Writing as if in the Center: World Literature and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (original) (raw)

The scholarship on world literature has often used a center/periphery model and analyzed how Orhan Pamuk’s works have been received by different cultures, especially the Western. Rather than analyzing Pamuk’s reception in other cultures, this study will examine how Pamuk overlooks and even sometimes undermines the hierarchies that shape the international literary domain by writing “as if in the center.” As a case study, a close reading of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir, 2003) will be given and the narrative techniques that Pamuk uses to upend the center/periphery dynamics will be examined. This article argues that Pamuk transforms elements that threatened to marginalize Istanbul, such as the Western gaze, into sources that nourish his artistic vision that endows Istanbul with a central status. The first section demonstrates that although Istanbul was marginalized within the international realm, Pamuk describes the act of writing as a means to endow Istanbul with a central status. It points out that Pamuk generates his vision of the city through a process that this study calls interweaving or artistic translation. The second section shows that the writer uses different mediums such as photography and painting to foreground the complexity of the city. Furthermore, it will claim that Ara Güler’s photos that are used throughout Istanbul further enriches Pamuk’s work by not always confirming Pamuk’s observations and sometimes even contradicting with them. The final section examines Pamuk’s perspectives on the Western gaze. Pamuk notes that the European gaze becomes a source of nourishment rather than a threat. He writes about the shortcomings of Edward Said’s theories and criticizes the tendency to view East and West as two well-defined regions.