Orhan Pamuk’s missing island? Nights of Plague and the emergence of its breakaway polity

Abstract

This essay engages with Orhan Pamuk’s Nights of Plague (2022 [2021]) to argue that the novel contemplates a seceding island-state which is conspicuous as a locatable omission: a space that is missing from the late-Ottoman imperial map yet eminently alive in the reader’s own, mental vista of the waning empire. How does an island that is ontically absent from the universally affirmed cartography of the period come to make its bid for plausibility – and to obtain a certain legitimacy by means of the complex, outlying political constellation that it opens up? Bugeja argues that the island of Mingheria incites a distinct retrospect on Turkey’s turn-of-the-century transition, as well as its lingering shadow on the country’s politics today. Viewed as a depiction of that fragile period when the impending passing of an ancien régime was becoming evident but had not yet fully materialised, Pamuk’s plague-stricken island has the potential to contaminate Turkey’s ensuing national project, as well as to re-awaken its overlooked political wraiths. The essay draws on the author’s own island-inflected memories, as well as his responses to the art of Yves Tanguy, Yukai Du and various exhibits from Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, in order to locate Mingheria as a strategic geo-political elision – a space which may well turn out to be Pamuk’s most trenchant countertextual legacy.