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
