I remember, I remember so as not to forget!’ Orhan Pamuk and the splenetic Périples of mediterranean writing

Abstract

In the post-war context addressed by Orhan Pamuk, the voice of an irrevocable and haunting historical loss elaborated by Tanpinar was to acquire a 'name,' as well as specific properties that Pamuk distilled from Tanpinar's own forlorn spaces. Huzun in Pamuk's purview embodies what Benita Parry, in her seminal work Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, has termed "the consciousness of historical continuity". Pamuk's fiction strives to replenish a certain crisis of memory as an ongoing struggle to ward off the danger of a bequeathal of consciousness being rendered illegible. In Pamuk's oeuvre, the struggle over the articulation of consciousness is mediated and re-mediated through the post-progressive moment: his writing operates in the fading political light of a secular, modern, progressivist, Kemalist republicanism. The existential nihilism that for Wendy Brown results from post-progressive time, and that Pamuk captures in his melancholic vignettes of post-imperial Istanbul, pervades much of the memorial writing produced in the basin.