the memory politics, tries to replace the “hot memory” in Turkey, which is the memory open to devastations, destructions, and radical changes, with a “cold memory”, that is, a more stable, static memory compiling all the traces of the past and changing very slowly in time. Thus, Pamuk is a path-breaking explicator of the concept of “memory”, writ large. In his books (particularly those published after his first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons') Istanbul itself plays a pivotal role. Those peculiarities of the city are, for the writer, embedded in the events of the late 19th and early 20th century and in one significant concept, melancholia. To ground his arguments, Pamuk traces Istanbul through the writings of national and international writers. In this article, I argue that melancholia is used for the first time by Pamuk to analyze Istanbul, a point differentiating him from other writers who have written about the city; melancholia is also the concept helping Pamuk to ground his politics of memory. Pamuk’s writing about Istanbul, I argue, is in itself political and critical. The concept pair hot memory-cold memory, which 1 have developed, helps us to understand Pamuk’s political and critical endeavor in his works.