Jonathan Cox

The Powerless Historian: Museums, “Melancholie,” and Hypochondria in Istanbul: Memories

and the City

The word “systematization” sounds like computer programmer jargon, but when the

quixotic dictator Nicolae Ceausescu “systematized” the once beautiful city of Bucharest, the

result was far more tragic, degrading, and lasting than simple lines of computer code could ever

be. He leveled the beautiful Baroque and Art Nouveau buildings that had earned Bucharest the

nickname “Little Paris,” and replaced them with lead-colored apartment complexes so

stereotypically dystopian that the art-director for the sci-fi video game Half-Life 2 used them as

inspiration for the grim fascist stronghold “City 17.” Ceausescu’s “systematization” was a darker

version of the “urban renewal” programs which reform-minded journalists in Istanbul in the 20’s

blamed for turning the city into a “cheap, pale, second-class imitation of a western city.”

Though the downfall of Bucharest certainly wasn’t as devastating or as far-reaching as the fall of

the Ottoman Empire, it was, in its own way, just as tragic.

Pamuk claims that a city’s tragic past dooms all of its residents to a lifetime of

melancholy and regret, no matter how much the city itself changes. “Because of the huzun

[Istanbullus] derive from the city’s history,” he says, “they are broken and condemned to defeat”

(94). But my experience in the scarred city of Bucharest, and, to a lesser extent my limited

experience of Istanbul, has taught me the sheer nonsense of using a city’s past as justification for

fatalism and melancholy. We naturally look askance at Victorian-era mourning traditions, where

the death of a spouse meant at least two years of black clothes and spontaneous sobbing, because

of the obvious artificiality of such conventions. Similarly, it would be absurd for me to sigh

gloomily every time I pass the glitzy Plaza Romania shopping center in Bucharest, simply

because in 1994 it looked like a burnt-out mosque crossed with a James Bond villain’s

stronghold and housed homeless drug addicts. Istanbul has gone through a similar transformation

in Pamuk’s lifetime, yet in his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City, he insists on dredging

up outdated reminders of its sad past, even recycling reporters’ complaints about porters beating

their horses from 1875 (129). If he admitted that this fixation on tragedy represents strictly his

own overly nostalgic point of view, that would be one thing, but when he insists that every

Istanbullu shares his existential angst, it calls his clarity of insight seriously into question.

Part of Pamuk’s skewed perspective stems from his insistence on seeing Istanbul, and his

life in Istanbul, as a museum. In April, he wrote an article for the Guardian entitled “State

Museums Are so Antiquated,” explaining how “monumental state treasure-houses such as the

Louvre or the Met ignore the stories of the individual,” and arguing that “exhibitions should

become ever more intimate and local.” He applies this philosophy of museums to his memoir,

and it is most clearly seen in the index—which takes a device used in encyclopedias and dry

scholarly texts and applies its mathematical scrutiny to a human life. In the index, the heading

for “masturbation” shares equal copy with “God,” and “Gunduz, Pamuk (father): wisdom of”

gets equal weight as “Napoleon Bonaparte” (345). Indexing his life in this idiosyncratic way

brilliantly shows how ordinary existence is as eloquent and beautiful as the Venus de Milo or any

other museum piece, but simultaneously (and tragically) makes his experiences public-domain,

anonymous, and places a “do not touch” sign next to his own history.

Turning life into a museum is dangerous business. Sometimes, it seems like Pamuk is

gazing at Istanbul through the wrong end of a telescope, and despite seeing everything in the

perfect detail of a Persian miniature, he remains emotionally removed. For example, in the entire

course of the book, his mother’s name is not mentioned once. Her character remains a tabla

rasa, and while her physical attributes are described in almost oedipal detail (“the beautiful

triangle between her hair, her neck, her breasts”) she remains a vague, scolding presence,

constantly playing solitaire and waiting for her husband to return home.

A similar emotional distance characterizes the chapter “Black and White,” which is

especially ironic since its focus is ostensibly the deep connection between Istanbullus during

winter. In this chapter, Pamuk describes how Istanbul feels like an outpost during the winter

months, and he rhapsodizes about the resulting “deep sense of fellowship” between Istanbullus.

He doesn’t, however, delve deeper into this sense of fellowship; rather, like one of the

cinematographers in the old black-and-white film crews, his descriptions remain superficial and

aesthetic. The “crowds of schoolchildren” are just as impersonal as the “chiaroscuro of

twilight,” or the “dusk descend[ing] like a poem” (31). To Pamuk, a photograph of two figures

hurrying home at dusk doesn’t inspire questions of who they are, or where they are going, but

merely suggests that they are “pulling the blanket of night over the entire city”—an intriguing

image totally devoid of human interest.

This overly-aesthetic perspective may be the cause of Pamuk’s strange fixation on

masochism, both physical and emotional. Aestheticism and masochism are closely linked (as

Sylvia Plath shows in her poem “Cut”1). Pamuk’s penchant for “slowly killing flies,” striking

cats, relishing his brother’s beatings, and enjoying the “delicious air of impending disaster”

which suffuses Istanbul in winter are only a few examples of this recurring motif. As if he’s

over-eager to prove his dedication to his aesthetic perspective and to imitate his fringe heroes

(Flaubert with his “cemetery whores,” or Reset Kocu with his grotesque Istanbul Encyclopedia),

1 What a thrill/My thumb instead of an onion./The top quite gone Except for a sort of hinge/Of skin,/A flap like a hat,/Dead white./Then that red plush.)

he introduces this artificial and distracting flavor of masochism into his work when it serves no

purpose except to distance the reader.

Like Theophile Gautier, Pamuk mistakes aesthetic description for true description—

when, as any dime romance novel will tell you, appearance isn’t everything. When the city

breaks out of its shades of black and white during spring and summer, the yalis turn brown and

dry in the sun, and with color comes the risk of conflagration. In a parallel sense, it’s as if

Pamuk fears that, if he breaks out of the black-and-white limitations of aesthetic description and

allows in the color of emotional perspective, the resulting fires of shame, insecurity, or

existential panic could consume him.

Pamuk repeatedly quotes Richard Burton, whose medieval pseudo-scholarly treatise “The

Anatomy of Melancholie” naively diagnoses everything from clinical depression to ennui as

“melancholie,” and pronounces it the hallmark of a powerful mind. His praise of melancholy is

part cause, part effect of the cliché of the tortured artistic soul, starving himself and anguishing in

a lonely garret. This cliché may have gone out of style with the bohemians and their bowler hats,

yet Pamuk seems intent on resurrecting it (and applying it not just to artists but to every resident

of Istanbul). He speaks of “wanting to curl up in the corner like a dying animal” as if he’s

almost proud of his emotional hyper-sensitivity (292). Similarly, his index represents a Sartre-

level laundry list of post-modern misery: loneliness—one reference; self-disgust—two

references; guilt—two references; tristesse—three references; melancholy—13 references;

happiness—only two references, both to a magazine with that title.

To Tsar Nicholas 2nd, Turkey was the “sick old man of Europe,” to Pamuk, Istanbul is the

“sick old hypochondriac of Europe”—a city full of tortured souls awake at night counting ships

on the Bosphorus like a patient with heart disease fearfully counting his pulse, waiting for some

disaster to plunge them deeper into melancholy and regret (185). Many writers see a link

between hypochondria and genius: “What do Charlotte Brontë, Marcel Proust and Charles

Darwin have in common? They were all hypochondriacs” reads a 2010 headline for a book

review in the LA Times. Pro-hypochondriacs theorize that the urge to understand the mysterious

workings of the body (or city) leads one to take an inquisitive, critical view of the rest of life.

Thus, when Ralph Waldo Emerson wasn’t going to the doctor in terror of a brain tumor every

time he got a migraine, he was writing brilliant essays and inventing Transcendentalism. Pamuk

evidently shares this view, claiming that “huzun [read hypochondria] nourishes Istanbul’s

inward-looking soul” (82).

I consider this perspective too optimistic—in my (extensive) experience, hypochondria

puts one inside a gerbil wheel of useless doubts and fears rather than inspiring productive action.

Pamuk himself seems caught on this gerbil wheel, so convinced of Istanbul’s single-minded

depression, self-hatred, and ennui that he fails to see the hope, pride, and ambition which even

my untrained eye detects. Pamuk claims that huzun compels Istanbullus “to create new defeats

and new ways to express their impoverishment,” but this doesn’t mesh at all with my experience.

“Poor but Proud Istanbul Neighborhood Faces Gentrification” reads the headline of a recent New

York Times article about the Kurdish neighborhood of Tarlabasi, where, despite its poverty, the

residents are fighting to renovate and protect their architectural heritage. I know what cynicism,

depression, and hopelessness look like—I saw them almost every day on the metro ride to school

in Bucharest. Walking by Tarlabasi, or by the hardware shops in Karakoy during the morning,

however, I get the opposite impression—people are too busy chatting, making business deals,

and organizing displays to luxuriate in melancholy.

Perhaps Pamuk simply finds the most popular cure for melancholy—consumer capitalism

—distasteful, and so wishfully imagines that the rest of his city shares his depression. He would

rather see the Beyoglu district as dirty, unkempt, and sadly “picturesque” (227) than accept that,

like Bucharest, it is turning into yet another clone of the standard-issue European shopping

district—a cheap imitation of Paris, with global brands like Apple, Gucci, and Giorgio Armani

on every corner.

Baudelaire, another of Pamuk’s decadent/Romanticist heroes, described himself in 1863

as a “ragpicker, in a life-or-death struggle with commodity capitalism, who collects urban

detritus and turns it into poetry.” If Pamuk can’t find any detritus, he makes his own, by painting

Istanbul and its people in the most degrading light possible. Everything is either dirty, poor, or

both, and even the soccer games always end, according to him, in “abject defeat” (89)—a claim

as cynical as it is easily disproved. He claims that people despise the beautiful architecture that

graces the city “like wrecks of a dissolving dream,”2 because the alternative—people loving their

architecture for its value as a tourist trap—disgusts him. He laments that the secular elite feel as

empty as the abandoned yalis now that they have jettisoned religion (240), and this “unbearable

soullessness and artificiality” drives him to seek out “the melancholy of the back streets” (210),

thus continuing the vicious cycle of melancholy. He forgets (accidentally or intentionally), that

the candle-lit, prayer-whispering, guilt-ridden world of his housekeeper Esme Hanim’s religion

isn’t essentially different from the neon-lit, deal-making, dog-eat-dog world of Karakoy’s

capitalsm.

Pamuk compares the author of the bizarre Istanbul Encyclopedia, Resat Ekrem Kocu, to

“the powerless historian in Nietzche’s ‘Uses and Abuses of History,’ who turns the history of the

city into the history of himself” (151). At the beginning of the memoir, Pamuk asserts his

2 Shelley, Percy. “Hellas”

difference from Kocu: “So, pay close attention, dear reader. Let me be straight with you, and in

return let me ask for your compassion” (my italics). His promise to be straight with us (in every

sense of the word) is repeatedly broken, so I find compassion difficult. His outdated obsession

with Burtonesque “melancholie,” his hypochondriac perspective, and his anti-emotional

museum-catalogue tone, turns him, like Kocu, into a “powerless historian,” trying to tell the

story of a city but ultimately telling only the story of himself.