If al-Maqrizi Were Alive Today:
Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul

February 7, 2007

People who live with decline suffer the emotion of Hüzün.. the Turkish word for melancholy. That is the title of the central (if not the most interesting) chapter of Orhan Pamuk's book Istanbul. It is the concept that unifies the book and makes sense of the personal, civic and civilizational histories that are interwoven throughout the work. Pamuk uses the word to define the outlook not just of a poetic individual.. but a feeling shared by a group of people.

Hüzün is also the feeling that dominates the world of the "four lonely melancholic writers" that he spotlights. The descriptions of these earlier chroniclers of Istanbul are to me endlessly inspiring.. for these are the writers who took up the thankless task of describing and collecting details about a city that was clearly in decline. (I wonder if every large city somewhere has such chroniclers?) One writer, Resat Ekram Koçu, labored much of his life putting together the Istanbul Encyclopedia.. an immense project that only got to the letter G. The work itself was published fascicle by fascicle and only later bound up into actual volumes. Conventionally this man Koçu must be accounted a failure.. here is Pamuk's thoroughly melancholy account of the fate of this project:

In the years after Koçu's death, in the mid-seventies, every time I went to the Covered Bazaar I would stop at the Sahaflar Secondhand Book Market next to the Beyazit Mosque and the find the final unbound fascicles and volumes that Koçu published at his own expense in his final years, sitting among the rows of yellowed, faded, mildewed, cheap old books. These volumes, which I began to read in my grandmother's library, were by now being sold at the price of waste paper, but still the booksellers I knew said they found no takers. [169]

It is the kind of passage I love.. showing both the heroism and tragedy of eccentric projects.

I have been surprised by the thoroughness with which Pamuk takes up questions by means of reference to Western writers. At various points there are references to Arabic or Persian writers.. but the artists in which Pamuk has steeped himself are clearly Western. If you don't believe me just glance through the index of the book. This is not to say that there is nothing "Turkish" in his work, it is simply to note that the author's national or local characteristics are expressed with his gaze firmly set upon the Western literary tradition.

Reading Istanbul I keep thinking of the medieval Egyptian writer al-Maqrizi. His great topographical work known as the Khitat is infused with something very like hüzün.. as he describes with relentless detail the look and feel of Cairo in the 15th century and earlier.. and there is an unmistakable sense of loss as he describes the changes that have come over his city. Al-Maqrizi may have been motivated by a feeling that would be immediately recognizable to Pamuk, but he did not have recourse to the forms of a second literary tradition. In other words, there is no way that he could have written a book entitled Cairo that paralleled Istanbul. He was faced instead with writing about cultural loss within a literary framework generated by the Islamic/Arabic tradition.. and his answer to this problem was to amplify the topographical format of the Khitat genre.

Al-Maqrizi's situation can be seen more clearly if we imagine Pamuk in a slightly different situation. What if Pamuk had no access to Western literary forms? What if all he had to look back on were his "four lonely melancholic writers" and earlier Ottoman writers? That would have been a formidable challenge.. The break-out feel of Istanbul.. indeed what separates it from his beloved and heroic failures of local Turkish writing.. stems from his embrace of a foreign formal sensibility. This even makes the book feel somewhat contradictory in its aims.. as we encounter a writer who is steeped in a deep admiration for the past and for his world in decline, but whose work stands for a new Turkey.. not the Turkey of Ataturk, but one that can stand as an equal with the West. In the work of al-Maqrizi there is no such internal contradiction. There is only loss and change, briefly arrested by a descriptive and encyclopedic prose that manages to come as close as words can to representing a city without the use of images.