Espace urbain et identité : l’imaginaire de la ville comme symptôme de la crise identitaire dans l’oeuvre d’Orhan Pamuk

Istanbul is for Pamuk what Paris is for Baudelaire: an inexhaustible source of inspiration and spleen. But, if the French poet is more conscious of his states of mind, the most widely read contemporary Turkish novelist seems at first to deliberately disregard the fact that any discourse on the external world is also a discourse about himself. At first, in emulation of other Turkish novelists, Pamuk seems to thoroughly enjoy mapping the hüzün, the much talked about collective feeling of melancholy, reputed to be intrinsic to the city and its ruins. Nevertheless, as soon as Pamuk starts to follow in the footsteps of foreign writers and artists who have visited Istanbul, he notices that the apparent melancholy of the ruins is only one layer among many fluid layers. While following the tracks of the otherness, Pamuk discovers the heterogeneous character of his city but also of himself and notices that the collective melancholy widely accepted by most his compatriots is fabricated by a certain socio-political narrative, within a specific social class. Indeed, by tracking the reflections of his own imaginative twin, the novelist is suddenly aware of the elusiveness of his own subjectivity but also of the world and the others. If such is the case, the urban space that preoccupies and obsesses Pamuk is only a reflection of his mind and the will to fully access to the presence, is nothing but an illusion. As if the disturbing uncanny of his unconscious, by revealing the elusive side of the world and the self, encourages Pamuk to challenge a number of views and opinions taken for granted, inside his own culture but also inside the culture of the other, his European twin. For, if everything is fluid and malleable, there is no reason not to question everything, including tradition and state politics, the latter making him, "a person well more political, serious and responsible that I am and ever whished to be". Thus, Istanbul: memoires and the city questions the relationship between the subjectivity and the heterogeneous layers of Istanbul in order to come to a deconstructionist conclusion: everything is a substitute; there is a general absence of sense. If the city lacks a tangible raison d’être or sense in its history and topography, then it must be the same in places that are far from Istanbul. Thus central characters in The House of the Silence question not only the very foundation of their identity and subjectivity, but also the relationship between tradition and modernity, center and periphery, East and West, not to mention the destructive and ephemeral nature of time and space. In Pamuk’s most recent novel, The Museum of Innocence, the protagonist engages in an even more obsessive and destructive quest for another kind of space and time — an imaginary in-between space allowing for a seamless traffic between reality and fiction, East and West, and tradition and modernity. This in-between space or identity clearly anchors Pamuk among the most interesting postmodern novelists of our time. But, this in-between positionality, however, can only be attained at a price: Pamuk’s work, illuminating insight or a precarious balance is more often than not achieved through the sacrifice of the female figure.

Keyphrases: Dissemination, Absences, Istanbul, Europe, Space, Identity, Otherness, Dissemination, Presence, Absence