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
