Orhan Pamuk has so eloquently connected the concept of hüzün (melancholy) with his life in Istanbul that his memoir Istanbul, where he establishes this link, is now being used as a reference text in discussing both melancholy in general and Turkish hüzün in particular. His attribution of the prevalence of hüzün in Istanbul to a collective sense of loss experienced by the city over the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire seems only to reinforce the connection between Istanbul, sadness, and Pamuk by offering a historical explanation. The first problem this essay puzzles over is the unquestioning and even eager acceptance of these sweeping connections by all kinds of readers, as the following examples demonstrate. In one of the early reviews of the book in The Guardian, Jan Morris not only takes this Turkish hüzün as an uncontestable and self-evident fact but also uses it as a springboard to talk about her own double Welsh/British melancholy, observing that Pamuk “lives, breathes and honours hüzün, a congenital Turkish melancholy apparently akin to Welsh hiraeth.”Footnote ¹ She claims that she is qualified to review this book because she has also “experienced—with mingled pride, shame and regret—the extinction of an imperial order.”Footnote ² Peter Levine, a blogger who visited Istanbul after reading Pamuk's book, boasts of duplicating Pamuk's experience: “I have wandered with a scholarly European guidebook through the poor western quarters of the Old City, finding Byzantine ruins, old mosques, and leftover Ottoman wooden houses whose upper stories lean over the streets. I have relished the hüzün that Pamuk has lived with for half a century.”Footnote ³ Finally, Andreas Huyssen gives a literary critic's stamp of approval to this reading of inherent sadness in Istanbul—which he says was shaped by “Turkish history and the literary imagination of Western visitors”—when he describes the “Hüzün” chapter from Istanbul, by stating, “In the urban scenes and tableaux Pamuk conjures, hüzün becomes palpable almost as a material reality.”Footnote ⁴

Why do these readers accept Pamuk's claim that he and his fellow inhabitants of Istanbul, that is, Istanbullus, suffer from a shared and readily observable melancholy that is caused by historical events? Pamuk repeatedly warns his readers against believing him. He tells them that what he remembers is subjective and filled with errors caused by misunderstanding and chance associations. At the very beginning of the memoir, when trying to identify the reason for his belief that he had a twin who lived a happier life in another part of Istanbul, he concludes, “I can't remember where I got this idea or how it came to me. It must have emerged from a web of rumors, misunderstandings, illusions, and fear.”Footnote ⁵ When he realizes that his reminiscences don't match with what his mother and brother remember about their relationship, he adds, “So anyone reading these pages should bear in mind that I am prone to exaggeration” (p. 294). He admits that the childhood he talks of is reconstructed, as when he describes his writing process as something that occurred “[i]n later years, when I was reinventing the Istanbul of my childhood” (p. 108). At the outset, he offers advice about how he needs to be read carefully and asks for forgiveness in return for being forthright about his unreliability: “So pay close attention, dear reader. Let me be straight with you, and in return let me ask for your compassion” (p. 8).

Yet, these reminders against approaching Pamuk's account at face value are lost in the actual practice and momentum of reading the book, because it is presented as a memoir. We read memoirs differently from how we read fiction because we take the former to be true and factual. In this case, the history of a city is presented and, moreover, supported with the documentary evidence of photographs whose concrete “truth” overrides any general warning about unreliability. The personal nature of the memoir further disarms the reader's critical defenses both because it involves experiential claims of truth and because of the personable manner of its approach to its audience, which fosters an identification on the reader's part. Pamuk sharpens the appeal of the personal by using his autobiography as the medium of entry into the story of Istanbul. The argumentative evidence that might be treated skeptically in a discursive presentation is absorbed into the subjective logic of the autobiographical narrative, all the while according it factual support. This combination of the factual and the emotional proves to have an irresistible force; it is the main reason why his readers believe Pamuk's narrative and do not take his warnings seriously. Pamuk makes this emotional pull toward identification easier for them by explicitly concentrating on an emotion, hüzün, as the subject of his analysis. He creates a hybrid narrative of Istanbul and his life as intertwining stories of hüzün, which both explain and demonstrate this emotion while offering it as an identificatory hook for his readers.

In order to create this hybrid story of his life and Istanbul, Pamuk transforms his personal experience of sadness into a collective and typical one by creating a prehistory for it in Istanbul through a chain of influences and developments that explain it and derive it from that past. According to the progression Pamuk traces, he is first a character, a child, experiencing and being shaped by Istanbul's inescapable hüzün (although he tries to resist it, he says); then he attempts to understand what causes and disseminates it, as demonstrated by his long lists of explanations; and finally he traces it to the “image” of the city created by 19th- and 20th-century French and Turkish authors such as Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, who previously identified hüzün in Istanbul and who put this idea in circulation for different audiences in different eras. The progression from experience to consciousness and control is one prized by Pamuk, as we see in his exploration, using Schiller's schema and vocabulary, of naïve authors who just write unconsciously from the heart and sentimental authors who consciously shape and manipulate their materials.Footnote ⁶ In Istanbul, Pamuk dramatizes his own progression from naïve protagonist to perceptive literary critic, who identifies and names the genealogy of the link between Istanbul and hüzün, to master artist, who consciously manipulates and depicts their connection. In explicitly tracing the association of hüzün with Istanbul through a historical explanation and charting this connection through the authors he has chosen, in causal links that culminate in his own work, he emerges as the conscious formulator of this relationship, which I describe as the chronotope of Istanbul. As I will explain, chronotope is a literary and narratorial schema that describes the intersection of time, place, and the affective worldview they constitute as an indivisible unit of comprehension and representation. Pamuk does not use the term chronotope, but he might as well, since his focus is on a place and a historical time, which together generate the feeling of hüzün and the accompanying worldview of resignation. Identifying this constellation as a chronotope, more particularly as the Istanbul chronotope, allows us to understand Pamuk's project of creating a genealogy and tradition in which to place himself as a writer of Istanbul. Attention to the ways he puts together the vectors of time, place, and emotion in the construction of this chronotope necessarily undermines the identificatory kind of reading I described previously and opens up a more critical reading that also heeds Pamuk's warnings.

THE CHRONOTOPE

I use the term chronotope in the Bakhtinian sense of time and place (chronos-topos/time-place) that are fused in such a way as to embody a specific worldview and its attendant values and “conception of man” that shape the narrative. Bakhtin writes,

Here, Bakhtin is highlighting the inevitable interpenetration of time and place in any literary portrayal. As he recognizes, any depiction of place embeds time, and vice versa, and through their convergence time and place encode a specific worldview. To give a brief example, if I mention Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century, you will already guess that I will be talking about the American dream. Furthermore, the association of this time and place will conjure up for you the image of a hard-working immigrant who hoped for a better life. The symbolic value a particular time and place acquire through their connection, and the worldview this imparts, are the preconditions of translating a lived experience to an artistic representation. Bakhtin explains:

This essay examines how the chronotope of Istanbul is constituted to embody feelings of loss and pain as well as the active embrace of these as a life philosophy, that is, it examines how Pamuk is able to represent Istanbul as the unchanging locus of hüzün.Footnote ⁹ Any narrative will code its use of time and place according to the worldview it is imparting. The variations will depend on genre. As Bakhtin observes, different genres have different formulas for representing time and place, and consequently have developed shortcuts for depicting plot and characters that fit these formulas. In his historically evolutionary analysis, Bakhtin argues that genres preceding the 19th-century realist novel deal with varying degrees of abstract time and space but progressively evolve during the 19th century toward the concrete specificity that he prizes.

Pamuk has to improvise and borrow his narrative conventions when he develops the chronotope of Istanbul because his is a hybrid form. Istanbul is a memoir both of his own life and of his city. Furthermore, the protagonists of these parallel accounts are identical to each other. The statement Pamuk makes in binding his life to the meaning of Istanbul, in a twist on Flaubert, is, “Istanbul, C'est moi.”Footnote ¹⁰ In depicting this identity and reversibility, the chronotope's constitutive elements of place and emotion do not pose a problem because they appear to be the same in both stories; but the element of time does, because the timescales of Istanbul's story and Pamuk's life are vastly different, and the crises of each story take place on different dates. Pamuk's own life story unfolds from 1952 to 1974, with a turning point in 1972. He tells Istanbul's story by focusing on three separate periods: the period of the visits of the French authors Nerval, Gautier, and Flaubert to the city from the 1830s to the 1860s; the period from the 1930s to the 1950s that the Turkish authors Beyatlı and Tanpınar write about; and the period of the black-and-white Turkish melodramas of hüzün from the 1950s to the late 1960s. The time of crisis for Istanbul is the turn of the 20th century, when the empire is lost.

Pamuk solves this incongruence in time, in terms of both scale and historical specificity, by creating a composite and abstract timeframe that includes but transcends all the different historical dates mentioned. In order to do this, he either omits or downplays actual dates from his own life. For example, we only get two key dates of his life: 7 June 1955, his birthday, and March 1972, his artistic awakening or the beginning of his “second life,” that is, his conscious life (in terms of the definitions of “first life” vs. “second life” that I will later analyze), of which this book is a product and accounting. The historical story of Istanbul acquires a greater specificity and concreteness than the personal story because most of the overtly stated dates in the book are in the period from the 1830s to 1860s and refer to the Istanbul visits of French authors like Nerval, Gautier, and Flaubert. A shift in time is conveyed as progression through the story's next move to discussing the Turkish authors Beyatlı and Tanpınar and then the black-and-white movies; but, because the dates in these discussions are not given as overtly and with the same emphasis and frequency as those of the 19th century, the main narrative takes place in an abstract subjective present that seems to deceptively point to and read as the 19th century. Through this sleight of hand, Pamuk takes his audience to the actual time of the dissolution of the empire, which plays such an originary importance in his account of hüzün. This sense of nebulous and unchanging time, whose association with the 19th century also conveys a psychological dimension of timelessness, emerges as the time of hüzün.

In combining different and specific time periods of his youth and of various authors’ experiences of Istanbul into an abstract unchanging present, Pamuk performs the opposite of what Bakhtin valorizes: from specific chronotopes that carry the mark of their own particular times, Pamuk constructs a larger generic and archetypal chronotope whose temporal content corresponds to a biographical outline operating in an indeterminate time weighted toward the 19th century. Bakhtin shows that instead of concrete dates, such ahistorical narratives proceed by relative designations of “before” and “after,” “at just that moment,” and “suddenly.”Footnote ¹¹ Pamuk defines various happenings in such relative terms—“102 years before my birth” (p. 6), “fifty years later” (p. 72), “in October 1850, seven years after Nerval's visit's to Istanbul” (p. 286)—which undermine the importance not only of concrete dates but also of larger time periods. “Two years before this, in 1852 (nine years after Nerval's visit and exactly a hundred years before my birth)” (p. 224) is a hyper-example that incorporates several different ways of referencing. These kinds of references that unite two or more separate dates in terms of a personal connection (to himself or to somebody else) uproot them from the particular dates given, and turn them into a designation of shared internal time in which the people referenced coexist, because the importance of their connection supersedes the designation of separate dates that belong to separate epochs and separate narratives. Time is relativized and turned into a subjective measurement. Pamuk returns the reader to the immediacy of the present with a Turkish form analogous to Bakhtin's “suddenly”—the - iver verb suffix, which shows the unexpectedness and quickness of the event happening at hand. With frequent use of this suffix,Footnote ¹²Pamuk brings the reader to the immediate present of the foreground, therefore distinguishing between an indeterminate past that blends into the present in the background and a more immediate one of present action in the moment, in between which the story fluctuates.

The abstractness of this time helps hüzün transcend its historically specific origin and become an inward, psychological state that defines Pamuk's life and that the readers of the memoir can identify with. Further, it is because time is defined as a subjective, abstract state instead of a historical durée that it can remain constant and can preserve the stability of the chronotope, as a result of which Istanbul can be seen as an unchanging and perpetual locus of melancholy and decline. I will now examine more closely the two strands of the narrative of self and Istanbul, whose intertwining shapes the story of hüzün and whose exchange of roles constitutes the main action of the book.

THE TWIN NARRATIVES: THEIR CHANGING WEIGHT AND INTERSECTION

In writing a book with double protagonists, Pamuk accomplishes the difficult feat of balancing and melding the expectations of two genres: the autobiography and the analytical essay. In the latter he examines black-and-white movies, novels, paintings, and prose writings of various kinds—such as newspaper articles, encyclopedia entries, and travel memoirs about Istanbul—as narratives of hüzün. He concurrently clarifies and fixes the chronotope of Istanbul as hüzün, offering his book as sort of an artistic achievement that parallels, for example, the production of the tarantella at the end of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by serving as a mark of his literary coming of age and as a sample of his literary talent.

He links the two narratives of the autobiography and the essay through two movements of change, one of which is expressed in time and the other in space, each causing a different reversal in the direction of cause and effect and each appropriate for the genre it operates in. The biographical development reaches a moment of epiphany in which the young artist, in an episode reminiscent of Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus, discovers his artistic subject matter and vision, of which the book we are reading is a product. This autobiographical moment unfolding in the linear trajectory of the life story engenders and intersects with a reversal of logic in the essay, which changes the direction of the flow of power and causation in Pamuk's relationship with Istanbul. Originally, Pamuk's story is Istanbul's because he is a product of Istanbul, and therefore, he claims, Istanbul's story explains and clarifies his.Footnote ¹³ This logic of cause and effect is reversed between Pamuk and Istanbul when he realizes that Istanbul's story is his because he is producing this story, with the explicit admission that if Istanbul represents hüzün, it is only because he says so. This change in the direction of causation is a spatial shift between what constitutes the background and foreground narratives. Or it can be conceived as the turning around of the mobius strip of their relationship, which Pamuk sums up as, “I have described Istanbul when describing myself, and described myself when describing Istanbul” (p. 295). As this sequencing also implies, at first, the essay and its exploration of hüzün in Istanbul explain Pamuk's life, but after the moment of epiphany, which is the “the center” of discovery and reversal, Pamuk's life gains explanatory force for the hüzün located in Istanbul.

ISTANBUL AS THE LOCUS AND CAUSE OF HÜZÜN

This identification of Istanbul as the cause of the hüzün of its inhabitants constitutes the general content of the chronotope of Istanbul. This is the connection that the readers remember from the book. According to Pamuk's reasoning, Istanbul is an embodiment of hüzün, a kind of predetermined sadness, which he carefully distinguishes from the melancholy defined by Burton and the tristesse identified by Levi-Strauss. Based on his reading of Richard Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, he claims that the melancholy Burton identifies is more like an individual suffering that may lead not only to isolation and loneliness but also to some kind of reflectiveness and creativity. Tristesse, on the other hand, as seen in Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, is more like a bourgeois Western guilt felt when visiting the tropics; it's the conflicted discomfort experienced while enjoying the pleasure of easy sunshine. Hüzün, on the other hand, is uniquely felt in Istanbul; it is a collective sense of sadness, a feeling of loss and defeat so entrenched that people do not even try to fight against it. They bear and, in fact, embrace this suffering as a sign of their dignity.

Pamuk tries to list various reasons for this sadness, and they range from an Islamic and particularly Sufi mourning for alienation from God, to rampant poverty, to the omnipresence of dilapidated buildings, to the centrality of romantic sadness in songs and poetry. The fact that street lights are not bright adds to this as do the black-and-white photos, films, and cheap reproductions of gravures about Istanbul that make the inhabitants of the city visually encounter their own sadness. But its most important cause is the historical loss of empire. Although he does not exactly explain what this means (for that, we have to turn to his sources in Beyatlı and Tanpınar, from whom he borrows this historical argument), his hüzün is a nostalgia for a past that was better, richer, and happier and that is forever gone. The concrete political and ideological implications of this are left untouched as he concentrates purely on the emotion and its pervasiveness as well as on the literary and artistic ways this sadness is recirculated. What Pamuk describes is his experiences of sadness, most poignantly his helplessness as a child caught in the squabbles between his parents. Both the events he talks about and the way he talks of them make these emotions identifiable for the reader. The longing of a child for a family he has lost—which is the trauma Pamuk experiences—provides the personal illustration of the general nostalgia felt for an empire after its loss. Pamuk's personal perspective as a small child allows a venue to this collective pain, highlighting only the emotional aspect of the experience rather than its causes, which are sometimes given as endless lists and which seem to announce in their desperation that they are not adequate as explanations. This personalization from a child's perspective, however, allows the readers to understand and experience the historical loss through their identification with and sympathy for the child's suffering. By setting this concrete example of the pain of a child longing for family togetherness and harmony as an emotional parallel for what Istanbullus felt after the loss of the empire, Pamuk turns Ottoman history into a story of the dissolution of another family like his, albeit more illustrious and powerful. By the same token, the troubles and loss of the fortune of his family are narrated like the decline of the Ottoman dynasty.

What allows the biographical story to serve as a key for the historical one is the identical emotional coloring and meaning accorded to Istanbul in both. While Pamuk's life story illustrates the experience of sadness in narrative terms, the historically analytical part of the book traces the various stages of the association of Istanbul with melancholy. This latter turns out to be a palimpsestic and intertextual reading of previous authors of various genres who wrote about Istanbul as a site of sadness and loss. Glossing over the differences between different emotions of sadness, Pamuk conducts his investigation of these texts basically through the framework of the story of the young man as an artist, which begins with his birth and ends with the declaration of his vocation as a writer.

Although this central Künstlerroman moves the narrative forward through its biographical outline, it is not really anchored in history or concrete time. We get some dates that indicate the book covers the first twenty-two years of Pamuk's life, but there is not a particularly clear chronology or a definite sense of what was happening historically. For example, we hear that the prime minister was Adnan Menderes (1899–1961) through the association of his first name Adnan with the name of Pamuk's uncle Gökhan because they rhyme. Pamuk recounts a funny episode in which, as a five-year-old, he insisted that the prime minister was his uncle because of the resemblance of the two names with their rhyming ending. But we learn nothing about the period of this first prime minister from the Democratic Party, who was elected in the first two-party elections held in Turkey in 1950 and who was hanged after the 1960 coup. Pamuk personalizes the historical reference as an illustration of the kind of associative slippage to which he is prone. Nor do we hear anything about the new constitution this coup produced, Turkey's entry into the Korean War, or Turkey's attempts to become a NATO member, all of which were taking place around the time of the beginning of the book's narrative in 1952.

This lack of concrete temporal markers and connections allows the emphasis to remain on the internal life that the anguished young hero guiltily prefers to the external one lived with others. He feels that he is pretending to be somebody else when he is with other people. He describes this discomfort by saying, “I'd feel ashamed, afraid, terrorized, and terrified of being marked as alien” (p. 309). The remedy for him is to withdraw into an inner life, which unfolds when he shuts out the world and is only indirectly described in the book as the “second world” (as opposed to the “first world” of routine and the reality principle); he delineates its territory when he says that he went into his room and locked his door, but ultimately the book ends up being about this inner world.

The fact that the twin narrative about the idea of Istanbul is developed in an intellectual discursive framework expands the terrain of this inner life. While tracing the association of melancholy with Istanbul in the writings of the other authors, Pamuk treats them as his doubles who had their own inner turmoil and struggles, whether about love, sexuality, or youthful ambition. The shared attention in both Istanbul narratives to analysis and reflection as well as to a common feeling of melancholy helps turn the focus from the external to the internal. Ironically, the book that purports to be about a real place that is visually captured in many photographs ends up being framed through a narrative of inner life and defined by emotion. Pamuk's preoccupation with and reading of the chronotope of Istanbul through literary works in the second plotline validates the final and surprising revelation that he wants to be a writer, not a painter, in the biographical plot. Thus, the independent second story line about Istanbul is absorbed into the logic of the biographical story whose culmination offers Pamuk's own contribution to the concept of Istanbul.

The resolution of the biographical story is worked out as Pamuk's conflict with each member of his family is either solved or explained. The sibling rivalry with his older brother, which weighed him down with feelings of shame and defeat, is resolved when his brother leaves for college. The problem with his father's disappearances is explained when he is discovered to be an adulterer living with another woman, experiencing the twin life that Pamuk imagined for himself. Pamuk has a close but difficult relationship with his mother, which shapes his early life. In a way, the book is about his separation from his mother, the main person who initiated him into loving Istanbul. Pamuk finally declares his independence from her by running out into the streets of Istanbul and rebelling against her expectations that he become an architect. The streets of Istanbul and personal freedom triumph as Pamuk drops out of the university, acting on a truth he learned in elementary school that school explains nothing about life. In the end, his locked room opens up to encompass all of Istanbul because he now finds the solitude he once found in his room in the different neighborhoods of the entire city, which he identifies with after his experience of an awakening.

THE AWAKENING AND THE SHIFT TO THE PERSONAL AS CAUSE OF HÜZÜN

The most important resolution of the book comes from the reversal of Pamuk's relationship with Istanbul as a result of the moment of epiphany in the biographical plot line, which awakens Pamuk to his vocation with the discovery of his artistic material. The stories of Istanbul and of Pamuk's life are not only parallel plot lines but are also embedded in each other. Pamuk offers his life as both the product and the embodiment of Istanbul through the argument that he has always lived in Istanbul and, therefore, is marked by Istanbul in the way that some writers are defined by exile. Yet, he can't help but reveal the dwindling of his family's fortunes, the disintegration of the relationship between his parents, the darkness of the atmosphere in his grandmother's museum house where curtains are always half-drawn, and his own sense of alienation from his surroundings—his own depression, one might say.

The terms of this cause and effect relationship are reversed in the penultimate chapter of the book, which contains “the center” of Istanbul. According to Pamuk's recent explanation, “the center” is the point to which all the narrative flows and which unlocks the mystery of what it means.Footnote ¹⁴ He prepares us for the existence of such a center when he indicates he had to make a choice about how to tell his story, which turns out to be between the perspectives of a naïve vs. sentimental writer. He says he could have written it in the form of a fairy tale, mystifying his writing as an unconscious and spontaneous act of creativity by a naïve author who is not in control of what he produces: “Then, when I was twenty-two, I seem to have begun writing novels without knowing why” (p. 8). He explains why he opted not to this and instead wrote his memoir from the viewpoint of a consciously in-control sentimental author who shapes his narrative with deliberate intention:

This distinction between “first life” and “second life” should not be confused with the other important categorization of “first world” and “second world” (which refers to the opposition between the real world of shared routine and the world of the imagination), although the “second life” begins when the “second, inner world” of the imagination becomes the guiding force of a conscious life. The terms “second world” and “second life” are both coordinates of inner life, but the first is a designation of space that grows to include the whole of Istanbul, and the second is a designation of time that captures and embodies that growth. They finally intersect at the moment of Pamuk's epiphany, opening up his second life dominated by the second world's power of imagination, and changing his relationship with Istanbul.

The date of this rebirth into his “second life” is given almost as a full date: “around noon on a day in March 1972” (pp. 346–47). The coupling of the month and year recalls the formality of the birth date in the “first life,” but this time the date is not complete since it is only a second birth. Pamuk is extremely depressed because his girlfriend is sent away, he has lost his love of painting, and he is constantly fighting with his mother about his future. He decides to cut class and take a ride on the ferry because this is the typical consolation for heroes of all black-and-white movies as well as for the intellectuals of Tanpınar's 1949 novel Huzur (Peace). He thinks, “By looking at Istanbul, so much more defeated, ruined and sorrowful, I would forget my own pain” (p. 350). He boards an old commuter ferry going to the Golden Horn and immediately experiences “this sense of belonging, this sense of sitting now in the heart of the city” (p. 346). He also feels that while that specific day in 1972 goes on above the bridge, he descends into a different kind of indeterminate and subjective time on the water. He notices, “Here, in the world below, we belonged to an older, broader, weightier time” (p. 346). This time slowly moves back to take him first to the time of Beyatlı and Tanpınar with the observation “I'd gone back thirty years” (p. 347); then into a black-and-white movie from an earlier date, “This midday scene seemed, like the Istanbul views I saw in disintegrating old movies” (p. 348); and, next, to the time of the French visitors a hundred years earlier, when he notices that the horse-drawn carriages on the shore “looked as finely and clearly drawn as in hundred-year-old postcards” (p. 348). By the time he comes to Üsküdar and the Golden Horn, the site of Istanbul's conquest, with an awareness that “every strange memento seemed saturated with the poetic melancholy of lost imperial greatness and its historical residue” (p. 353),Footnote ¹⁵ he not only duplicates the physical journey of Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453 from the sea to the heart of Istanbul, but he also repeats that military conquest in psychological terms. Pamuk gains the authority to define what Istanbul is when he reconquers it in the spirit of Mehmet the Conqueror, who at twenty-one was about the same age as the twenty-year-old Pamuk reliving in 1972 a personal version of that historical victory. This artistic conquest is foreshadowed by a reference to its historical model in a special chapter entitled “Conquest or Decline? The Turkification of Constantinople” exactly at mid-point in the memoir.Footnote ¹⁶ Pamuk's allusion to Sultan Mehmet is also an intertextual reference to the works of Beyatlı and Tanpınar, who have mythologized the conquest of Istanbul as the city's foundational moment.Footnote ¹⁷

Pamuk achieves this conquest by understanding the meaning of the city: “I imagined myself to be the only one who had unlocked the city's secret; it had come to me as I watched through the windows of the Golden Horn ferry, and I had embraced the city as my own—no one had ever seen it as I did now!” (p. 353, emphasis added). The sense of community that enveloped him at the beginning of the journey ends with the declaration of his individuality and singularity, because he is the only one who has grasped the meaning of the city's heart: although this meaning is enigmatically left unexplained, we know by now that it is the city's hüzün. The book we are reading is the result of that insight, and the success of this conquest can be measured by the popularity of the image and to the extent it is embraced as an uncontestable truth by reading audiences worldwide.

The young artist conquers the city by allowing himself to be conquered by it. He tells us at the outset, “For me, Istanbul has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own” (p. 6). It is during this ferry ride that he finally gives in to the feeling and accepts it. He says, “I lost myself in Istanbul. So it was that I finally came to relax and accept the hüzün that gives Istanbul its grave beauty, the hüzün that is its fate” (p. 352). It is through this acceptance of the city's ethos and his identification with it that he finally conquers both the city and its hüzün. The young artist's interaction with the city is the kind of lovers’ embrace often depicted in black-and-white films, in the shot of the hero and heroine running toward each other in slow motion and finally throwing themselves into each other's arms. In allowing himself to be penetrated by the city's hüzün and in literally penetrating its heart both in his physical journey to the Golden Horn and in his moment of grasping its essence, he enacts this embrace with the city and it becomes both a communion and a consummation.

Before he depicts this moment, Pamuk juxtaposes two traditions in which awakening means opposite things and which are thus narrated for different ends. Pamuk explains that in the typical Turkish moment of epiphany, the protagonist finally accepts the defeat that was his fate from the beginning. Pamuk juxtaposes this passive resignation with its Western opposite as expressed in the rebellion of Balzac's canonical hero Rastignac: “No such feeling operates in heroes like Balzac's Rastignac, who in his furious ambition comes to convey, even glorify, the spirit of the modern city” (p. 104). The reference here is to Rastignac's challenge to his city Paris, especially epitomized in his war call at the end of Père Goriot:

Unlike Turkish heroes, Rastignac is ready to take on the ruthlessly capitalist but also exciting life of Paris, where mobility and success are difficult, but possible. Words such as avidement, pénétrer, lança, grandiose show the youthful ebullience and aggressiveness of Rastignac's ambitions, which culminate in his direct challenge to the city as he looks on its most upscale neighborhoods (unlike Pamuk and other hüzün writers, who favor the poorest).

On the ferry, Pamuk's moment of awakening also involves the decision of which tradition this epiphany is going to be narrated in. Flooded with the city's hüzün, he considers how a typical Turkish hero, “so destined to lose ‘in life and in love,’” would cede to it (p. 351). This thought leads to a pause of doubt and a dramatic moment of reversal as we see in the following sequence: “To say such a thing would be to talk in the language of Turkish melodrama” . . . “—and it won't do to use the city's melancholy to explain away my own” (pp. 350–51). Although he accepts the city's hüzün, Pamuk refuses to be defeated and defined by it. He turns to the Western model and embraces Rastignac's challenge, announcing his conquest of the city by his insight into its essential meaning. Pamuk's descriptions of his anger and ambition, in this and the following chapter, with phrases like “unchecked ardor” (p. 353), “unbounded love and anger” (p. 360), and “this dark spirit” (p. 360), follow this identification with Rastignac,Footnote ¹⁹which makes available for him an appropriate language of expression. In the end, he writes, “My fury gave me a dizzying vitality that pushed me out of myself; I felt a wondrous ambition—so vast it surprised even me—to leave the house and run out into the street” (p. 363, emphasis added). This forceful language of “fury, vitality, and ambition” pushes him out of the Turkish tradition toward a hybridization of Eastern and Western traditions, which he has already discovered at the core of hüzün.

Pamuk also references another famous Western hero of awakening, Stephen Dedalus, in order to deepen the artistic nature of his epiphany by following the blueprint provided by Joyce. Pamuk's spiritual communion with his city, which becomes his subject matter, is modeled on that of Stephen Dedalus with his city, Dublin. Stephen is another character who defies his mother; he leaves his family home, Ireland, and the church against his mother's wishes. Stephen's epiphany happens slowly over the course of a walk by the sea. First he announces the end of his youth and declares his vocation in writing: “His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.”Footnote ²⁰ Toward evening, he encounters a young girl wading in the sea, looking like a seabird, and her image is transmuted into Ireland's in his mind. Stephen has a silent spiritual encounter with her, absorbing her figure as the subject matter of his future writing: “Her image had passed into his soul forever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called to him and his soul had leapt to the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!” (p. 156). Like Joyce's writer character, Pamuk's young self discovers his subject matter of Istanbul in a euphoric and wordless encounter by the sea between two spirits, one of which belongs to a place. Similarly, the experience creates a mandate. Pamuk says, “Once I mastered this new poetic outlook, I chased with unchecked ardor after anything and everything connected with the city” (p. 353). In ambitiously pursuing his topic, Pamuk's hero also incorporates the more openly confrontational tone of young Rastignac's encounter with his city because the former's relationship with Istanbul is also one of power. These implied comparisons of Pamuk's awakening to its literary others add the present tense of literature and literary analysis to the indeterminate present of the narration.

PAMUK AS THE CAUSE OF HÜZÜN IN ISTANBUL

The fifty-year-old narrator of the memoir not only portrays the triumphant moment of the epiphany of his younger self who felt his trilling uniqueness but also shows that this naïve self-important discovery is the work of projection. He comments with the ironic hindsight and wisdom of his age that cities are only what we see in them; our inner life offers the only perspective through which we can experience a city. He says of his past, “The view looked troubled then because I myself was troubled. I poured my soul into the city's streets, and there it still resides” (p. 346). At the end, he writes, “But here we have come full circle, for anything we say about the city's essence says more about our own lives and our states of mind. The city has no center other than ourselves” (p. 349). He accepts responsibility for the sadness he locates in Istanbul and subordinates the Istanbul argument to his biography by contextualizing the epiphany of his younger self in the unhappiness of his own life then. Pamuk here accepts that what he has written about is his Istanbul: his take on, his interpretation of, the city.

While undercutting his younger self's moment of self-discovery with this ironic consciousness, the mature narrator simultaneously legitimizes his former self's claim to authority over the city as its voice and bard. The memoir ends with the declaration of the young man's subject matter and his artistic vocation in writing. The meaning of this claim to authority is dramatized and justified in the analytical work of the mature narrator, who constructs the tradition in which he will place himself and in terms of which he will claim that Istanbul is a site of hüzün. His genealogy of this association, traced through authors who were looking for “an image of Istanbul” (p. 107), demonstrates how the chronotope of Istanbul is developed. Although he makes a general and generalizing claim about the connection between Istanbul and hüzün on the basis of the framework and the history he creates, Pamuk also underlines the personal motivations and circumstances of the authors—including himself—who not only contributed to the various stages in the collective development of the chronotope but also left their personal signature on it.

THE CREATION OF THE CHRONOTOPE