Post-imperial culture and its melancholies – from Théophile Gautier’s Constantinople of to-day to Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul – memories of a city

Abstract

This article is concerned with literary representations of the affective impact of the Ottoman empire’s demise on its principal metropolis, Istanbul. It discusses first the work of nineteenth-century French novelist and diarist Théophile Gautier about the city, Constantinople of To-day, then moves on to analyse its subsequent influence on the work of the early Turkish Republican writers, through to Orhan Pamuk’s recent memoir Istanbul. Memories of a City. In Istanbul, Pamuk forges a system of belief that presents itself as a counternarrative to the ideological discourses that took over the city, as successive Republican governments embarked on radical urban, ethnic and religious reconfigurations of the post-Ottoman metropolis. This is registered in his memoir as an affective structure, a form of melancholy that Pamuk terms hüzün, and that may be perceived as operating through the Saidian model of ‘intertwined constructions’ expressed in his Culture and Imperialism. The article proposes that Pamuk’s fraught gesture significantly complicates Said’s unilateral argument on the French Orientalists in his Orientalism, suggesting instead the urgency of reading Gautier’s influence on Pamuk through the early Turkish Republican writers as a trope of world literary dynamics.