A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual (Literary and Cultural Theory) 9783631674734, 9783653066845, 9783631693407, 9783631693414

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The book investigates relations between the ‘East’ and ‘West’ which have been forming and evolving from the Enlightenment until the present times. On the basis of material covering a selection of American, British and Turkish literature, as well as examples of Western Orientalist painting and musical (operatic) illustrations of analysed issues, the study aims to usher in a deeper and more nuanced understanding of post/colonial phenomena and their broader socio-cultural implications. The work attempts to accentuate the resonances and dissonances between various arts and disciplines, with the view to illuminating the organic nature of both inter- and intra-cultural relationships. The rationale behind such an orientation in research and methodology has not been to arrive at a final eclectic perspective, but rather, to promote a more comprehensive and diverse approach towards the ‘Other.’

Julia Szol´tysek completed her doctoral dissertation at the University of Wrocl´aw, Poland. She currently lectures at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Her academic interests include literary and artistic representations of the Middle East, travel discourses, racial/ethnic theories, and opera studies.

J. Szol´tysek · A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual

47

Literar y and Cultural Theor y

Julia Szol´tysek

A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual

ISBN 978-3-631-67473-4

LCT 47_267473_Szoltysek_AM_HCA5 PLE.indd 1

04.07.16 KW 27 09:10

The book investigates relations between the ‘East’ and ‘West’ which have been forming and evolving from the Enlightenment until the present times. On the basis of material covering a selection of American, British and Turkish literature, as well as examples of Western Orientalist painting and musical (operatic) illustrations of analysed issues, the study aims to usher in a deeper and more nuanced understanding of post/colonial phenomena and their broader socio-cultural implications. The work attempts to accentuate the resonances and dissonances between various arts and disciplines, with the view to illuminating the organic nature of both inter- and intra-cultural relationships. The rationale behind such an orientation in research and methodology has not been to arrive at a final eclectic perspective, but rather, to promote a more comprehensive and diverse approach towards the ‘Other.’

Julia Szol´tysek completed her doctoral dissertation at the University of Wrocl´aw, Poland. She currently lectures at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Her academic interests include literary and artistic representations of the Middle East, travel discourses, racial/ethnic theories, and opera studies.

LCT 47_267473_Szoltysek_AM_HCA5 PLE.indd 1

J. Szol´tysek · A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual

47

Literar y and Cultural Theor y

Julia Szol´tysek

A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual

04.07.16 KW 27 09:10

A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

VOLUME 47

Julia Szołtysek  

 

   

A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual        

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Szołtysek, Julia, 1985- author. Title: A mosaic of misunderstanding : Occident, Orient, and facets of mutual misconstrual / Julia Szołtysek. Description: Frankfurt am Main ; New York : Peter Lang Edition, [2016] | Series: Literary and cultural theory, ISSN 1434-0313 ; volume 47 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016025317| ISBN 9783631674734 (print) | ISBN 9783653066845 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: East and West. | Miscommunication–History. | Intercultural communication–History. | Postcolonialism–History. | Other (Philosophy)–History. | Intellectual life–History. | Civilization, Western. | Civilization, Oriental. Classification: LCC CB251 .S96 2016 | DDC 909/.09821–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025317 This publication was financially supported by the University of Silesia in Katowice.

ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-631-67473-4 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-06684-5 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-69340-7 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-69341-4 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-06684-5 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2016 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Table of Contents List of Images..............................................................................................................7 Acknowledgments....................................................................................................9 Bibliographical Note..............................................................................................13 Prelude........................................................................................................................15 Chapter One: Of Mutual Threats – 9/11 Re/Considered.........................25 Introduction.................................................................................................................25 History caught red-handed: towards the emergence of ‘literature of terror’..........41 Home, Hearth, and Horror: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man........................................48 The Ethnic Exception Clause: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist....................................................................................63 Zipping up the sleeping bag of oneself: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close..............................................................................................73 Memorializing – Museum (at) Work........................................................................90

Chapter Two: Of Orhan Pamuk’s Delightful Obsessions.........................97 Introduction.................................................................................................................97 Love’s Labour’s Lost? Triangles and Compulsions.................................................109 Catalogues and collections: passion for the commonplace..................................117

Chapter Three: Of Temptations Lady Mary Discovered, and Shared with Others.......................................................................................129 Introduction................................................................................................................129

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‘Tis just as ‘tis with you? Mediating cultural difference........................................134 Dialogue inter artes....................................................................................................151

Post-Scriptum: Of Promises and New Beginnings...................................187 Appendices...............................................................................................................193 Interviews with Erdem Erdoğan and Elijah Moshinsky on Die Entführung aus dem Serail��������������������������������������������������������������������������������193

Works Cited.............................................................................................................201 Index...........................................................................................................................209

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List of Images Fig. 1. Jean-Étienne Liotard, A Woman in Turkish Dress, ca. 1756; reprinted courtesy of the Royal Baths Museum in Warsaw (original catalogue number: ŁKR 861 2)....................................................................................16 Fig. 2. Richard Drew, 2001, Falling Man; Associated Press................................55 Fig. 3. Thomas E. Franklin, The Record, Staff Photographer, 2001; http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_IedElXbDqE/ TkqZhJs2irI/AAAAAAAACxs/4qp7uJsxceU/s1600/ September11FiremenRaiseAmericanFlag.jpg)���������������������������������������55 Fig. 4. The Westin Grand–Berlin; the author’s own archive..............................94 Fig. 5. The Westin Grand–Berlin; the author’s own archive..............................94 Fig. 6. The Westin Grand–Berlin; the author’s own archive..............................94 Fig. 7. The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul Logo; website: www.masumiyetmuzesi.org...................................................... 118 Fig. 8. The Museum of Innocence road sign; the author’s own archive........................................................................... 119 Fig. 9. “The Museum of Innocence: Single Admission Only”; the author’s own archive........................................................................... 120 Fig. 10. “The Museum of Innocence: Single Admission Only” – how it works; the author’s own archive................................... 120 Fig. 11. Anıtkabir, Ankara; the author’s own archive......................................... 126 Fig. 12. Çukurcuma Caddesi in Istanbul; the author’s own archive........................................................................... 127

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Acknowledgments The present project would not have materialized into its final state, had it not been for the support and assistance granted me by many institutions throughout the process of research and writing between the years 2009–2014. Along the way, I have consistently remained the taker in the exchange. I am grateful to the John F. Kennedy Institute for North-American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin for granting me a four-week research fellowship at the JFKI Library in Berlin in 2011, during which the foundations for the present project were laid. At roughly the same time, the University of Wrocław in Poland offered me two successive research grants which helped me with many international trips, sponsoring my participation in conferences and congresses in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In 2011, the Foundation for Polish Science allotted me a Conference Stipend thanks to which I could take part in the 14th EACLALS Triennial Conference held at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, a trip co-funded by an EACLALS/ABES Eastern European Scholarship, which I had the honour of receiving. I also had the good luck to be recognised by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education for my research and academic performance during the first three years of my doctoral studies at the University of Wrocław, in acknowledgment of which I was granted a generous stipend in 2012. The University of Wrocław has significantly supported me up to the final stages of work on the present project, sparing me the distracting task of seeking material support on a corporate basis, for which I remain continuously grateful. It is one thing to esteem the essential institutional help; it is quite another to acknowledge the personal kindness and goodwill of individuals that make the institutions as remarkable as they are. First and foremost, my gratitude goes to Prof. dr hab. Zbigniew Białas, Chair of the Department of Postcolonial Studies and Travel Writing at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia, Poland, an all-time mentor. To have such a research supervisor is a rare privilege and an honour that I only now begin fully to comprehend. Inspiring, supportive, and critical, Professor Białas is to be credited with encouraging me to look beyond, beneath, and into the surface of things, and rise to unbeatableseeming challenges, thus leading me to overcome my own weaknesses and to accomplish feats originally only timidly imagined. I consider myself lucky to have had the chance to learn and draw inspiration from this distinguished scholar and writer.

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I would also like to express my deep appreciation to Dr. Katarzyna Nowak– McNeice of the University of Wrocław, for having triggered the original ‘spark’ of my academic interests and pursuits, and for unfailingly helping me to keep it alive and bright through times good and better. I am in debt to Dr. Nowak–McNeice for having introduced me to the maze of intricacies of academic practice. A very special “thank you” goes to my big brother, Dr. hab. Mikołaj Szołtysek, P.D., who has been my role model for what the life of an academic should be like, and, as all big brothers should but not many actually rise to the challenge, has always lent me his protective shoulder. He is also to be credited with providing the specific direction my own interests – scholarly, musical, and cultural – have assumed. During two fruitful and stimulating research stays at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North-American Studies I relied on the assistance of Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein who was my kind patron on both occasions, in 2011 and 2012. My work at the JFKI Library would not have gone so smoothly or been so pleasant and comfortable had it not been for the support offered by Ms. Angelika Krieser, Deputy Librarian, who provided me with sound practical knowledge on the functioning of a library so extensive as the JFKI Library, and who took care of my creature comforts by allotting me a convenient study place with a view over the Institute’s peaceful backyard, and who helped me solve a number of pressing practical matters. While working on what has become Chapter II of the present study, I stumbled upon obstacles which I could not have overcome had it not been for Professor Sarah LeFanu’s kindness and disinterested help involving such time-consuming tasks as rummaging through attics in search of pieces of information that I could not go on without, copying them and posting to Poland. For the visually attractive shape of the project I am greatly indebted to the Royal Baths Museum – The Palace on the Isle in Warsaw, in particular to Ms. Izabela Zychowicz, Curator and Head of the Museum Centre, who shared with me her knowledge of the Royal Collection of Paintings exhibited in the Palace on the Isle and gave me a royal tour of the premises. Jean-Étienne Liotard’s painting A Woman in Turkish Dress appears here by the Royal Baths Museum’s kind permission. Chapter III has been greatly enriched by interviews with two important figures of the international operatic scene. I am grateful to Dr. Elijah Moshinsky, opera and theatre director with such productions to his name as the 2000 film Mozart in Turkey, the 2012 Otello for the Metropolitan Opera HD Live series, and a number of Shakespeare plays directed for the BBC televised series, who found the time to respond at length and in depth to my amateur questions pertaining to Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail. My thanks go also to Ms. Allana Sheard of Opera 10

Australia for acting as an intermediary between myself and Dr. Moshinsky. For the other interview I am indebted to Mr. Erdem Erdoğan, Turkey’s leading tenor recently engaged at the Izmir State Opera and Ballet House, who – between singing Belmonte in Izmir and Rodolfo in Mersin – provided me with extensive answers to my opera-enthusiast-questions, for which I humbly say, çok ama çok teşekkür ederim sevgili arkadaşım. Invaluable help in moving back and forth between English and Turkish has been granted me by a dear friend of mine, Dr. Reyhan Özer Taniyan, Assistant Professor at Nigde University, Turkey – but for her kind-heartedness and linguistic expertise much of the Turkish-language material would have been lost. Sana çok minnettarım, kalbim ve gönlüm her zaman senin yanında! Last but by no means least, appreciation is due to my dog, Koski, for keeping me reasonably fit throughout the entire process of research and writing, which – though intense – was for the most part a sedentary endeavor.

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Bibliographical Note This study is the outcome of intense research conducted between the years 2009 and 2014. Some parts were originally presented at several international conferences which provided apt occasions for the subsequent revising, deepening and development of the ideas that have finally found their way into the present project. Fragments of Chapter One were presented in various forms and under different titles at five conferences held between 2012 and 2014: in September 2012 at the 11th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) organized at the Boğaziçi University, in Istanbul, Turkey, and Grievings International Conference organized by the University of Silesia, Poland, in Ustroń; in November 2012 at the Reading Readers International Conference of the Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey; in October 2013 at the Third International BAKEA Symposium of Western Cultures and Literatures held at the Gaziantep University in Gaziantep, Turkey; and in May 2014 at the International Conference Representing, (De)Constructing and Translating Borderlands co-organized in Krasnogruda, Poland, by the University of Białystok, Poland, Warsaw University, and the Borderlands Foundation. The result of these various presentations was the essay “They call this ‘organic shrapnel’: Violent Closeness Between ‘Victims’ and ‘Perpetrators’ in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” published in the collection Culture and the Rites/Rights of Grief, edited by Zbigniew Białas et al. (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp. 108–123). Excerpts of Chapters II and III likewise received public exposure at stimulating venues. Elements of the present Chapter Two were presented at the LIT CRI ’13: Literary Criticism Conference, organized by the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey, in November 2013, while passages from Chapter Three were read at the 15th Triennial EACLALS Conference Uncommon Wealths: Riches and Realities, organized by the University of Innsbruck, in April 2014. In a consolidated form, these excerpts were published as “A spectacle which would make a hundred painters drop their brushes in astonishment: In the Harem with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Edmondo De Amicis, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Daniel Chodowiecki,” in Anglica Wratislaviensia vol. LIII, edited by Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak (Wrocław: University of Wrocław Press, 2015, pp. 89–102).

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Prelude A dignified woman reposes on a sofa. She appears calm but pensive, at once powerful and fragile, comfortable but aware of being watched. Her gaze, however, avoids the eye of the viewer; with her head slightly bowed to the left, it rests on what remains hidden from the frame of the picture. She reclines against a set of lush, dark blue cushions, with her left arm outstretched and her right, with a fan between the thumb and the index finger, resting on the thick material of her overcoat, the colour of which creates a pleasant contrast with the faded red of the chaise longue. The tip of her beige shoe sticks out from behind of her brown coat, touching the surface of a red and blue carpet and resonating with the corresponding light shade of the background. What most captures attention is the lady’s elaborate skirt, the only element in the picture which is not of a uniform fabric but uses sophisticated patterns and decorations. The alternating light-orange and white stripes run vertically all the way from the lady’s waist to about mid-calf, and horizontally across the sleeves. The waistline is further accentuated by a rich belt made up of two golden circles on a white, presumably leather, strap, while the décolletage remains largely bare, shaded only by a thin layer of creamy-white lace. As for adornments, the lady requires few, the whole outfit being already opulent and luxurious, topped by a white-fur collar shawl checked by black oblong button knobs, falling over her shoulders all the way down to the rim of the outer skirt. The only accessory, apart from the white fan in the lady’s right hand, is a yellow-and-blue headdress covering her silver hair and folding gracefully down her neck, with a jewel crowning her forehead. The overall sensation is that of luxury and comfort, peacefulness, and power held in check. The Oriental attire in which the lady is clothed, though by no means a costume, is not her native outfit, either – her blue eyes, light complexion, and regular countenance give her away. Presumably a Western aristocrat posing for a portrait, the woman manages to avoid over-stylization and exaggeration, creating a gentle and tasteful overall impression.

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Fig. 1. Jean-Étienne Liotard, A Woman in Turkish Dress, ca. 1756; reprinted courtesy of the Royal Baths Museum in Warsaw (original catalogue number: ŁKR 861 2)

The portrait was painted around 1756 by Jean-Étienne Liotard, a Swiss-French painter, and for over three hundred years the artist’s noble sitter was believed to be Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a British woman of letters and an avid traveller, wife of Edward Wortley. In the years 1716–1718 the two stayed in Constantinople where Wortley performed the function of British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Liotard himself has a prolonged sojourn to Turkey to his name – from 1738 to 1742 he, too, lived in Constantinople where he developed a strong taste for Turquerie, which included growing a characteristic ‘Ottoman’ beard. The circumstances in which the picture was painted are not known, nor are the grounds for the long-lived assumption that the portrait presented Lady Montagu in Turkish dress; what speaks in favour of the identification is the Turkish strand of Lady Mary’s biography and her preference, quite similar to Liotard’s, for Turkish fashions and customs. The time frames roughly match, too – at the time of making the picture Lady Mary would have been about 67 years old, only six years before her passing away in 1762 in London. Apart from these conditions, however, 16

there seemingly is no hard evidence to corroborate the assumption. It was Anne de Herdt who in 1992 had disproved the identification – Liotard worked on the painting between 1738 and 1742, while he was living in Constantinople, whereas Lady Mary had arrived in Turkey nearly twenty years earlier, in 1716, and stayed only until 1718. Given that Liotard as a rule used real people for his patient sitters, it appears safe to assume de Herdt was right in her assertion that Lady Mary could not have been Liotard’s model for the portrait, although the painter did in fact cooperate mainly with affluent, upper-class foreigners living in Constantinople, with a particular predilection for the English1. Since de Herdt’s claim, the painting has functioned under a modified title – Portrait of a Woman in Turkish Dress, instead of the time-honoured Lady Montagu in Turkish Dress. Old habits die hard, though, and despite the formal verification, the otherwise unidentified sitter continues to be thought of as Lady Montagu. This peculiar indeterminacy appears to haunt much of the heritage of West’s and East’s mutual contacts. Against the framework within which these have played themselves out at multiple intersections of history, geography, culture and politics, it is quite significant in that it reveals how far the East/West relationship has been based on wishful thinking – conjectures and representational fictions which all too often might have effectively shaded the truth. To return to Liotard’s woman in Turkish dress briefly – not only has the identity of the sitter recently been proven wrong; until late 2013 also the actual colours of the painting were concealed from viewers by a layer of accumulated dust which substantially changed their hue. Restored by the crew of the Royal Baths Museum in Warsaw, the painting gained a new life – or rather, should it be said that it re/gained its original splendour? This moment of hesitation points back to the opening question of indeterminacy – even such a strictly regulated task as the restoration of artistic works is always hypothetical and, to some extent, remains a matter of interpretation. Interpretation, in turn, has fuelled heated debates with regards to how to keep it just and ensure its righteousness – if that can be attainable at all. The problem has proven particularly acute in the case of organizing public institutions, as well as those which work counter to them, or as alternatives to them, at the periphery of official policy. National memorials and state-sponsored vs. independent museums have all found themselves at the forefront of the dispute (not to say battle), with dilemmas to respond to such as commemorating the seemingly uncommemorable (e.g. the controversies around the establishment of the

1 Cf. Danielewicz, Iwona, and Joanna Guze, eds., Le siècle français: francuskie malarstwo i rysunek XVIII wieku ze zbiorów polskich, Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe, 2009, 313.

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National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York), or, less emotionally charged but still problematic, shifting the centre of gravity in museum trends from the grand, the ancient, and the official to the ordinary, the mundane, and the petty – and, as is the case with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul-based Museum of Innocence – the fictitious, too. Conjecture, projection, interpretation and, indeed, wishful thinking have come to constitute the building blocks of efforts to achieve these feats – by means fair or foul, as it has turned out. Just how fair or foul exactly has, nevertheless, remained largely indeterminate and unsolved, potentially unsolvable. In order to comprehend these dilemmas today – and realize their impact on history, culture, and politics – one needs to go back to the Enlightenment era, the time when the first cabinets of curiosities had begun to draw in substantial numbers of viewers, and the emergent museum canons had confronted – or collided with – the ever-growing popularity and availability of travel which quickly came to mean the possibility to confirm or disprove the value of certain exhibits and, perhaps even more importantly, some pertinent beliefs and notions. At the same time, travel facilitated the perpetuation of overblown images-cum-fantasies, especially when the destinations were located at the periphery of what had then constituted the civilized world. The interpretative merry-go-round gained momentum, seizing on hitherto unheard-of prospects for exploration and penetration. Notably, the pioneer voyagers were drawn from among men of means exclusively; however, it soon became clear that there were realms in the newly investigated lands which men had very slim chances of entering. Gradually, the previously all-male domain of travel opened up to women, too, who did not hesitate to enter it. The new experience yielded written accounts recording the adventures of the voyagers; soon, rivalry developed between travellers who competed with one another for accuracy of representation, attractiveness of message, and as little indeterminacy as possible. Differences in approaches quickly ensued – the monsieurs apparently opted for attractiveness, at the cost of and to the detriment of accuracy, the mesdames seemed to favour truthfulness, even were it to compromise the thrill of the tale. A case in point might be Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who in her Turkish Embassy Letters waged an all-out war on the mythomania and pseudologia fantastica of her male fellow travellers-writers. Not only was literature affected, but the arts and music, too. Oriental themes, made fashionable by numerous authors in their travel accounts and memoirs, were quickly taken up by painters and composers, gradually building what today is referred to as ‘Orientalist’ interventions, especially in opera and painting. Whereas Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-Auguste 18

Dominique Ingres and John Frederick Lewis are already functioning as trade names, also less ‘mainstream’ artists such as Jean-Étienne Liotard and Daniel Chodowiecki merit attention for their specialized responses to exoticist topics, including portraits of haremites and odalisques, bath scenes and various depictions of not infrequently (at least semi-) imagined ‘Oriental’ lifestyles and rituals. In a similar vein, composers have resorted to ‘exotic’ settings and plots, as well as musical devices, in efforts to re/create the ‘strange’ climes and cultures, with their pre-assumed liberties and tyrannies, promises and threats, or recluses and dangers. Virtually all operatic giants can boast some notable exotic titles, Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail occupying a central place among them. Thus, the ‘conundrum’ of the East/West relationship persists. The complexities of the bond, however, at once trouble and attract, opening up fresh realms for critical and analytic enquiry several aspects of which, delineated above, form stimulating starting points for the present study. This work is composed of three chapters, following the logic sketched out in the preceding paragraphs, although it must be admitted it does not assume a standard, chronological and forwardoriented development. Chapter One – “Of Mutual Threats: 9/11 Re/considered” – approaches the East/West encounters from perhaps their most violent side, i.e. the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, and thus, in terms of themes and problematics, subscribes to the complex field of American Studies. By looking at a selection of literary texts which emerged from the aftermath of the event, the chapter aims to explore the trauma of 9/11 and its repercussions on a multitude of levels, i.e. from the perspective of wounded individuals, affected directly, as well as through the negotiation of media coverage and the socio-political vigilant mood that news anchors generated; wounded communities – composed of individuals suffering the shock and incongruity of what had happened, as well as those occupying the opposite side in the encounter, polarized along the lines of ‘victims’ vs. ‘perpetrators.’ In the process, novels by Don DeLillo (Falling Man), Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) and Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close) will be analysed in an attempt to answer, albeit tentatively, some of the persistent questions pertaining to how the attacks have changed the nature of the East/West bond, perhaps not so much severing it, as irrevocably transforming the imaginations, convictions, and attitudes of its participants. In an effort to wrap up the analysed threads, the conclusion to the chapter will look at national memorials, museums and commemorative monuments, in particular – the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, as peculiar requiems to the East/West relationship, posing questions of how to memorialize events such as 9/11, what – if any – ‘lesson’ to teach, and whether trauma may indeed be ‘healed’ 19

by interaction with such memory sites – and whether the healing applies to all of the involved sides or perhaps favours only the apparent victims. Chapter Two, “Of Orhan Pamuk’s Delightful Obsessions,” begins as a response to the issues raised in the final pages of the preceding section; thus, it initially retreats a step before developing into a depiction and analysis of further aspects of the East/West relationship, this time observed and approached from a more centrally Eastern perspective, which also indicates its deeper entrenchment in the field of Culture Studies. It broadens the discussion of museums commenced at the close of “Mutual Misconstrual: 9/11 Re/considered,” enhancing the analysis with insights into a ‘properly’ Eastern museum, at least in terms of its geographical location, i.e. Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul-based Museum of Innocence. The museum, however, has not emerged independently, but owes its foundations to yet another of Pamuk’s endeavours, his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence. Drawing on contemporary museum studies and the nascent trends in modern museology, the Chapter explores the curious case of Pamuk’s ‘double-bound’ museum/novel project, tracing the convergences between the literary genre and the low-profile museum of the quotidian which Pamuk himself describes as an alternative to the grand nationalist museums and the official discourses they embrace. The Chapter considers also the novel per se, seeing it as a painstaking study of an obsession which functions across the two interconnected personas of the protagonist – that of an estranged lover and that of a compulsive collector. Whereas the exploration of what contemporary psychiatry would probably best define as obsessive-compulsive disorder yields insights into the transformations in perceptions and receptions of the modern museum, further problematized by the inherent ‘East’ vs. ‘West’ context, analysis of the lover figure is further enhanced by the qualification based on his ethnic belonging, i.e. his being a Turk, a realization which allows for the inclusion of a set of additional issues worth looking into, in particular of the problem of a ‘split’ identity experienced by many modern Turks, manifest in the conflicted bond they have developed towards the broadly understood ‘West.’ This dilemma, albeit in a conscious and conditioned form, informs much of Pamuk’s oeuvre, surfacing in his deliberate choice of topics, as well as technical devices he employs in his works, creating an amalgam of Western post-modern literary devices and more (stereo)typically Eastern traditions of literature expressing melancholia, longing and a sense of loss. He, too, chooses to annihilate his female protagonist, which may be seen as a gesture pointing both to the Western poetics largely influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s Philosophy of Composition, and to the Eastern harem tradition of keeping women behind

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(frequently) golden bars – both practices have long meant the ultimate silencing of women and their disempowerment. Chapter Three – “Of Temptations Lady Mary Discovered, and Shared with Others” – again retreats in relation to its predecessor but the backward motion is employed in order to render comprehensible the issues lying at the core of the analytical spine of the present study, i.e. the projections and conjectures at work in the gradual construction of the West and East mutual self-image. In order to illuminate these, the Chapter relies predominantly on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, but the account of Lady Mary’s travels serves as a springboard for the exploration of works by other authors and artists, coming from a varied range of sources. Thus, Lady Mary’s Letters are compared to and contrasted with Edmondo De Amicis’s Constantinople; next, they are juxtaposed to and analysed against a selection of paintings including such notable works as Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Le bain turc and Le Grande Odalisque, as well as the lesser-known engraving art of Daniel Chodowiecki, which share the feature of having been in some way influenced by Lady Mary’s exploits. Finally, the dialogue inter artes is expanded to accommodate also musical voices concerning Mozart’s opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail, these being focused on patterns of convergence between literature, painting, and musical exoticism joined in the act of perpetuating (or, though not in an equal measure – disarming) the fantasyinformed discourses of East/West encounters. The analysis is complemented by two interviews, with Erdem Erdoğan and Elijah Moshinsky, respectively, which, in reference to Die Entführung aus dem Serail, consider issues as broad as music, history, Orientalism, representation, feminism, and gender and ethnic relations. The methodology that I employ throughout the study does not limit itself to just one particular field but rather derives from multiple disciplines, which is a conscious strategy employed to guarantee the aimed-for comprehensive view. It draws on postcolonial studies because post/colonial discourses remain the leading area in the humanities devoted to and immersed in questions of relations between the constructs of ‘West’ and ‘East,’ ‘Occident’ and ‘Orient,’ ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery,’ ‘History’ and ‘histories,’ at the intersections of which the literary, artistic, socio-political and, albeit to a lesser degree, philosophical interests explored herein have long played out. Postcolonial studies have also provided an arena for the development of travel discourses, as these have naturally mediated the above-delineated binaries, and likewise migration narratives – again, closely linked to travel and traversing pre-assigned borders and boundaries.

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Any discussion preoccupied in some way with power relations cannot hope for comprehensiveness without the inclusion of concerns dealt with by feminist studies, which remain, too, in close proximity to postcolonial discourses, each complementing the other. In the present study, feminist studies are adverted to mostly in analyses of Lady Mary’s epistolary accounts, seeing the tireless observer as a peculiar proto-feminist figure, holding some beliefs, though, which appear too outrageous to be embraced within the framework of today’s straightforwardly militant feminism. In this vein, later in the study feminism is applied in what may come across as a somewhat devious/perverted way – not so much to lay bare the faults inherent in the original sources as to, rather, defend them by revealing certain errors in the theories and practices that have emerged from what I see as an indiscriminate, not to say slavish, acceptance of some of the postulates of feminist studies, an acceptance which suggests disregard for broader cultural, historical, and socio-political concerns. In light of the above, the interdisciplinarity of the project results perhaps not so much from the author’s predilection for eclecticism as from the fact that the analysed constructs reveal a somewhat eclectic ‘backbone,’ i.e. the various complex entanglements of representations that have kept surfacing during the processes of formation of cultural and social conceptions, ideas, and prejudices. Naturally, the present study does not exist in an analytical vacuum, and takes foundation in an array of research traditions and trends, some already quite wellestablished and time-honoured, others yet ascending to significance. To the best of my knowledge, while there are enquiries into the particular elements which form the building blocks of the present volume, most of them have been predominantly monothematic, concerned with a narrow scope of issues, and thus generally offering a limited perspective. There are multiple studies on the literature of 9/11, both analytical monographs and essay collections (e.g. Karen Engle’s Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination; Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America; Judith Greenberg’s Trauma at Home: After 9/11; Ann Keniston’s and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn’s Literature after 9/11; Martin Randall’s 9/11 and the Literature of Terror; Barbie Zelizer’s and Stuart Allan’s Journalism After September 11; E. Ann Kaplan’s Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature; Richard Gray’s After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11), as well as on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu – usually separate volumes approaching Lady Mary from one dominant perspective, including classics such as Robert Halsband’s and George Paston’s editions of Lady Mary’s letters, with extensive biographical background, Dervla Murphy’s and Christopher Pick’s 1988 monograph Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley 22

Montagu, and the more recent publications by, among others, Isobel Grundy – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. Mozart and his operas have also been covered extensively (e.g. by Daniel Heartz in his comprehensive 1990 study Mozart’s Operas, by Lucjan Puchalski in his Oświecenie po austriacku: świat przedstawiony w operach Wolfganga Amadeusza Mozarta, and in Nicholas Till’s monograph Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas), with various aspects of his work accentuated by a range of scholars (feminist interest – e.g. Mary Ann Smart’s Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera and Kristi Brown-Montesano’s Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas; post/colonial perspectives – e.g. John Locke’s Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections), just as have been Liotard or, more broadly, European Orientalist painting (e.g. Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones’ and Mary Roberts’ Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture; Emmanuelle Gaillard’s and Marc Walter’s A Taste for the Exotic: Orientalist Interiors; Genevieve Lacambre’s Painting the Orient: The Orient in Western Art; John M. MacKenzie’s Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts; John Sweetman’s The Oriental Obsession: Islamic Inspiration in British and American Art and Architecture 1500–1920; Nicholas Tromans’ and Emily M. Weeks’ The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting). Orhan Pamuk, too, has gained much critical attention, which was undoubtedly significantly spurred by his being awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature – scholars such as Erdağ Göknar, Miriam Cooke, Grant Parker, Mehnaz M. Afridi and David M. Buyze have painstakingly filled in the blank with academic works on Pamuk in English. More generally, there are classic and less classic studies on ethnic problematics of today’s world, on postcolonialism, travel writing, on the Ottomans, on the culture of the Enlightenment, which it is not possible to list exhaustively. I do not provide here a classical state of research; rather, I refer to particular texts at particular points in my argument, as it is my belief that the sweep of the issues tackled, the choice of works, and the methodological decisions it has dictated would make it impossible to summarize comprehensively and/or would ultimately obscure thus attempted state of research in the first place. What my study seeks to do is to push ‘English Studies’ beyond its traditional and, to my sensibility, somewhat limiting realm. Thus ‘liberated,’ ‘postcolonial studies’ are also given the chance to expand into territories which show that unexpected links exist between phenomena seemingly far apart, a realization that, in turn, helps us to understand the contemporary polyvocality and complexity of culture, history, politics, and the arts. Although the present study has been largely envisioned – by its author – as an academic and intellectual adventure, the overall aim is not purely academic, 23

I believe, and the outcomes of the study could find application in today’s social situation. In depicting two contemporary metropolises – New York and Istanbul – the study concerns itself with the problematics of the modern global and multicultural city, matters close to virtually all cities with more or less pronounced metropolitan ambitions. Questions of how Istanbul and New York today deal with their symbolic status – representing the interests of both empires and colonies, as well as a variety of imperial pursuits – remain present throughout the volume, and may encourage similar discussions with regards to other, even at first glance less prominent, urban centres. Moreover, through its focus on encounters between the ‘East’ and the ‘West,’ the study attempts to shed light on the similarities and differences in stereotypically eastern and western attitudes towards the past and history, at the same time revealing at least some of the challenges that the future holds in stock for both of the involved sides, especially in the context of the uneasy heritage of mutual acrimony, prejudices and divisions. Again, such ‘baggage’ burdens virtually all nations and societies which today face the task of reckoning with the past and drawing conclusions for the future. In this vein, the present study might provide some, though of course very tentative, hints about solutions to the dilemmas confronted globally and locally, too. By intervening in what I see as critical spaces at the intersections of potentially explosive and by no means negligible issues, questions, conflicts, histories, desires, grievances, wishes, traditions, practices, and phenomena, A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual hopes to pry open nooks and niches in the superstructures of today’s increasingly heterogeneous and amorphous globally local, or locally global, lives.

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Chapter One: Of Mutual Threats – 9/11 Re/Considered Introduction Countries are constructs not easy to capture within the finite frameworks of description. Carrying with them the symbolic and, at the same time, performative, burden of nationality and culture, as well as cultural nationality and national culture, they do not permit a clear-cut definition which would enclose their otherthan-geographical boundaries, though these contemporarily also prove a fluid category. Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, struggling to capture and contextualize the ephemeral nature of the notion of a ‘country,’ determined several major factors which he found responsible for the shaping of a communal sense of belonging, characteristic of the emergence of nations.2 Country and nation, however, do not constitute the obverse and reverse of one terminological and symbolic coin – there are nations with no countries (or deprived of countries, or fighting for their countries), and the relation between the two hardly amounts to a one-to-one correspondence. For the idea of the nation to materialize in a formal shape, a narrative backbone is necessary, to which recourse may be had when the need for a reassertion of authenticity and legitimacy occurs. Such a ‘backbone’ is most readily provided by the tradition-sanctioned idiosyncratic mythology which develops simultaneously with and alongside the emergence of the germs of the awareness of national distinction. The texture of various national mythologies itself permits an insight into the cultural, psychological, political, religious, and geographical, among others, uniqueness of nations around the globe, facilitating their complex analyses. Thus, the British have their Lancelot and Arthur, the French the noble Roland, the Scandinavians Sigurd, or Sigurðr, featuring also in German lore as Siegfried, and the Poles their steadfast Wanda and Wars and Sawa. The Americans are no exception in this regard. In fact, it appears safe to assert that the American heritage of founding myths and legends performs a much more advanced and multi-layered function than the collective mythologies of other nations do. The very origins of America have been structured upon the ambiguous myth of a discovery made by Christopher Columbus, a figure subject to question, even with regard to such a basic matter as his actual existence. 2 Cf. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991.

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Columbus, though historians today refrain from making definite pronouncements about the presumably Genoa-born explorer, has been elevated to the status of a national hero, hailed as the physical ‘founder’ of the American nation, under the sanctified claim that had it not been for Columbus’s voyage of 1492, no European immigrants would have ever made it to the New World, settled there and laid the cornerstone of what was to become the United States. How could they have, after all, not having known of the existence of such a place? The conception of American national identity, predicated on the romantic claim of Americans as inhabiting a ‘new’ world indeed, thus one which was pure and pristine, innocent and virginal, has been further shaped by the unique conditions of making a living on the young and promising, but still waiting to be ‘properly’ conquered, American soil. The wild frontier offered just such prospects, evolving gradually into a powerful symbol of the unstoppable expansion of the Americans, who, driven by their exceptional self-sustainability, pragmatism and ingenuity, embodied in the virility, fearlessness and resourcefulness of cowboys, ranchers, and rangers traversing the seemingly boundless terrain, carving out inhabitable patches of land, founding settlements, and fending off Native American ‘trespassers,’ who, ironically, were no strangers to the colonizers’ claimed territory. In fact, the encounters with Indians who ‘happened’ to occupy the land since long before the arrival of the first European-origin settlers, soon came to provide yet another building block of the collective American mythology in the form of widely popular captivity narratives, in which the Indians figured as the ‘original’ Others, constituting a threat to the Christian settlers, to whom it befell to ‘civilize’ the savage and brutal tribes of Native Americans. Thus came into being the abiding American security myth which, in a relatively unchanged shape, still holds up today. The fundamentals of the myth consist in a determined rejection of even the suggestion of vulnerability and a swift embrace of militant retaliation against anyone who would dare to threaten the security of the nation, or rather – the nation’s grandiose and precious illusion of invincibility. The contented American self-image has also led to the emergence of yet another characteristic of America which, in the course of the country’s impressive expansion, has recently become one of the gravest accusations launched at Americans – as a self-professed Land of Opportunity, Freedom and Equality, qualities further ingrained in the fabric of the American sense of identity owing to the perpetuation of the American Dream, America feels under an obligation to ‘promote’ democracy, by means fair or foul, which in practice comes down to military interventionism perpetrated in the name of propagating liberty and bringing justice to people oppressed by their own depraved and corrupted 26

governments. Closely related to the American conception of and attitude towards the broadly understood ‘others,’ beginning with the ‘civilizing’ efforts committed against the Native Americans, the liberating mission, from its earliest stages, has had suspiciously much to do with expanding and promoting America’s own political, financial, geographical, and governmental interests. Quoting multiple examples of America’s backtracking on its ideals, Anne Anlin Cheng observes that American history is a tale predicated on a record of professing and promising various things and conspicuously – and repeatedly – failing to deliver, a practice which goes as far back as the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence3. Cheng’s views are echoed also in Mahasweta Devi’s diagnosis of contemporary American relations with the ‘Third World’4. Manning Marable, responding to George W. Bush’s notorious question “Why do they hate us?” posed in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, adds a more directly political edge to this discussion, noting that: The question “Why Do They Hate Us?” can only be answered from the vantage point of the Third World’s wide-spread poverty, hunger and economic exploitation… . For three decades, the United States refused to ratify the 1965 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Racism. Is it any wonder that much of the Third World questions our motives?5

The repository of national myths and shared illusions has been vital to the maintaining of a stable, contented American self, enclosed in its cocoon of selfaggrandizement made up of repressed and concealed global guilt. To penetrate through such a barrage would indeed mean performing quite a feat. That nineteen men, coming from a ‘backward place,’ on the morning of 11 September, 2001, succeeded in doing so, has indeed deserved all the paralysed attention it has received. For many, the date 11 September, 2001, truncated to the numerical 9/11, marked a moment when something went incredibly wrong with the world. A prevailing sense of incredulity, incomprehension, and petrifaction determined the standard mode of response for months following the attacks. The cherished myths and illusions 3 Cheng, Anne Anlin, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001, 3–29, in particular 10–13. 4 Cf. Devi, Mahasweta, Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi, translated and introduced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, London: Routledge, 1995, ix–xii, in particular xi. 5 Marable, Manning, “9/11: Racism in a Time of Terror,” in: Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order, Aronowitz, Stanley, and Heather Gautney, eds., New York: Basic Books, 2003, 3–15, here 13.

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of invulnerability, impregnability, and watertight security were shattered, leaving Americans dumbfounded and at a loss about how to go on. If any knowledge came from the experience, it was the brutal realization of the lack of understanding (and its immense scope) between America and the ‘rest’ of the world. Questions of ‘why’ they did it persistently recurred, yielding however no practical solutions and appeasing answers. Americans descended into an era of violent mourning, striving to come to terms with the conditions of life in a world ‘after.’ Assuming the immediately unquestionable position of the victim, America indiscriminately proceeded to exercise the privileges and benefits resultant from the status quo, making no distinction between such vital notions as guilt and (or, vis-a-vis) responsibility – in fact, there was no doubt whatsoever about the guilt of the Al Qaeda group, but to acknowledge that, as Marable daringly claims, “the US government is largely responsible for creating the conditions for reactionary Islamic fundamentalism to flourish”6 would verge on high treason7. Thus, America slowly but surely receded further into the consolation offered by the status of the victim, shaped so as to account for and legitimize the course of action the country embarked on. The discourse of crime and punishment, wrong-doing and getting one’s comeuppance, though in the long run reductionist and overtly simplistic, still deserves at least a cursory look when attempting to dismantle the broader context within which the US-Middle East relations have continued to be played out. Douglas Little, in his insightful study of American ‘Orientalism,’ observes that “the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 constituted … a brutal reminder of how very different the Middle East is from the Middle West”8. Having recourse to Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, Little finds that American attitudes towards the rest of the world “have changed little since the 19th century”9, and goes on to quote at length Twain’s interpretation of the U.S. relationship with the Middle East “as the by-product of two conflicting ingredients: an irresistible impulse to remake the world in America’s image and a profound ambivalence about the peoples to be remade”10. Although perhaps Little might be seen as slightly exaggerating in ascribing to Twain the role of America’s national prophet, his observation that 6 Marable, 4. 7 The question of the binding patriotism which developed in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks will be further elaborated on in the ensuing parts of this chapter. 8 Little, Douglas, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008, 3. 9 Little, 2. 10 Little, 3.

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9/11 was a tipping point in the history of America’s relations with the Middle East11 rings ominously true, especially once account has been taken of the troubled cultural encounter between the two. Naturally, the orientalist and orientalising media stereotypes of broadly understood ‘Arabs’ have been given much scholarly attention. Douglas Little complements the discussion on the introduction of ‘Orientalism’ into American popular culture and imagination by exhibiting the part that the National Geographic magazine played in the process. The National Geographic, by the early 1930s one of primary sources of knowledge about ‘other’ parts of the world for middleclass Americans, early began to spread stereotypical and often unreliable images of the Middle East, grounded firmly in orientalist fantasies which depicted the ‘Third World’ as a realm defined by categories of temptation and threat, attraction and repulsion – as a kind of museumized curiosity begging to be interacted with. As Little notes: “the Arabs, Africans, and Asians who grace the pages of the National Geographic are backward, exotic, and occasionally dangerous folk who have needed and will continue to need US help and guidance if they are successfully to undergo political and cultural modernization”12. The condescending mode of perception of the ‘others’ has persisted, becoming deeply entrenched in the American popular imagination, giving way to yet more ‘exotic’ fantasies, materializing also in a batch of Hollywood films, a barrage of best-selling books on oriental themes, and finally, in the contemporary onslaught of the tourist industry promising a genuinely exotic experience, during a holiday of seven nights in a Western-run chain hotel. And yet, the ‘love-hate’ relationship between America and its ‘others’ prevailed, assuming the form of a mutual, though troubled, exchange. The ‘East’ provided the setting necessary for the staging of American fantasies of ‘Orientalism’ and exoticity; America, in turn, offered the prospect of a materially and politically secure existence, even though in confrontation with reality these promises frequently proved empty and meaningless. The ideals, however, were lofty indeed – in the global arena America had early earned itself a reputation for an asylum-granting, welcoming and friendly land where all could live in peace and harmony, provided that everyone paid their dues and respected their neighbour. No wonder, then, that ever since the early 19th century the flow of immigration has been continuing in numbers consistently high, despite the repeated efforts of the state to curtail the quotas for various nationalities at particular times. Those who came did so

11 Little, 314. 12 Little, 10.

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fleeing oppressive regimes, running away from poverty or persecution, escaping to a ‘better’ place, where they sought equality and the elusive concept of liberty. These motives brought them into ideological proximity with the hailed, nearly legendary, figures of the American Pilgrim Fathers who, pursuing religious freedom, left England and founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620.  The fact that the origins of the United States go back to the history of being British colonies creates an uneasy bond between America and other former colonial subjects of Great Britain. In the case of America, however, the record of America’s colonial past has been recently largely overlooked; when it is called upon this is done to accentuate and praise American righteous resistance to colonizers who stifled their development and suppressed their freedoms. The pattern of autonomization assumed then by the proud Founding Fathers by and large set the model for other colonies to follow when attempting to gain – or regain – their independence from colonial rule, with the most significant difference, however, being the advantage of the literal ‘new world’ which the Pilgrims had had at their disposal. Decolonization in the post-second world war period did not offer such concessions for the then-emancipating subjects. Worse still, the independence gained did not necessarily equal freedom13. The post-colonial era has deviated into a badly disguised neo-imperialism, by some claimed to be far more detrimental and sinister than its predecessor in that the rules of the game have now become informed by cunning, espionage and forms of indirect oppression coated in the sugary cover of international norms and regulations on maintaining world peace and propagating democratic rule across the globe. Behind the smoke screen of world politics predicated on the rule of non-violence and respect for the independence of previously colonized and/or otherwise colonialism-afflicted countries, America has emerged as the contemporary superpower with designs to spread and consolidate its global influence. Still, however, America remains one of the world’s top multicultural countries, even though multiculturalism has not been recognized as an official federal policy. Rather, it has to do with the concept of the American myth and the clichéd, but still held in popular and mainstream discourses, metaphors of the ‘melting pot,’ ‘salad bowl,’ or ‘pizza plate’ (curiously, all these have to do with food – after all, cuisine has remained one of the constituents of immigrant identity). Each of these metaphors emphasizes different aspects of multiculturalism but the core 13 See for example David Basckin’s elaboration on the difference between ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ in his short story “Bing Crosby and the Encyclopaedias,” in Leveson, Marcia, Firetalk: Selected Short Stories from the Entries to the 1989 Sanlam Literary Award, Cape Town: The Carrefour Press, 1990, 75–82.

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reasoning remains largely uniform. Recently, the very idea of multiculturalism has been subject to questioning, not to say suspicion, with some voices calling for a modified version, transculturalism, others advocating a definite parting with the concept and its practice, a provenience popularized, at least partially, in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks; nonetheless, multiculturalism persists, in various forms and under many guises, as the everyday reality of vast numbers of American population. The nucleus of problems arising from the practices of multiculturalism has always been located at the forefront of discussions of race and its significance within societies. In America, the controversy over the nation’s colour line has tended to shift its focus, gradually moving (perhaps temporarily) away from debates around African–American identity and racial determination, through the struggles of Chinese- and Japanese-Americans and their eventual elevation to the status of ‘model minorities,’ to the question of the Arab-American, or, more broadly, Muslim-American positioning within the social fabric of the contemporary American society. Some of the more radical and less politically correct critics and observers have raised the issue of the ‘Arab’/‘Muslim’ races being more epistemologically difficult to define and place than those unequivocally ‘black’: ascribed and described with the colour ‘brown,’ they are regarded as hybrid in the classic and perhaps most complex sense of the word, which means that they can be read as neither black nor white, complicating further the issue of racial and social identification and determination. The question of racial ambiguity is further complicated by problems regarding assimilation and ‘fitting into’ the host society, which are particularly pronounced in the case of immigrants of Arab descent. Recent statistics reveal that about four to six million Muslims now live in America, some of them having been there for two or three generations.14 These numbers do not make them the largest ethnic/religious minority in the United States, but surely Muslim Americans are now finding themselves under constant scrutiny. Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the ever-present ethnic and religion-related social tensions have evolved, or rather, deviated, into a boiling point of direct conflict, especially given that following the event, compassion and commiseration have been automatically and seemingly irreversibly assigned to the immediately identifiable victims, resulting in the stigmatization of a few million people, American citizens at that, as fanatical killers ready to go to greatest lengths in pursuit of

14 Cf. Smith, Jane, Islam in America, New York: Columbia UP, 2010.

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their sinister goal. In her study of the history of Islam and Muslims in America, Jane Smith notes that it is difficult to characterize the consequences of the violent acts of a tiny number of Muslim extremists on that September morning. But none have been affected more directly than the Muslim men and women who live in America and who have had to answer again and again for the decisions of terrorists that they don’t even recognize as coreligionists.15

From the perspective of Muslim Americans negotiating the daily realities of life in a world ‘after,’ the most direct result of the attacks has been the emergence of an aberrant situation in which, as aptly observed by Smith, “Muslims on a daily basis have to deal with what actually had happened to them since the … invasions”16. What actually had happened was that America plunged, into a relentless war on terror which, apart from the obvious political and military repercussions, brought about the advancement and consolidation of the dichotomy of Islam and the West, previously spurned and overlooked, at least in the official state’s policies. The vigilance inherent in the binary itself, carrying the burden of colonial and colonialist heritage, meant a significant step backwards in building a multicultural community, leading to a resurfacing of problems of identification and self-determination among American Muslims. Seeing the backwash of the status quo, Jane Smith summarizes the contemporary condition of American ethnic/ religious relations by posing two questions: Will the majority of Muslims identify themselves as Americans who happen to be Muslim or as Muslims who happen to live in America? What differences will such identification make in their public and private lives?17

The search for solutions to these challenges is likely to shape the near and more distant future of America’s racial and cultural debates. In defining the consequences of the attacks, Jane Smith proposes that the tragedy has also had a positive outcome. Before September 11, 2001, Smith’s somewhat controversial argument goes, “few Americans had much awareness of the presence of Muslims in America”18, and the events of 9/11 propelled Muslims out of their marginalized existence into the very centre of attention. Smith continues:

15 Smith, Islam in America, 177. 16 Smith, Islam in America, 177. 17 Smith, Islam in America, 180. 18 Smith, Islam in America, 188.

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Despite the resulting discomfort, and the constant need to have to respond to questions of whether Islam is a religion of violence and why Muslims hate Americans […] there came also the opportunity to seriously engage with the issue of Islam as a truly American religion. As Muslims have had to defend their faith, and as they have moved from invisibility to visibility, many have responded with more overt forms of public acknowledgment of Islam.19

The humanizing nature of this remark cannot be denied; in her attempt to de-demonize Muslims Smith is however entering a shaky ground, a step which might prove counterproductive to her intended aim. In times of crisis, it seems to be a natural tendency among individuals belonging to a group rejected as being on the ‘wrong’ side to stand up for themselves, and this can easily be observed at various points in history when conflicts and tragedies ruptured the coexistence of nations and countries. Yet a more crucial issue is the sense of concealment of the dimensions of the havoc wreaked by the attacks implied in Smith’s observation that “with the attacks, Muslims were forced out of anonymity … and into the spotlight”20. There can be no denying that the attempts of the authorities, backed up by popular media, to shroud the events of 9/11 in an air of sanctity and sanctimonious-sacrificial heroism have not helped to ease the trauma and should be rejected as a blurring of the truth; however, the roles played by each side in the tragedy cannot simply be reversed to achieve the intended and necessary de-sacralization of the mode of representation of what has become a founding event of the 21st century. The clear-cut categories of the victim and the perpetrator cannot be indiscriminately applied in this case. The nature of the conflict has made it impossible to read the motives and deeds of those involved in the events along the lines of either offensive or defensive; the stakes have been growing too persistently and too complexedly for any such determinate qualifications to be made. The ‘legacy’ of American Orientalism has paved the way for the emergence of an opposing phenomenon, operating largely on the basis of tools and methodology developed and perfected by Orientalism the American way – Oriental Occidentalism, constricting the modes of interaction between America and the Middle East to a predefined set of behaviours, among them political propaganda and activism, subterfuge, rebellion, material and physical exploitation (particularly acute in popular holiday destinations where economic hierarchy and power relations are most pronounced and accentuated), and finally, aggression, violence, or abuse.

19 Smith, Islam in America, 188. 20 Smith, Islam in America, 188.

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Also trifling with culture, a matter of life and death to many, might yield unfathomable outcomes – just as it happened with 9/11, although critics such as Slavoj Žižek21 or Jean Baudrillard22 made repeated claims that the world, especially the Western world, had been well prepared to go through such an experience owing to the persistent conditioning and ‘training’ in the unimaginable offered and sponsored by Hollywood filmmakers and producers. Both Baudrillard and Žižek came in for heavy criticism and accusations of “tastelessness in the media”23, and their responses to the attacks were excluded from the state-sponsored, official mode of addressing the disaster. However, if their voices in the discussion might be perceived as controversial, this can only be so owing to the somewhat brazen laying bare of concealed truths related to America’s own inestimable part in the tragedy and in the pre-attack global context. Baudrillard, discerning “an uncanny collusion between the terrorists and the audience, played out at the level of the symbolic”24, observes that “without this deep-seated complicity … the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists doubtless know they can count on this unavowable complicity”25, found in “the unforgettable incandescence of the images” which prompted the audience to acknowledge “that (unwittingly) terroristic imagination which dwells in all of us”26. Baudrillard does not have any qualms about stating that such a cataclysmic event has been longed for in order to satiate the “collective desire of murderous intent eager to see such a dominant power … destroyed”27, thus making a gesture to Žižek who argues that the attack had indeed been anticipated in outrageous disaster fantasies, captivating the collective Western imagination. In a final turn, both theorists agree also on the most controversial issue – that the attacks have provided a spectacular outlet for the repressed knowledge that had hitherto emerged only in film productions. The view is further extended to embrace also the memory-structuring potential and sinister artistry inherent in 9/11 by Damien Hirst who asserts that “the thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for

21 Cf. Žižek, Slavoj, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso, 2002. 22 Cf. Baudrillard, Jean, The Spirit of Terorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, translated by Chris Turner, London: Verso, 2002. 23 Randall, Martin, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011, 13. 24 Randall, 13. 25 Baudrillard, Jean, The Spirit of Terrorism, London: Verso, 2002, quoted in Randall, 13. 26 Baudrillard quoted in Randall, 13. 27 Baudrillard quoted in Randall, 13.

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this kind of impact. It was devised visually”28. And, in all its visual horror, it was staged craftily. Despite mainstream chastisement of Žižek and Baudrillard, other, more moderate, dissenting voices soon followed, too. Among perhaps the most prominent ones was a somewhat populist remark made by E. Ann Kaplan in Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature29 who shifts the focus to the viewpoint of “those of us living close by” and thus subscribes, to a degree, and perhaps with a view to sustaining the central argument of her study, to the intellectually resented ‘sacralising’ mode: The thesis does not exhaust or actually get close to the specificity of the event for those of us living close by. It is possible that the Towers represented to the terrorists postmodernity, technology, the city, architectural brilliance, urban landscape, the future high-tech globalized world. But for those nearby, they functioned phenomenologically as part of people’s spatial universe.30

Indeed, the Towers have vouchsafed a multiplicity of symbolic meanings, depending on who was reading them and from what vantage point. Perhaps the most consistent and widespread of these is the de-materialization of the Towers and their transposition to a nearly metaphysical order, in that the two impressive buildings shed their physicality and were given instead a new dimension – following their collapse, the World Trade Center began functioning in metonymical ways, extending to encompass the event that had been their destruction, and, most of all, America, Americans and the nearly obscene visibility of the wound they had sustained. The absence of the Towers, and the tangible materiality of the shadow of no Towers31, have come to constitute the ultimate source of national traumatisation and a shocking reminder of the frailty of the cherished dream of invulnerability whose place in national mythology was threatened by the paralysing confrontation with the abysmal void. The trope of the void has proven defining in imagining and theorizing 9/11, along with concepts of rupture, humiliation, and emasculation. Kaplan elaborates on the notion of void, showing the variety of interpretations that may be ascribed to it, from “Lacan’s petit objet ‘a,’ castration, the infant’s loss of the mother” 28 “9/11 wicked but a work of art, says Damien Hirst,” The Guardian 11 September 2002, retrieved online September 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/11/arts. september11. 29 Kaplan, E. Ann, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005, 13. 30 Kaplan, 13. 31 Cf. Spiegelman, Art, In the Shadow of No Towers, New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.

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to “a loss standing in for death, abandonment, abjection”32. The “gaping hole” according to Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn has come to stand in for the “unrepresentable absence”33, marking the reality of the world after, and thus a passage to the melancholic order. The physical lack of the Towers and the sense of spiritual deprivation it brought conditioned the onset of a powerful melancholia which descended over the nation, regulating modes of behaviour and response to the tragedy, shaping the official state policy, and even determining social trends, from family forming patterns to preferences in cosmetics and outfits. That the American reaction to the attacks was predominantly melancholic was evident already in the immediate hours after the planes had crashed – live broadcasts of the tragedy gradually gave way to recursively replayed recordings of the fatal moments, exhibiting the Freudian compulsion to repeat and thus, re-live, the traumatic event, precluding prospects of recovery and healing. In this way America, as a collective melancholic subjectivity, immersed itself in the inability to mourn the lost object and get over its grief. The open wound in the heart of New York persisted as a constant reminder of the unimaginable loss and all that it used to be before the tragedy. The loss was, most directly, of thousands of individual lives, the site becoming “the great yawning crematorium [festering] like a sore without bandages or healing salve”34, a crime scene and burial ground at the same time, as the remains of the victims were virtually impossible to recover. Significantly, this circumstance produced the morbid peculiarity of the Towers – they were the mass grave of 2,977 victims, whose death occurred invisibly, beyond the ostensible display of ‘familiar’ imagery. Thus, death could only – and relentlessly – be guessed at, with no prospects of arriving at an assuaging certainty. The uncanniness ascribed to such a death needed to be domesticated in order to facilitate anti-crisis activity; the official discourse of sacrality and sacrificial heroism seemed to answer that well and was quickly implemented, leading to a further accentuation of the trope of death as a taboo and, perhaps even more alarmingly, giving rise to censorious definitions of propriety to which all were arbitrarily bound to subscribe. Apart from the scale of human loss, other damage was sustained, too. The Towers, erected between 1966 and 1973, had come to symbolize the potency of capitalism, of the world’s most buoyant economy in its prime. Impressive, skyshearing, they were perhaps exorbitant, but at the same time symptomatic of the 32 Kaplan, 10. 33 Keniston, Ann, and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, eds., Literature after 9/11, New York: Routledge, 2008, 2. 34 Kaplan, 136.

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country’s pride and optimism in its hard-earned power. They stood for arrogance, too, which was evident in the smug double-accent of the buildings. Yet most sublimely, they epitomized Western culture and civilization, their invincibility and indivisible rule in the world, linked, too, to sexual imagery and symbolism. Read from this perspective, their destruction resembles the mythical fall from grace; moreover, the capitalist system, in collusion with Western culture in general, contained the seeds of its undoing in its very foundations – the impulse to destroy the Towers lay dormant for the years following their erection, like the germs of an autoimmune disease, erupting momentarily in 1993 but saving all its vicious force for the morning of September 11, 2001.  If a sexualized reading of the Towers is given credence, their phallic symbolism extending to signify aggressive male power and dominance, enhanced in attractiveness by their proximity to wealth and capital, then in fact the attacks themselves acquire yet another dimension, aptly illuminated by Ellen Willis: What might it mean for men to commit mass murder by smashing symbols of desire – desire that in terms of their religious convictions means impurity, decadence, evil – and at the same time destroy themselves? Can it be that those symbols and the set of realities they represented were at the deepest level a source of intolerable attraction and temptation to these men, one that could be defended against only by means of total obliteration? Was the rage that such an act must entail directed solely against an external enemy, or was it also against the actors’ own unfreedom?35

Judged from this angle, sexual politics comes into play, directing attention towards questions of humiliation and recovery of honour, which could be arrived at through a violent and definite assertion of virility. Whereas the hijackers, with their terror act, seemed to achieve this ultimate goal, American males found their manhood challenged and threatened. No ‘Superman’ descended from the sky on September 11, 2001 to save the victims or, better still, forestall the tragedy entirely. As Susan Faludi notes in her impressive work The Terror Dream, “nothing like this had ever happened before, so we didn’t know how to assimilate the experience”36, stressing the general failure of the entire nation to accommodate the shock of the attacks’ unimaginable character. Initial paralysis also characterized the operations of the Bush administration which, in the midst of an overwhelming crisis, struggled to come up with an explanation and effective guidelines for taking action. In the attempts to find some viable reference point

35 Willis, Ellen, “The Mass Psychology of Terrorism,” in Implicating Empire, 95. 36 Faludi, Susan, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007, 3.

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for the events of 9/11, various tacks were tried, but only the comparison to the Cold War truly caught on. In consequence, “the post-9/11 age [was declared] an era of neofifties nuclear family ‘togetherness, redomesticated femininity, and reconstituted Cold Warrior manhood”37. Indeed, since many opinion-makers, writers, journalists and politicians emphasized the marital symbolism of the Twin Towers – strengthened by popular readings of the collapse of the North Tower shortly after the fall of the South Tower as spousal dedication and inability to go on alone without the loved one – the pressure on re-evaluating one’s priorities was frantic; not going along with the trend was considered at best irresponsible, at worst a breach of national loyalties. As gradually more became known about the hijacked planes which obliterated the World Trade Center, another stimulus for “nesting” was provided – heart-rending accounts of passengers who, sensing the inevitable, had shared their mobile phones and made last calls home, flooded the media and arrested the collective imagination of Americans who were confronted head-on with the cold extremity of the question, “Who you gonna call?”. Rising to the challenge of appeasing the descending mass social hysteria, the authorities, the media, even Hollywood and many celebrities joined forces and worked together towards what Susan Faludi describes as “restoring the illusion of a mythic America where women needed men’s protection and men succeeded in providing it”38. Faludi offers apt illustrations of celebrity couples spectacularly getting back together, apparently setting good examples for ordinary people: September 11 made Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman realize ‘what’s really important’ and has convinced the pair to put an end to their bitter divorce bickering (though not an end to their divorce) … Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid were considering getting back together (but didn’t) … Lisa Marie Presley and Nicolas Cage ‘were brought so close together as they shared the horror … that they never want to be apart again’ (but were divorced within a year)… . Even on TV series like Sex and the City there is a moment in one episode … when Samantha … proclaims, ‘I think I have monogamy,’ looking at married Charlotte, engaged Carrie, and pregnant Miranda. ‘I must have got it from you people.’39

The emergence of this ‘new traditionalism,’ at least in the mainstream culture and discourse, meant a return to a supposedly simpler, healthier and safer way of life, the charmed life of suburbia, with clearly marked gender divisions and traditionsanctioned gender roles. Within this discourse, women were invariably assigned

37 Faludi, 4. 38 Faludi, 118. 39 Faludi, 155–156.

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the roles of vulnerable maidens, relying for their subsistence and security on brave and noble men, the fearless and vengeful modern knights. Women were turned into nearly saintly figures, embodying the ideal of chastity, and guarding them was worth even the highest sacrifice. The professed changes in social mentality disseminated in popular discourses also influenced the trade sector, especially the bridal market, in that the fashion trends in bridal gowns assumed “a new ‘old’ form: more romantic, princess-like elements, such as ballgown skirts, cap sleeves, form-fitting, embellished bodices and long veils”, and the wedding boom led to “patriotic pregnancies”40 and a baby boom. ‘New traditionalism’ embraced also the fashion and cosmetic industries, with the new styles for women being distinctively non-aggressive … They’re not about dominance, power … but instead gentle and private … As a result of the atrocities of September 11, clothes should be white – it’s a very angelic, soothing, ethereal type of colour that makes us feel like we’re on some kind of road to recovery… . Make-up arbiters declared red lipstick to be back … – it’s feminine and full of life … evidence that a certain return to essentials is going on.41

Fashion designers wholeheartedly subscribed to the social atmosphere in post9/11 America – Carolina Herrera proclaimed a return to “romance, femininity and sophisticated chic … with a lot of ruffles, flounces, lace, eyelet, and tulle”42; Oscar de la Renta issued white lace gowns, and Ralph Lauren produced an entirely white collection. Since white, apart from being considered an ‘angelic’ colour, signifying innocence and sophistication at the same time, is also very vulnerable, it was clear that “post-9/11 woman was dressed for domestication”43, and thus became confined – albeit voluntarily, as the official policy went – to the hearth, whereas her companion, in order to rise to the task of providing for her and protecting her, “had to be adorned in protector gear. Soon after the attacks, men’s fashion began tending toward hard-hat and military chic”44. The role of the ring-leader fell to president George W. Bush. Bush’s conduct and skilful adaptations of his image elevated him to the status of the noble father of the nation – fierce, virile, determined, dedicated to the national cause, full of charisma and compelling appeal. The discourse which emerged around him grounded him in the legacy of American superheroes; in fact, journalists noted how they waited for Bush to “tear open his shirt and reveal the big ‘S’ on his

40 41 42 43 44

Faludi, 124, 127. Faludi, 136–137. Faludi, 137. Faludi, 137. Faludi, 137.

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chest”45, and Bush’s very rhetoric was likened to the “Whams, Pows, Piffs, and Whaps of Batman, Bulletman, and the Shadow”46. George W. Bush seemed to loom larger than life, figuratively endowed with supernatural features, signalling the relief of a promise nearly fulfilled, order nearly restored, and consolation generously dispensed. The entourage of image specialists did a masterful job with Bush’s public persona, helping to exploit the myth of the “President of the Wild Frontier”47, craftily manoeuvring Bush’s public appearances and speeches, and even his acts and gestures, so as to create a picture of the perfect homme d’État. Perhaps the most memorable of these images is the famous photograph of “The Hug”48 in which president Bush is protectively embracing a teenage girl who lost her mother in the WTC, asking her how she is holding up. The popularity of the photo may have helped Bush to win re-election, and was deemed “the most effective ad of the political season”49. Susan Faludi cites some of the comments which appeared following the event: The photo was said to reveal Bush as a man of ‘strength’ with ‘the courage to do what needs to be done to protect our country.’ The protective encirclement of her head by President Bush’s arms and hand is the essence of fatherly compassion.50

Faludi concludes on a strong note, pointing to the seamless convergence between American realities post-9/11 and the compensating myths held during in the times: “If Bush was Ashley’s frontier hero, she was his American Cinderella”51. In the aftermath of 9/11, myth and reality became nearly indistinguishable, one feeding off the other and helping paint a picture not so much of American society post-9/11, as of the imagined and somewhat retouched version of America suffering in the midst of a crisis. Unable to deal with the tragedy constructively and fend off the trauma, America wound itself into a “penny dreadful plot”52, seeking solace in attempts at “retrofitting” and “rewriting.” A realization of how discrepant this melancholic narrative 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52

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Faludi, 47. Faludi, 47. Faludi, 146. The photo was officially used in Bush’s election campaign in which it figured as “Ashley’s Story,” having been turned into a ca. 2-minute advertisement. It is credited with helping Bush win the presidential election, and political analysts claim it to have been “critical” in tipping the election scales. Faludi, 150. Faludi, 147. Faludi, 157. Faludi, 18.

was from the actual situation within American society began to emerge only after the initial shock died down, and more moderate and better measured calls found their outlets, breaking through the shell of accumulated illusions, security myths and deeply ingrained preconceptions. The most distinct voices belonged to writers who managed to cut a swathe in the carpet of mainstream and state-sponsored stories, and set about the task of re-li(e)ving the trauma by artistic means, most frequently opposed to official policies.

History caught red-handed: towards the emergence of ‘literature of terror’ In the nearly 30 years during which the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center stood shooting proudly above the New York City skyline, the responses they drew from New Yorkers, and Americans more generally, were at best indifferent. The buildings, so it seemed, melted in the city’s sky- and landscape, to the point of becoming inseparable from them, or, from yet a different perspective, of assuming a peculiar invisibility which allowed a certain oblivion to embrace the skyscrapers. September 11, 2001, changed it all. In a matter of minutes, the World Trade Center was transformed into the world’s most important and most media-covered group of buildings. Driven by the unexpectedness and abruptness of the attacks, the international media networks entered into a competition with one another in which the speed of transfer, spectacularity of the images, vividness of coverage, and numbers of viewers were the prime concerns. 9/11 was history caught ‘red-handed’; it was enfolding live, brazenly interrupting the tediousness of everyday rhythms, and arresting the course of all other developments. Interpretation gave way to simple presentation of the events in their visual crudeness, devoid of commentary. It seemed that America, failing to find the proper means to express and make sense of what had been happening, was trapped in a compulsion to repeat and re-play the images which were insistently forcing the world to accept them as the ‘real’ thing. This acknowledgment could only arrive belatedly, as – in Martin Randall’s words – a “posthumous assimilation of the event”53; still, it did not come hand in hand with acceptance. The struggle against the incommensurability of the attacks played itself out perhaps most violently in political, cultural and literary discourses which shortly blended with one another, making it impossible to separate official – political – statements from artistic responses. Politicians, authors, activists, artists, and ordinary

53 Randall, 2.

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members of society all took to writing in attempts to address the tragedy, finding themselves under an obligation to bear witness and give testimony. It seemed that in the first days, weeks, even months after the attacks, this personal, confessional and emotional mode, often partial and from a critical point of view biased, remained the only possible form such accounts could assume. Ann Keniston in her work on post-9/11 literature observes that the evolution of literary forms referring to the attacks shows the “passage from raw experience to representation … the transition from narratives of rupture to narratives of continuity”, as well as a “sequence of genres”54. Similar views are evoked by others, too, although scholars like Martin Randall, Richard Gray, and Gross and Snyder-Körber point also to the role trauma has played in the shaping of the body of creative writing that was soon to be named ‘(post-)9/11 literature’ or ‘literature of terror.’ Trauma, Gross and Snyder-Körber’s argument goes, in its basic definition, marks a denial of agency, immobilizing traumatized subjects in their impotence to act55, a symptom widely reported by those who have had even a vicarious experience of the traumatic event. Many writers, including those who have subsequently produced works dealing with the attacks or their aftermath – Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, John Updike or Martin Amis, to name but a few – recount the serious block they encountered in their initial efforts to approach 9/11 artistically, aiming at a greater objectivity towards and creative distance from the events. Common observations include remarks on how, when attempting to analytically engage with 9/11, all they found themselves doing was ranting on the shock, the incomprehensibility and brute criminality of the acts perpetrated by fanatics blinded by faith, for no apparent reason at all. Trauma, however, possesses yet a different quality – Gross and Snyder-Körber claim that it actually “reveals itself to be enabling”56, in that trauma prepares the ground for the healing process to take place, which itself is not possible without the victim first suffering pain and consciously experiencing loss. Linking their findings with literary studies, Gross and Snyder-Körber conclude that the “drive to recovery drives trauma discourse”57. As ample evidence from literature shows, once the distance from the events has grown time-wise, writers, previously stunted by temporal proximity to the tragedy, began to discover and explore 54 Keniston, 3. 55 Gross, Andrew S., and Maryann Snyder-Körber, “Trauma’s Continuum – September 11th Reconsidered,” in Amerikastudien Vol. 55 (3), Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010, 369–385. 56 Gross and Snyder-Körber, 378. 57 Gross and Snyder-Körber, 378.

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gradually more complex means to address 9/11, its context, impact and both global and local consequences. ‘Literature of terror’ is a sort of a picklock term applied to literary works dealing primarily with liminal moments in history, and the resultant trauma, anguish and sense of rupture. Originally it was used to categorise the complex body of writing which emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, particularly in response to the atrocities of the Holocaust. ‘Terror,’ then, did not draw such direct associations with terror-ism as is the case presently, but designated rather a state of intense fear or the frightening, appalling aspects of given behaviours, circumstances or conditions. Beginning with the onset of the Cold War and in the later decades of the 20th century, the expression ‘acts of terror’ acquired the now-inseparable metonymic quality of meaning acts committed by terror-ists, in which form it was subsequently appropriated by multiple literary discourses. 9/11 seems to incorporate and unify the many senses of the word ‘terror’; thus, literature of terror – as ascribed to writings which, produced in the time ‘after,’ in/ directly engage with the problematics of the attacks – surfaces as an apparently strangely-matched amalgam of topics, topoi, motifs, and their various, at times clashing, oppositional or discordant, modes of realization and representation. The following discussion limits itself to examination of three novels that lie in the current of post-9/11 fiction, that is, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man58, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close59, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist60. The rich field of 9/11 poetry remains largely outside the scope of investigations conducted here, although some notable examples will be mentioned. The main focus falls on a selection of prose writing produced by authors of American and/or mixed descent, and the very question of the writer’s positioning within or vis-a-vis the ‘mainstream’ plays a crucial part in the discussion. While engaging in analytical polemics with the selected texts, I intend to explore the ambivalent space within which they have been created and which has developed around them, attempting to produce in the process an efficient apparatus with the aid of which to determine and define, however tentatively, the poetics of the nascent (post-)9/11 literature. In popular discourses, 9/11 was persistently envisaged as a bolt from the blue, which it in a sense was, regardless of the fact that events do not happen in a vacuum, unburdened by the relativity of motivations, rationale, beliefs, convictions, 58 DeLillo, Don, Falling Man, London: Picador, 2011 (2007). 59 Foer Safran, Jonathan, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, London: Penguin, 2006 (2005). 60 Hamid, Mohsin, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, London: Penguin, 2007.

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ideals, or consequences and reverberations, inherent in their taking place. Still, the prevailing mode of perception, as well as reception, of the attacks emphasised the effect of rupture and havoc wrought on the texture of what should have been another ordinary day. On a world scale, the attack signified a liminal moment marking the end of an established order. In the encapsulated American universe, however, it was turned into an assault not on the hubs of American policy, capital and power, but on the personal, domestic sphere of the family. Such a vision was perpetuated by the state, media and popular culture, leading to the emergence of a state-sponsored illusion of a return to the 1950s, with the era’s traditionalism, clear-cut borders between the spheres of male and female activity, and an emphasis on trends like ‘nesting nation,’ ‘opting out’ and ‘security motherhood.’ I argue here that 9/11 fiction in its ‘domestic’ version has stemmed from these social moods, though partly as an act of resistance to the neo-traditionalist and reactionary social climate. Dissenting voices eventually began to be heard, slowly working towards the dissolution of the spreading national psychosis. What I endeavour to show, however, is that although the authors of 9/11 novels wrote with the intent to wrestle America out of its melancholic clinging to a predefined understanding of the attacks, they did so by employing the very same motifs as those applied in official discourses. In their attempts to put forth a coherent body of literature depicting the American experience of 9/11, writers frequently turned to the hearth as a source of literary themes and problems, producing, however, a drastically different vision of the American post-9/11 family. In a discussion of the aesthetics of American post-9/11 fiction, Martin Randall criticizes its authors for what he sees as their shared over-reliance on the personal and the private, which he believes to be compromising for so complex an experience and theme as the events of 9/1161. Randall provides the example of Don DeLillo, whom he describes as retreating into the security of the familiar, ‘safe’ and thus rather bland and single-track motifs, without venturing into broader problematics, and hazarding a more globally-involved representation of the events and those who had experienced them62. Randall makes his point quite ostentatiously, reading the writers’ preoccupation with the aftermath of 9/11 and its impact on what might be defined as the American system of personal relationships – marriages, divorces, affairs, juvenile delinquency, addictions and compulsions – rather than on the political reverberations of the terrorist acts, as a failure of American authors and the emergent post-9/11 literature to rise to the challenges of

61 Randall, 121. 62 Randall, 123.

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addressing such profound and history-making events63. I argue, however, that the oscillation of American post-9/11 fiction towards domestic problematics, as well as its focus on individuals thrust involuntarily into the formative experience of the 21st century, is not a fault or flaw of post-9/11 literature, and should not be judged as a failure on the part of the writers to stand up to the challenge posed to them by the events of September 11, 2001. Rather, I propose to understand this turn to the hearth as a defining feature of American post-9/11 fiction, and a manifestation of the specificity of the American experience of 9/11. In analyses of post-9/11 novels, yet another point makes recurrent appearances. Critics such as Pankaj Mishra,64 Ann Keniston,65 and Sabine Sielke66 have drawn attention to the relatively rare presence of fully developed terrorist figures in 9/11 fiction, arguing that what strikes the reader in a substantial number of texts dealing with the attacks and their aftermath is either the lack or the rather inept representation of the perpetrators. Such omissions, they stress, are again emblematic of the overall failure of the authors to address the profundity and complexity of the theme they have taken up; I offer a contesting interpretation. The figure of the terrorist, I contend, forms a particular ghostly presence in the deep structures of texts devoted to 9/11 themes. Working from this premise, I read the terrorist’s awkward and artificial-seeming depiction, or the apparent lack thereof, through the lens of theories of haunting as developed by A. A. Cheng and E. Ann Kaplan. Within this framework, I elaborate on the concepts of trauma, haunted memory, and identity ambivalence which play themselves out in a much broader context than that of the seemingly finite narrative of each of the novels. Evasion of direct involvement with the ‘terrorist,’ conservative representation of the incontestably violent contact moment that was 9/11, and distanced, vicarious engagement with the politics and power play behind the attacks form distinct patterns of literary refashioning of the experience, which it is my aim to elucidate and comment upon. The novels forming the focus of the present part of this study were all published roughly around the same time – Foer’s Extremely Close and Incredibly 63 Randall, 130. 64 See: Mishra, Pankaj, “The End of Innocence,” in The Guardian Online, May 19, 2007, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/19/fiction.martinamis, retrieved November 7, 2011. 65 See: Keniston and Follansbee Quinn. 66 See: Sielke, Sabine, “Why ‘9/11 Is [Not] Unique,’ or: Troping Trauma,” in Gross, Andrew S., and Maryann Snyder-Körber, eds., Amerikastudien/American Studies Vol. 55 (3) 2010, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010, 385–409.

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Loud in 2005, and DeLillo’s Falling Man and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist in 2007. The dates of publication seem to indicate that at least a couple of years had to pass before the writers could assemble both national and personal experiences into longer narratives preoccupied with 9/11 themes. Still, despite their belatedness, the novels did raise a stir among American and international readerships, leading to re-evaluations of the 9/11 discourse, which had already begun to appear to be a monolith structure, resistant to modification. Perhaps it is actually the very question of this belatedness that deserves a closer investigation, especially once account has been taken of how the delay has come to play an integral part in the narratives themselves. Belatedness seems to have been linked to the events of 9/11 from the moment they occurred – in the morning hours of that day nobody comprehended what appeared like a perverse spectacle staged and enacted in real time. Relatively few managed to make sense of the attacks in the febrile weeks and months that followed; fewer yet had any concrete ideas for recovery and solutions for how to go on in a world “after.” The feeling of life suspended presided over collective psyches and imaginations, which gradually succumbed to a mournful mood. Americans were mourning, openly expressing their grief over the loss they were still struggling to make sense of. Though since the times of Freud theories of grief and mourning have progressed multidimensionally, the basics appear to have remained constant. Grief is generally accepted as a natural response to loss, and a period of mourning following the experience is looked upon as healthy and vital for the restoration of the griever’s ordinary life, subsequently marked by an acceptance of and reconciliation with loss. Problems ensue when the griever fails in the ‘work’ of mourning, and persists in refusing to come to terms with the lost object which eventually becomes internalized and begins a parasitic existence within the griever, feeding on reserves of pain, anger, and denial. Here starts the “uneasy swallowing” described by Ann Anlin Cheng67 – the subject attempts to get over the object it has become stuck on, but the object proves to have grown too resistant by now, and the more the subject attempts to ‘swallow’ it, the deeper it lodges itself, with the effect of nearly suffocating the subject. Thus, failed mourning devolves into melancholia which takes over the subject’s notion of itself. In the American experience of 9/11, this is what appears to have happened, with America becoming a melancholic subject fixated on a loss it has been unable to recover from. The question which remains is whether the post-9/11 melancholia has penetrated so deeply into the fibre of the American vision and 67 Cheng, 8.

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understanding of itself that it has become an inseparable part of American communal identity. Literature does seem to offer an answer – exploration of post-9/11 works of fiction, in particular the three novels singled out in this part, shows them to be saturated with a melancholic spirit, to the extent that melancholia might be perceived as a shared topos – or perhaps, a chronotope – in texts taking up the 9/11 problematics. 9/11 fiction, it appears, is not at all a literature of consolation; rather, it shows Americans still trapped in the traumatic backwash, with many of its protagonists shown as pathetic, weak and decidedly anti-heroic figures, giving the impression of being paralysed, depersonalized, and immobilized by the experience of the attacks; their lives, though to a varied degree, turn into stories of their transformation into automatons stripped of elan vital, having, at times willingly, shed their performative powers. The world that they aimlessly roam is barren and ashen; it’s an adult world, and adulterous, too, with grown-ups moving haphazardly from one affair to another, not really knowing what to hold on to. Children, though they feature in the novels, appear only peripherally, as if to sustain a vision of a family which has already disintegrated. They are to be protected, sheltered, told what has happened and assured by their parents that the world will return to normal. The grown-ups, however, offer little solace – failing to answer their own questions of what the world will be like from now on, they cannot confront their children’s fears and anxieties. Americans, as a civilization, seem to have found themselves in a threatening void. Perhaps the only truly distinct figure in this continuum of defeated characters is Oskar Schell, a ten-year-old protagonist and one of the narrators of Foer’s novel. Amidst general crisis and apathy, Oskar, though having to overcome various obstacles, rejects the victimological discourse and embarks on a nearly mythological quest for answers and solutions. It is this structural-psychological difference that has prompted the categorization of post-9/11 novels according to the mechanisms applied by protagonists for fending off trauma. Noting the two major modes of response to the attacks and their long-term consequences, Beverly Haviland suggests a division into “novels of melancholia” and “novels of mourning”68. As she notes, texts qualifying for the first category are much more numerous than those which could be included in the latter – according to her argumentation, only Foer’s Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud fulfils the requirements of a novel of mourning, in that Oskar, through his perseverance and determination, manages to complete his quest and reach conclusions which, though perhaps not entirely satisfactory, enable him to

68 Haviland, Beverly, “After the Fact: Mourning, Melancholy, and Nachträglichkeit in Novels of 9/11,” in Gross and Snyder-Körber, 429–451.

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resume the more or less ordinary existence of a 10-year-old boy. I intend to expand this vision, but with a set of precautions in mind. The wariness with which I approach the issue stems from an apprehensive yet pressing realization that clear-cut categorization might be too radical a stance in a discussion of post-9/11 fiction. While the division indeed proves useful in stating and defending particular arguments, it seems insufficiently flexible to account for the complexity of the investigated narratives. Therefore, I will propose a tentative reliance on the categories, with an awareness of the fluidity between them, resulting in some of the novels fitting to both classes, though never entirely. By investigating the ‘contact zones’ between the categories and the ambivalent middle-ground surfacing around and/or within them, I hope to arrive at an elucidation of the internal conflictedness of post-9/11 writings. Apart from motifs of melancholia and mourning which show the novels’ proximity and resemblance to one another, there exists another point of convergence between them. Dealing with 9/11 problematics, the novels discuss themes of grief, bereavement, fear, anxiety, shame, anger and disillusionment, achieving their ‘effect of the real’ through at times quite radical means. In their depiction of domestic crises brought on by the attacks, the authors manage to perform fairly well, at times even extraordinarily so; when it comes to confrontations with individuals responsible for the crises in the first place, a peculiar bias seems to build up, taking its toll on the writers’ judgments, sentiments and, at least in case of DeLillo, compromising their reputation. Later in this part, I will investigate the portraits of ‘terrorists’ and ‘perpetrators’ as they are represented in the novels, with the aim of comparing them against one another and laying bare the authors’ bias and apparent ineptness in responding to the wide-spread public pandemonium around the perpetrators. My immediate goal is to check whether this particular strand in post-9/11 fiction should be read as a technical failure on the part of the authors to rise to the challenge of confronting the ‘other,’ a thesis seeming too obviously inaccurate to be defensible, or whether the compromising quality of narratives of encounter in the novels signifies a deeper and much more disturbing embodiment of a national complex.

Home, Hearth, and Horror: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man Don DeLillo published Falling Man in 2007 as his 15th novel. In many respects, Falling Man continues a detectible strand in DeLillo’s oeuvre: its focus on violence and modes of response to it, the psychology of the crowd, and the condition of the individual, often presented in conflict with his/her macro- and/or micro-environment. Falling Man feels particularly close to Libra (1988) and Mao II (1991); all 48

three of them take up the problematics of terrorism and the increasing notability and pervasiveness of the terrorist figure. Whereas Libra and Mao II show terrorists either as outcasts working on the margins of American society or as ultimate ‘others’ who, though their actions influence both America’s public and private sphere, are consigned to decisively far-off regions, Falling Man further estranges the terrorist but transplants him onto the national soil, where he is offered but a cursory look, with the main focus centred on a family suffering the backlash of the 9/11 attacks. Significantly, through such a strategy, the American family and the ‘Arab’ terrorist are brought uncomfortably close together; as such, they might be considered stock characters representing a certain kind of experience. Thematically, Falling Man is predominantly a novel of the disintegration of American domestic life in the aftermath of the 9/11 crisis. Indeed, the problematical weight of the novel is carried by the family of Lianne and Keith Neudecker. At the outset of the novel Lianne and Keith are separated, and importantly, their break-up has occurred well before the events which open the text. The hearth, along with its extensions, constitutes also the nexus of the melancholia of the text, which originates, however, in the external reality of the terrorist attacks. In more technical terms, Falling Man turns out to be a meticulously structured work – its internal logic, both textual and formal, is guided by the use of extensive parallelisms, culminating at two points in the novel, at its end and roughly half-way through the story. The technical and thematical planes enhance and complement one another, with the parallels lending the novel’s paramount motifs and events acute clarity and expression. Representation of the terrorist – Hammad, the fictional sword-arm of Muhammad Atta – also partakes of this strategy, although the question of how effective it is in this case remains debatable. Finding their marriage in a state of disintegration, Keith and Lianne attempt to live independently, Keith performing a menial office job, and Lianne working as a freelance book editor and trying to single-handedly take care of their seven-yearold son, Justin. Their crisis is juxtaposed with the relative stability of the nearly life-long relationship of Lianne’s mother Nina and her lover Martin, who are now also facing hardship due to Nina’s ageing and gradual collapse. Lianne’s attitude to her mother is marked by a sense of grudging and unresolved bitterness, made more acute by Nina’s advancing hypochondria in the face of her increasing age and weakness. Significantly, though, while Lianne frequently loses patience with her mother and finds herself petrified by the picture of old age that Nina angrily throws at her, she volunteers as a therapist for a group of Alzheimer patients, quickly developing a strong dependence on the sessions. Lianne is insecure, tired, and feels herself a failure in many fields, professional especially, but she notes, too, 49

that neither motherhood nor matrimony have brought her the sense of fulfilment and satisfaction she was looking for. She frequently gives in to prolonged reminiscences on her earlier life with Keith, wondering when it was that everything started to go wrong: It wasn’t just those days and nights in bed. Sex was everywhere at first, in words, phrases, half gestures, the simplest intimation of altered space… . She sat thinking about this. Her mind drifted in and out of this, the early times, eight years ago, of the eventual grimness called their marriage.69

Resentment and nostalgia trap Lianne, setting the mood of the entire novel, which oscillates between regret, fear, anxiety and occasional moments of hope. For Lianne, those recollections constitute a springboard to get away from the stifling reality of daily life; however, immersion in them only leads her further into discouragement and despondency. Those moments become yet more frequent and difficult to shake off when the quotidian is utterly changed by the events of 9/11. Lianne finds herself pursued by signs and beacons which in the context of the attacks acquire an ominous significance. An immobilizing realization of the discontinuity of life as it used to be ‘before’ occurs when she spots a postcard sent by a friend and read, belatedly, in an already changed world: It was the postcard that snapped her back, on top of the cluster of bills and other mail. She glanced at the message, a standard scrawled greeting, sent by a friend staying in Rome, then looked again at the face of the card. It was a reproduction of the cover of Shelley’s poem in twelve cantos, first edition, called Revolt of Islam. Even in postcard format, it was clear that the cover was beautifully designed, with a large illustrated R that included creatural flourishes, a ram’s head and what may have been a fanciful fish with a tusk and a trunk. Revolt of Islam. The card was from the Keats-Shelley House in Piazza di Spagna and she’d understood in the first taut seconds that the card had been sent a week or two earlier. It was a matter of simple coincidence, or not so simple, that a card might arrive at this particular time bearing the title of that specific book… . This was all, a lost moment on the Friday of that lifelong week, three days after the planes.70

That Lianne noticed this particular long-lost card might indeed be a matter of chance; her ascribing it with the sinister meaning related to immediate events is no longer so, which the narrator also points out, by inserting the qualifying “not so simple.” Perhaps it could be assigned to the trend which emerged immediately

69 DeLillo, 7. 70 DeLillo, 8.

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after 9/11, i.e. the somewhat forced elevation of Islam to the very centre of cosmopolitan New York society’s attention71. Indeed, it is hard not to notice, just as Lianne does, the omen the postcard represented. Still, DeLillo’s handling of this trope might come across as somewhat crude, exploiting a poetics that has already made itself fully manifest, excessively fed by clichés and stereotypes. Whereas in his depiction of the terrorists DeLillo does seem to falter, he structures his account of the attacks on World Trade Center with considerable confidence, placing the event in a textual frame which opens and ends the narrative, with the two parts of the text forming an extended parallel. The moment of direct impact is postponed and takes place near the close of the novel, when Keith and Hammad, in their violent encounter, nearly literally merge with one another in a matter of seconds. Importantly, the whole event occurs entirely on the level of the text, with the ultimate blurring of the bodily borders between Keith and Hammad – the significance of which lies in the symbolic fusion of the victim and the perpetrator – signalled grammatically, in the semantic shift of reference of the personal pronoun ‘he’ from Hammad to Keith. The novel in fact opens with Keith emerging from the burning towers, but how exactly he survived the attacks is revealed only at the end. The account of what happened is apocalyptic, creating the sense of chaos, disorientation and terror that must have taken over the world at that time. The depiction relies heavily on very plastic and auditory images; the world as it used to be ceases to exist and descends into pandemonium, with only smoke, ash, rumble and roar remaining. Civilization seems to suffer defeat, and its fall is further marked with descriptions of “office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall”72. The world and life as they once were manifest the Biblical Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas motif, further accentuated by traces of the old order perishing in the ash-filled air: “Paper massed in the air, contracts, resumes blowing by, intact snatches of business, quick in the wind”73. The destruction thus portrayed is total: It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars… . The roar

71 Cf. Smith, Islam in America. 72 DeLillo, 3. 73 DeLillo, 4.

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was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting about corners, seismic tides of smoke … . He saw people shedding water as they ran, clothes and bodies drenched from sprinkler systems. There were shoes discarded in the street, handbags and laptops, a man seated on the sidewalk coughing up blood. Paper cups went bouncing oddly by.74

Keith roams this battle-ground landscape, but it seems that neither he nor any of the people he encounters, or rather looks at incredulously as he goes by, have the slightest idea of what the battle has been fought for, why, and what will follow. A sensation of time suspended prevails, freezing individual lives in the coercion of the inescapable present: He kept on walking. There were the runners who’d stopped and others veering into sidestreets. Some were walking backwards, looking into the core of it all, all those writhing lives back there, and things kept falling, scorched objects trailing lines of fire… . He saw members of a tai chi group from the park nearby, standing with their hands extended at roughly chest level, elbows bent, as if all of this, themselves included, might be placed in a state of abeyance.75

In his wandering, Keith moves from one atrocity to another, taking in however only the general impression of an immensurable cataclysm, and literally breathing in the as yet unfathomed change. His perception dimmed by the roar, rumble, fire, and sirens wailing, Keith notices mere snapshots of the scale of the tragedy, perhaps all the more harrowing in their fragmentariness: The world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens in the air. The noise lay everywhere they ran, stratified sound collecting around them, and he walked away from it and into it at the same time.76

The sensation of simultaneously walking away from and into the epicentre of the events stalks Keith, depriving him even of the illusion of being in control of his actions. As if pulled by an invisible cord, he “kept going until he had to stop. It hit him quickly, the knowledge that he couldn’t go any further”77. With this, Keith found himself at Lianne’s doorway, but the reunion does not go smoothly. Both Keith and Lianne struggle to come to terms with the terror that has lodged itself too close to what used to be their safe space. Although it is Keith who had been in the South Tower that morning, Lianne, too, feels traumatized, but instead of locking herself 74 75 76 77

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DeLillo, 3–4. DeLillo, 3–4. DeLillo, 4. DeLillo, 5.

out to the aftermath, she looks for ways to approach the events and talk them over. Not with Keith, who gradually withdraws into the hauntology of his own experience; for her interlocutors Lianne chooses the members of the therapy group she conducts, and her mother’s lover, Martin. Importantly, though, what she is after is reception – Lianne wants to hear, to see, to witness others talking about the attacks, realizing that this is the only thing that brings her solace. Keith seems to be gradually growing more estranged from Lianne, and their precarious reunion faces ultimate threat once Keith meets Florence Givens, another survivor, whose suitcase Keith somehow carried out of the Towers and which he decides to return to its owner. Keith discovers himself to be growing dependant on his meetings with Florence which progress from a peculiar sort of amateur therapy session to secret trysts between melancholic lovers. Their affair, however, is an artificial relationship cemented only by their mutual experience of having survived the attacks; outside of this framework, Keith and Florence do not exist, and their relation has no anchor in the reality of the world ‘after.’ Both of them appear to be aware of that; still, they desperately cling to their liaison, quietly agreeing to a division of roles which further defines their relationship as a construct produced and functioning under specific circumstances. Within this scheme, Keith assumes the part of the weak and wounded victim of a traumatic experience, whereas Florence, quite like her notable namesake, the hardy and devoted nurse Florence Nightingale, dispenses consolatory alms with profusion and apparent ease, which soon deviates into an obsession, though, leading to their parting. Pointlessness seems written into the texture of their affair from its very beginning; as it turns out, both of them emerge from it further disillusioned and lost. A mood of disorientation also pervades the direct environment of Justin, Keith and Lianne’s son, and his friends, who are referred to by Lianne as ‘the Siblings.’ The children’s comprehension of the events is strictly regulated by their parents who take pains not to disclose too much of the tragedy but the result of their protectiveness proves counter-productive: owing to lack of reliable information, the children start a kind of a secret organization, with themselves as the only members, whose aim it is to monitor the skies from the Siblings’ bedroom window for more planes. Sensing that their pursuits are somewhat illicit, they make a pact to conceal their operations from their parents; however, the adults overhear a recurring name in the children’s discussions – “Bill Lawton” – but, when confronted about this, neither Justin nor the Siblings spill a word. It is only by accident that Justin lets the name slip when talking to Keith who recognizes the fear-inspiring name to be a distorted version of “Bin Laden” which the 53

children took from snippets of conversations on TV, the radio, and among adults. To the children, Bill Lawton/Bin Laden has become the ominous sign of inexplicable change which, though seemingly intangible, owing in part to the parents’ efforts to keep the atrocity away from them, has literally come out of the blue. Indeed, closely related to Bill Lawton/Bin Laden is the fear of planes which binds the children to the window with a shared toy spyglass, in their compulsion to stay vigilant. The plane also becomes one of the ‘ghosts’ melancholically haunting the text and providing a direct link with the novel’s symptomatic title. At the time of the attack, when the Towers already started to burn and collapse, for some of the people trapped inside, the hijacked planes were the incentive to jump out of the smouldering buildings and meet the very same fate as those who stayed in the Towers but, apparently at least, on their own terms, not the terrorists’. The ‘jumpers,’ as they were dubbed in popular discourse, came to be the strongest taboo in the 9/11 discussion, and pictures of their free fall were not shown by commercial media, deemed indecent to the point of being pornographic. Probably the most notable photograph of the ‘jumpers’ was taken by Richard Drew, a photographer for Associated Press. The photo, depicting a man in what seems a work uniform, in free fall down the sides of the building, with one leg bent at the knee, quickly spread to newspapers, television stations, and the internet, raising an uproar which led to its just as swift disappearance from the US media.

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Fig. 2.  Richard Drew, 2001, Falling Man; Associated Press

Instead, photographic accounts of firemen posting the American flag amidst the rubble were circulated and embraced by the state policy which advocated their further distribution, considering them to be proof of American invincibility and strength amidst a crisis. Fig. 3.  Thomas E. Franklin, The Record, Staff Photographer, 2001; http://4.bp.blogspot. com/-_IedElXbDqE/TkqZhJs2irI/AAAAAAAACxs/4qp7uJsxceU/s1600/ September11FiremenRaiseAmericanFlag.jpg)

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This was the message to send to the world; clearly, Richard Drew’s “Falling Man” went against the grain of this ideology, showing America at its most vulnerable, crushed by the will of the violator. In clear contrast, the firemen picture works to corroborate the state-sponsored discourse of heroism and bravery. There were also other grounds for suspicion towards Drew’s photograph, and its ill fame was largely due to the hint of artistic manipulation detectable in it. The contrast between the man’s black and white outfit and the alternate shades of the building’s colouring, the nearly perfect vertical line made by his prostrate figure with one leg bent at the knee and the wall’s structure, the absence of any traces of debris or smoke all seem to suggest an absolute stillness of the moment, improbable in the circumstances. The firemen, in turn, are covered in dust and ash; they sweat, accumulate more dirt, but this only further accentuates their activity and efforts taken in the name of a noble cause. No trace of artistry and thus artificiality or manipulation taints their work, depicted without retouch or other editing tools. The same opposition between the implied ambiguity of ‘art’ (even if only suspected), and scientific concreteness of the ‘raw’ material also functions in the case of other photographic accounts of the atrocities of 9/11. Owing to the nature of the attacks, the entire site around the WTC Towers became a crime scene, concealing human remains and genetic material required for the identification of the victims. All the rubble and debris were transported to the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, which was then turned into a huge forensic laboratory. The Fresh Kills forensic operations not only were widely photographed and the pictures circulated in the media; the work of the laboratory was preserved in the form of a documentary exhibited at The National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. Whereas the exhibition of pictures of recovered personal objects, pieces of clothing, and finally body parts was met with pious enthusiasm, receiving common blessing and widespread support for the commemorative mission it fulfils, no such redeeming qualities were discovered in more ‘artistic’ forms dealing with the same problematics. The ban on Richard Drew’s indecent photograph, accused of sending the ‘wrong’ kind of message to both American and international viewers, closely reflected the fate of Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Photograph from September 11” (“Fotografia z 11 września”) which employed a very similar kind of imagery, to the point that it could be received as the ‘screenplay’ for the photo, or a peculiar funeral march to be played at the viewing of the picture:  They jumped from the burning floors—one, two, a few more, higher, lower. The photograph halted them in life, and now keeps them above the earth toward the earth.

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Each is still complete, with a particular face and blood well hidden. There’s enough time for hair to come loose, for keys and coins to fall from pockets. They’re still within the air’s reach, within the compass of places that have just now opened. I can do only two things for them—describe this flight and not add a last line78

Ann Keniston, editor of Literature after 9/11, thus comments on the poem’s strength and the accuracy of its description: Taking up these charged figures, Szymborska’s poem seems to trace a complete journey in its three opening lines; the sentence’s single verb, “jumped,” implies the moment before the leap, the plunge itself, and the aftermath. Yet instead of representing all three parts of the narrative, Szymborska shows only one, arresting the bodies in their downward movement by referencing a still image … The first half of the poem unfolds in the past tense … and the second half is set in a continuous present that resists the narrative progression from a jump to a fall.79

Despite the poem’s acknowledged quality, it was excluded from a planned anthology on the World Trade Center because in the opinion of the project’s main developer, Larry Silverstein, it was a “downer.” As Keniston further notes:  Silverstein read the poem’s ekphrastic gesture literally, suggesting that its “graphic nature” would re-traumatize the reader, even as the tone of the poem is one of wistful consolation. The poems that survived Silverstein’s cut were uplifting and celebratory; there was not a “downer” among them.80

The sort of rationale behind such reasoning resembles very much that applied to photographs and their division into those representing the praiseworthy discourse of heroism and others, like Drew’ picture, which supposedly epitomize defeat and the height of vulnerability and should thus be kept from public view in order to minimize them from their harmful potential. The obsession with ill defined sanctity and sacrifice in relation to the events of 9/11 is one of key themes in DeLillo’s novel, too, providing an interesting context for the activity of David Janiak, a performance artist known as the “Falling Man.” Never given voice in the novel, the Falling Man nevertheless speaks his message better than words could convey. His unexpected appearances in various parts of the city sow unrest and provoke frequently violent reactions, ranging 78 Szymborska, Wisława, “Photograph from September 11,” trans. by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Kavanagh, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178603. 79 Keniston, 180. 80 Keniston, 181.

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from verbal abuse to attempts at physical aggression. The Falling Man, however, remains outside the reach of his spectators: suspended high above them, he does not give them any other option than to only aggravate their frustration with aimless shouts and threats. The drama of his act cannot be denied: A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct.81

Perhaps what shocks most in his performance is the suggestive likeness between the figure he stages and the pose of the unidentified ‘falling man’ from Drew’s notorious photograph. The image, banned from state-sponsored public discussion of the attacks, did not disappear from common imagery; all the more so did the Falling Man’s silent statement find susceptible ground. Through introducing this figure into his novel, DeLillo seems to achieve a distance between his text and the popular labelling which threw it into the category of fiction of domestic crisis, or a melodrama. In fact, it is the character of the Falling Man that enables DeLillo to expand beyond the limitations of a predetermined genre, providing complex and unsettling material to force the readers to confront their fears and taboos, and speak out the apparently unspeakable. The artist’s influence extends over all those who see him but the novel particularly accentuates Lianne’s encounters with the Falling Man and the peculiar bond which she imagines to build between them. The emotions the figure evokes range from utter dismay, to the shock of going over the events of ‘that fateful day’ yet again, to outrage; in Lianne the Falling Man generates pensiveness and sadness at the horror of what his stunt symbolizes: She’d heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man. He’d appeared several times in the last week, announced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump… . Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all.82

The notoriety of the artist spreads, with his performances multiplying and causing a public uproar. It appears that the commonly held opinion was that the 81 DeLillo, 33. 82 DeLillo, 33.

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Falling Man was shameless, blasphemous and disrespectful, his act a nuisance, violating the discourse of state-sponsored protection which had already taken effect. To Lianne, however, it seems that he must have some sort of a message which he cannot find other means to express but through the ever-renewed renewed shock of his performance: It took a moment for him to come into view, upper body only, a man on the other side of the protective fence that bordered the tracks. She saw him from the chest up and heard the schoolkids now, calling to each other, all the games in suspension. He seemed to be coming out of nowhere. There was no station stop here, no ticker office or platform for passengers, and she had no idea how he’d managed to gain access to the track area. White male, she thought. White shirt, dark jacket. The immediate street was quiet. People passing looked and walked and a few stopped, briefly, and others, younger, lingered… . White male in suit and tie, it now appeared, as he made his way down the short ladder through an opening in the fence.83

Watching the Falling Man prepare for his stunt, Lianne experiences an illumination which elucidates for her the intentions of the artist and allows her a moment of crystal-clear understanding, conveyed in a matter-of-fact tone of narration: This is when she knew, of course. She watched him lower himself to the maintenance platform that jutted over the street, just south of the intersection. This is when she understood, although she’d felt something even before her first glimpse of the figure. There were the faces in the high windows, something about the faces, a forewarning, the way you know something before you perceive it directly. This is who he had to be… . There was one thing for them to say, essentially. Someone falling. Falling man. She wondered if this was his intention, to spread the word this way, by cell phone, intimately, as in the towers in the hijacked planes.84

If indeed the ‘spreading of the word’ had been the Falling Man’s intention, any discussion of the issue cannot unfold without acknowledging the operations of the state following the attacks in attempts to ensure security. As Lianne remarks three years after the events, “all life had become public”85. Susan Faludi’s account of the national moods in the aftermath corroborates this view by pointing out how Americans have witnessed and experienced a pro bono publico curtailing of personal liberties, and a development of an elaborate system of surveillance and control of virtually all spheres of every-day activity. Following the three-year-interval in the novel, it turns out that Lianne and Keith have got back together, again quite in line with the common trend of ‘nesting’ observed by Faludi and illustrated by 83 DeLillo, 159. 84 DeLillo, 160, 165. 85 DeLillo, 182.

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Lianne saying to Keith that “in times like these, the family is necessary … This is how we live through the things which scare us half to death”86 – with the need for something concrete, family again turned out to be one of the top-rated American values. Near the close of the novel, the dust appears to have settled, with life resuming its course, though not without persistent flashbacks bringing back the complex trauma in all its acuteness. One night Lianne, giving in to a compulsion she developed after the attacks, is reading obituaries in various New York papers and comes upon that of David Janiak, “the performance artist known as Falling Man”87. Following a brief but intense web search, she establishes the basic facts of his life and immerses herself in a reverie on the symbol Falling Man came to constitute: Was this position intended to reflect the body posture of a particular man who was photographed falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, headfirst, arms at his sides, one leg bent, a man set forever in free fall against the looming background of the column panels in the tower? Free fall is the fall of a body within the atmosphere without a drag-producing device such as a parachute. It is the ideal falling motion of a body that is subject only to the earth’s gravitational field. She did not read further but knew at once which photograph the account referred to. It hit her hard when she first saw it, the day after, in the newspaper. The man headlong, the towers behind him. The mass of the towers filled the frame of the picture. The man falling, the towers, contiguous behind him. The enormous soaring line, the vertical column stripes. The man with blood on his shirt, or burn marks, and the effect of the columns behind him, the composition, she thought, darker stripes for the nearer tower, the north, lighter for the other, and the mass, the immensity of it, and the man set almost precisely between the rows of darker and lighter stripes. Headlong, free fall, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific.88

With Lianne’s musings on David Janiak/Falling Man the novel is gradually coming to its circularly negotiated conclusion which at once takes the reader back to the Apocalyptic opening and pushes the vision further yet. In terms of structuring, DeLillo takes his use of extensive parallelisms to very far, so that both events and characters are enfolded in the parallel narrative development. Shortly after the attacks, Keith visits a doctor who, when treating him, “would use clamps for deeper fragments”89. The doctor, quite unawares, introduces one

86 87 88 89

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DeLillo, 209. DeLillo, 219. DeLillo, 221–222. DeLillo, 15.

of the most ominous symbols of the post-9/11 traumatic confusion – the organic shrapnel: Where there are suicide bombings … In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a cafe. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel.90

Keith’s account is interspersed with the last thoughts of the pilots who crashed the planes into the towers, which gives the passage a morbid quality: Forget the world. Be umindful of the thing called the world. All of life’s lost time is over now. This is your long wish, to die with your brothers. Recite the sacred words. Pull your clothes tightly about you. Fix your gaze. Carry your soul in your hand. Every sin of your life is forgiven in the seconds to come. There is nothing between you and eternal life in the seconds to come. You are wishing for death and now it is here in the seconds to come. He began to vibrate. He wasn’t sure whether it was the motion of the plane or only himself. He rocked in his seat, in pain. He heard sounds from somewhere in the cabin. The pain was worse now. He heard voices, excited cries from the cabin or the cockpit, he wasn’t sure. Something fell off the counter in the galley. He fastened his seatbelt.91

The distinctions between Keith and Hammad are rendered unstable, and could be read as joined in what Sam Anderson calls “a dangerous parallel”92. Their clash resembles the forming of the organic shrapnel, the explosive and destructive potential of which might only reveal itself months after the instance of impact. On the textual plane, the focus shifts to Keith again who, trapped in his office, experiences the full blast of the crash, and significantly, the sensations he takes in are exactly those which Hammad endures from the ‘other’ side: A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through

90 DeLillo, 16. 91 DeLillo, 238–239. 92 Anderson, Sam, “Code Red: Don DeLillo, the Literary Master of the Terrorist’s Imagination, Reaches for the Ultimate Subject,” in New York Books Online 7 May 2007, http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/31521/; accessed and retrieved October 2012.

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the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. He found himself walking into a wall. He didn’t drop the telephone until he hit the wall. The floor began to slide beneath him and he lost his balance and eased along the wall to the floor.93

The attack, the impact moment, is split into two situations taking place simultaneously, and DeLillo’s narration stages a poised blend of the two. In this instant, the ‘victim’ and the ‘perpetrator’ are one, experiencing nearly exactly the same reverberations, but with distinct knowledge of the events – the latter armed with prescience and immediate cognizance, the former vulnerable prior to and at the moment of the attack but gradually gaining belated and fragmentary awareness of what has led to this and what might follow. The contact moment, despite its horrid force, also conceals a violence not played out physically, through open combat, but rather signalled internally, inwardly, by way of understatement, supposition and suspension of action. Evasion of direct involvement with the ‘terrorist,’ conservative representation of the incontestably violent encounter that was 9/11, and distanced, vicarious engagement with the politics and power play behind the attacks are all distinct patterns of literary refashioning of the experience, which make a close fit to the consolation offered by the status of the victim, echoing the resonant words of Mohsin Hamid that sometimes, in some parts of the world, human lives count merely as “collateral damage”94. The personal has always been interrupted by the inter/ national, with the consequences of the destructive impulses to hurt those from across the line frequently rebounding on both of the involved parties. The issue that begs to be addressed is whether it is justifiable to take sides in a conflict which throughout proves to be a no-gain situation. Don DeLillo, by bringing the novel back to its starting point through the use of the frame narrative, resorts to the mechanisms of national trauma and, as a result, does not resolve the nostalgic sense of rupture. Falling Man remains a novel of melancholia which is made evident in its preoccupation with repetitive images, structuring and characters’ doubles. The repetition compulsion makes itself manifest in the circular modes of opening and closing of the novel, and through showing the protagonists as only superficially reconciled to life in the world of the after. Whether such a reconciliation is possible at all remains an issue to which DeLillo refuses to give a comprehensive answer.

93 DeLillo, 239. 94 Hamid, 179.

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The Ethnic Exception Clause: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist Like DeLillo’s book, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist turns out to be a meticulously structured endeavour, with the author simultaneously developing his narrative on two overlapping planes whose two trajectories twine, approximate, and finally merge at the end of the novel. The present section consists of insights into the emergent discourse of terror and violence, imprinted on the collective Euro-American consciousness in the aftermath of the 9/11 events, within which the global geopolitical scene assigns strictly defined modes of conduct to those who partake in the building of contemporary history. Thus, America’s part becomes to negotiate the performance of two functions – that of a ‘supplier’ of innumerable frontier/cowboy stories which serve the US administration as legitimizations of neoimperialist acts, and of forewarning ‘The Western Man’ of what lurks ahead and threatens to demolish the bloodily foughtfor democratic ideals. It is my intention in this part to critically dismantle and/ or disarm these two seemingly exclusive roles, the internal conflictedness and heterogeneity of which have only very recently begun to come in for at times subversive re-evaluations. My goal is to probe the middleground which, in the ostensibly violent aftermath of the 9/11 events, has sprung out along the lines of racial and socio-political difference, providing fuel for misrepresentations, resentment and fear. With Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 apparently conversational novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist employed the analytical spine of the present part, I make an attempt at dismantling the convoluted aspects of the American/Arab relation which within a broader framework might be read as a reflection of the uneasy bond between the ‘first’ and the ‘third’ worlds. As Hamid’s account shows, being ‘Arab’ has degenerated into a shame- and guilt-inducing condition, paralleled perhaps only by wearing a scarlet letter upon one’s breast; in this light, Hamid’s allegoric remark on standing at the ‘wrong’ side acquires a grim significance: “Because I grew up on the other side … I was outside the candy store looking in”95. This, in turn, introduces the questions of be/longing, further complicated by the arbitrarily imposed awareness of being of a ‘suspect race.’ External factors such as the symptomatic beard have made it all too easy to locate the threat, with grounds for suspicion automatically legitimized by the labelling apparatus which perpetuates the mass ‘Muslim scare.’

95 Hamid, 71.

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Following this thread, I endeavour to conduct an investigation into the notion of “hyphenated identity,” bringing to the forefront of the discussion the very hyphen used in denominating national/racial belonging (e.g., Arab–American), seeing the hyphen as a marker of Homi Bhabha’s ambivalent “Third Space.” A careful examination of these issues entails dismantling questions of, respectively, desire as always located ‘outside,’ and one’s symbolic identification. I try to determine, however tentatively, how one proceeds along the subject/object/ abject scale, adding to the framework of this study discussions of agency and performativity, as well as the inevitable questions of ‘performing’ one’s ethnicity through answering to the demands of the ‘mainstream’ society which often amounts to its widely pronounced craving for the ‘exotic.’ Recently, though, with the advancing struggle for power, hegemony and world domination, cravings have taken the form of ultimatums, and ethnic self/consciousness has escalated into armed conflict. However, being ‘Arab’ has yet another aspect – the image of the hard-bitten terrorist conceals a fragile core. The crackdown on terror – while its essence cannot be disputed – largely overlooks the human factor, which is acutely noted by Mohsin Hamid in his observation that the lives of civilians whom circumstance has located in parts of the world marked as danger zones count merely as ‘collateral damage.’ I propose to disentangle the issue, acknowledging the confused experiences of melancholia, grief, nostalgia, shame, anguish, hate, longing, and jealousy which generate conflicting sympathies leading to internal imbalance on both sides of the conflict. While Hamid’s statement comes across as indeed radical, at the same time it seems unethical to so much as attempt to rid it of its appeal, deepening the uncertainty over who has the right to assume the position of the victim, and who the oppressor is. In the same vein, while the common equation of ‘Arab’ and ‘fundamentalist’ has become imprinted in everyday discourse, dissenting voices in society pose the inevitable example of American patriotism, with its frequent theme-park aesthetics of the American flag installed on toothpicks and stickers, as a counterweight to ‘Arab’ fundamentalism. The personal has always been interrupted by the inter/national, with the consequences of the destructive impulses to hurt those from across the line frequently rebounding on both of the involved parties. A consideration of what factors condition such a perverse outcome makes for another section of this study, in which I intend to elucidate (though coming to only tentative answers) the vexing question of why and on what patterns the mental phantasms functioning in given societies lead to various forms of mental devastation or self-imposed schizophrenia, both in those who profess them and in those onto whom these 64

phantasms are projected. At the core of these concerns lies the fear of identification, or, in Hamid’s words, the shared inclination to take for granted that “[Arabs] are all potential terrorists … [and] Americans are all undercover assassins”96. These problems have recently come to attract political, philosophical and critical interest; as such, they are frequent objects in ongoing heated debates on the past, present and future of the global ties between the Arab world and America, the investigation of which proves a major criterion in determining the underlying traumas and silencings. “All things probably are political” – with this statement Mohsin Hamind opens his key-note speech at the 2011 EACLALS Conference in Istanbul, Turkey, in which the author combined the reading of passages from his work with an engaged but level-headed discussion of fundamentalism, nostalgia, and abstract grievances.97 The venue of the conference is significant, too, and could perhaps be read symbolically, as a mythical gateway – or wall – between the East and West, just as was the date of the event – late April 2011, a week before the US government officially announced the killing of Osama Bin Laden. In this way, 2011 marks a symptomatic caesura, as well, but perhaps instead of attempting to provide a definite reckoning of the year’s significance, it is wiser to abstain from over-theorizations. Hamid himself appears to be doing so when, in answering the audience’s persistent questions about the rise of Islamist fundamentalism after 9/11, he asserts that “although 9/11 might work on the minds of the young … it was not a case of personal vendetta”98. What, then, is fundamentalism, and how should it be approached if recent responses to it might themselves be regarded as instances of fanaticism and fury? Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist does not present clear-cut answers to the dilemma vexing the contemporary global scene; what is more, it seems to further problematise the issue by defining Changez, the main protagonist and narrator of the story, as ‘reluctant,’ and through this, automatically introducing a degree of doubt and hesitation with regard to his identity, motives and convictions. The sense of confusion is compounded in the very second line of the novel, when Changez, in an attempt to appease his American interlocutor, 96 Hamid, 24. 97 14th EACLALS Triennial Conference, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, 28 April 2011; Mohsin Hamid’s Plenary Speech: “The Politics of Literature: Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Pakistan, and the West?” 98 14th EACLALS Triennial Conference, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, 28 April 2011; Mohsin Hamid’s Plenary Speech: “The Politics of Literature: Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Pakistan, and the West?”

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addresses him thus: “Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America”99. This short statement fuses two elements which in common parlance figure as antagonistic – the beard and America – establishing the framework of ambivalence prevalent throughout Changez’s entire testimony. As the novel progresses, the ambivalence gradually transforms, intensifying from distrust into anguish and distress, and finally escalating into outright fear, but whether the story can be called a thriller remains for the readers to decide individually. Although Hamid acknowledges fear as a catalyst for the thrill, he ascribes it to the universal condition of contemporaneity, thus withdrawing from making a definite pronouncement in this matter. Hamid stresses that for him, the most immediate goal was to “maximize cocreation and cooperation”100 in interacting with a work of fiction which – though fictitious indeed – could exert its intended effect of the real on the readers, thus turning the reading act into an exercise in interaction, without the comforting protectiveness offered by its seeming solitude. Changez’s narrative, soliloquy-like on the surface, in fact opens up a myriad of possibilities to engage in the story, though it does not offer any concessions for the reader to rely on; thus, the experience of delving into the plot at times does come across as a white-knuckle ride into the realm of the unsettlingly unknown. The novel starts in a style of a friendly camaraderie between speakers caught in an instant of time whiling away the lazy afternoon hours at a small café in Lahore. Significantly, it is Changez – the eponymous ‘reluctant fundamentalist’ – who commences the conversation, treading upon, however gently and politely – the unnamed American’s private space when he so addresses him: Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services.101

The brief exchange serves as an apt exposition to the drama soon to be enacted. The roles and positions, along with their unavoidable implications, have been assigned, and initially, neither Changez nor the American appear to be making

99 Hamid, 1. 100 14th EACLALS Triennial Conference, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, 28 April 2011; Mohsin Hamid’s Plenary Speech: “The Politics of Literature: Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Pakistan, and the West?” 101 Hamid, 1.

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attempts to destabilize and/or overturn them. The opening scene introduces balance and a nearly ritualistic harmony into the text, along the lines of the stereotypically defined ‘Oriental’ chatterbox as opposed to the rather aloof and withdrawn ‘Western’ travelling subject. Moreover, Changez already hints at the double-bound character of his identity by describing himself as a figure negotiating two functions, that of being Pakistani and a speaker of English at the same time. This, however, should not perhaps come as a surprise – America and Pakistan share the historical circumstance of having once been English colonies, a fact that Changez refers to later on, shedding light on how this chapter of the two countries’ respective histories is frequently forgotten in the American context, though by no means in reference to Pakistan. Having thus set the stage for the ensuing events, Changez draws the American into what appears to be as an innocent chat between a friendly native and an apprehensive tourist. Hamid appropriates this framework in order to have his main protagonist reveal the painful story of his life to the American. To this end, Changez employs the form of reminiscences and flashbacks, transporting the two participants in the exchange to the trajectories of Changez’s earlier American experiences. Simultaneously, however, Changez also develops the ‘real-time’ plane of the plot, as he frequently incorporates various immediate external interruptions into the conversation. This device pertains especially to intrusions from the waiter who is serving on the two of them, and whose figure gradually assumes greater significance over the course of the novel: You seem worried. Do not be; this burly fellow is merely our waiter, and there is no need to reach under your jacket, I assume to grasp your wallet, as we will pay him later, when we are done… . There. He has gone. I must admit, he is a rather intimidating chap. But irreproachably polite: you would have been surprised by the sweetness of his speech, if only you understood Urdu.102

The short passage provides also one of the very first hints as to the nature of the American’s mission; his uneasy gestures, acutely noticed by Changez, and his nervous reaction to the waiter’s appearance and bearing, introduce the element of the thriller into the novel which begins to subvert the initial impression of a mere conversation, an idle chat with no consequence. Capped with the fact that the American is actually reaching under his jacket where Changez only assumes that he is keeping his wallet, thus attempting to remain on the superficial level of Western/Eastern stereotypes, the scene works to unsettle and alert the reader to the possible existence of a darker side to the proceedings which he/she 102 Hamid, 5–6.

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is witnessing. At first, it appears that it is the American who remains ‘reluctant,’ as the novel offers a depiction of Changez’s repeated efforts to engage him in conversation. On the other hand, though, Changez does not perceive the American’s reticence as a deterrent from pursuing his own story, developing it into a form of testimony and seizing on the opportunity to give vent to his conflicted impressions of and responses to America and his American experience. In his account, Changez threads a realistic narrative in the form of a traditional Bildungsroman grounded within the momentum of the ‘American Dream,’ yet spiced up with the allure of the ‘exotic’ and ‘Oriental.’ His story, at least up to a point, is a record of success, a depiction of the life of a high-flyer, a golden boy whom the conditions of American democracy and capitalism have enabled to secure a comfortable and fully-fledged life, especially when account is taken of the persistent Western fantasy of the ‘Other.’ In this vein, Changez manages to overcome his background of implied under-privilege and disempowerment, which is only possible for him because of America’s being a nearly mythical land of plenty and opportunity, a safe haven where anybody can experience the meteoric rise ‘from rags to riches,’ provided that he/she works hard, remains undaunted by initial obstacles, and whole-heartedly embraces the American egalitarian ideals of certain ‘inalienable rights.’ Such a perception, though, is but a projection of the paradigm of the East/ West binary, with no legitimization from Changez’s actual circumstances – he comes from an old and affluent Pakistani family, which has lived for generations in an aristocratic mansion located in Lahore’s most elegant neighbourhood, with a history of employing servants and regularly sending the children on holiday to Europe: I am not poor; far from it: my great-grandfather, for example, was a barrister with the means to endow a school for the Muslims of the Punjab. Like him, my grandfather and father both attended university in England. Our family home sits on an acre of land in the middle of Gulberg, one of the most expensive districts of this city. We employ several servants, including a driver and a gardener – which would, in America, imply that we were a family of great wealth.103

How, then, to account for Changez’s apparently overturned fortunes? The story of success does strike a suspicious chord, accentuated by Changez’s protracted musings on his own identity and questions of responsibility, loyalty, and professed sympathies. The first surfacing of doubt concerning the morality and ethics of his ‘going native’ – that is, yielding to the demands of Americanization and the paradoxical requirements it imposes on the ‘foreign’ subjects enjoying America’s 103 Hamid, 9–10.

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liberties and her plentiful opportunities – occurs when Changez is preparing for dinner at his American girlfriend’s parents’ house. Unable to decide what to wear for the occasion, he finally chooses to “take advantage of the ethnic exception clause that is written into every code of etiquette”104 and settles for “a starched white kurta of delicately worked cotton over a pair of jeans”105, thus exemplifying what Graham Huggan defines as answering the Western expectations towards the ‘foreign other’ who should “operate not just as representers of culture but as bona fide cultural representatives … a function of their inscription in the margins, of the mainstream demand for an ‘authentic’, but readily translatable, marginal voice”106. Changez moves towards the murky realm of ‘orientalizing’ himself – becoming a self-professed cultural artifact signifying the contained ‘other’ within. He mixes jeans with a kurta, in this way arriving at the apex of exoticization but one whose appeal is checked by the unifying and standardizing symbolic of the American blue jeans. However, the adopted American overcoat begins to itch, which awakes insurgent impulses leading Changez to realize that he is “a modern-day janissary,” discovering in the figure of the janissary a reflection of himself and his dedication to Underwood Samson, the aggressively capitalist auditing company for which he has been working: There really could be no doubt: I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war. Of course I was struggling! Of course I felt torn! I had thrown in my lot with the men of Underwood Samson, with the officers of the empire, when all along I was predisposed to feel compassion for those whose lives the empire thought nothing of overturning for its own gain.107

Underwood Samson also lends itself to being critically investigated for the purposes of a discussion of the peculiar symbolics to which Hamid resorts profusely in his novel. The name of the company in its abbreviated form – US – might be perceived as a metaphor for America, especially once account has been taken of the rules on which it operates. With its relentless capitalism, pursuit of commercial success, and emphasis on the individual’s performance as contributing to the overall well-being of the entire organism, it is difficult to resist the temptation of

104 Hamid, 48. 105 Hamid, 48. 106 Huggan, Graham, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London: Routledge, 2001, 26 (emphasis in the original). 107 Hamid, 152.

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viewing the company as a depiction of the American democratic geopolitical apparatus. From a different perspective, Underwood Samson and the abbreviation US could be read as the institutionalization of the allegorically loaded image of “Uncle Sam” and the stern call for engagement in expanding the country’s might and power. Seen from such an angle, Changez’s growing reluctance to comply with the demands of US functions on two levels – the more immediate and personal, portraying his increasing sense of the pointlessness of the duties he is performing in the company, and at the more ambiguous and perhaps less tangible level of racial and political grievances, propelled by a realization of the dehumanizing and oppressive practices wielded against those whom he later on describes as “collateral damage” in the American struggle for hegemony in the global arena. Thus begins for Changez a painful and conflicted process of rediscovery of his Pakistani identity, accompanied by a desire to de-hybridize and purify himself by up-rooting himself from the arbitrarily imposed American system, and also re-routing himself, made evident by his turning away from the US in the direction of his homeland. The crucial moment for Changez’s evolution is the day of September the 11th, 2001, with the events which shook the world and called into question the so far dominant global order. The vicissitudes within the global networks of communication, cooperation and control generated by the 9/11 attacks reveal abjected traumas and silencings in American history, which, as both Anne Cheng and Mahasweta Devi emphasize, has been right from its very beginning marked by schizophrenia and constant backtracking on publicly professed ideals, in its reliance on exclusion, oppression, and favouring certain subjects over others108. The shock and incongruity of the attacks do not, however, lead to a reckoning with the past so as to make the America of the future a healthier nation, but rather bring about the militant wave of American patriotism and an outburst of suspicion and hatred towards that which cannot be fathomed and controlled. Nostalgia and a melancholic longing for a mythologized golden epoch of wellbeing, order and stability descend over political, cultural and literary discourses, occluding the capabilities of distinguishing where protection and safeguarding the country and its people end, and where hysteria begins.

108 Cf. Cheng, Anne Anlin, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001, 3–29, in particular 10–13, and Devi, Mahasweta, Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi, translated and introduced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, London: Routledge, 1995, ix–xii, in particular xi.

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America’s melancholia assumes the form of unceasing attempts to go back to a ‘better world,’ leading to a perpetuation of the practice of ‘retro-fitting’ which, by resorting to the popular discourse of American progressivism, aims at restoring the shaken-up integrity of the national spirit. As Changez observes: It seemed to me that America, too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia at that time. There was something undeniably retro about the flags and uniforms, about generals addressing cameras in war rooms and newspaper headlines featuring such words as duty and honour. I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World… . What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me – a time of unquestioned dominance? Of safety? Of moral certainty? I did not know – but that they were scrambling to don the costumes of another era was apparent. I felt treacherous for wondering whether that era was fictitious, and whether – if it could indeed be animated – it contained a part written for someone like me.109

The media vigorously participate in the process, conditioning people to constantly feel sad and angry, installing in those who defy the mainstream mode of conduct a sense of guilt and shame. Changez feels this from the very outset of the developments when in a hotel room he watches with incredulity the media coverage of the events. His reaction to what he sees but cannot make sense of further deepens his own uncertainty over who he is and what he should be doing: I turned on the television and saw what at first I took to be a film. But as I continued to watch, I realized this was not fiction but news. I stared as one – and then the other – of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased … at that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack … . – no, I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees. Ah, I see I am only compounding your displeasure. I understand, of course; it is hateful to hear another person gloat over one’s country’s misfortune. But surely you cannot be completely innocent of such feelings yourself. Do you feel no joy at the video clips – so prevalent these days – of American munitions laying waste the structures of your enemies?110

What follows in this part of the novel, probably the most disturbing and demanding, is a record of the descending mass hysteria about the ‘terrorist Arab’ – bearded, suspicious, not to be trusted and potentially carrying lethal weapons in his/ her personal belongings. Changez recounts the experiences of prejudice and resentment towards those originating from regions now marked as danger zones, 109 Hamid, 114–115. 110 Hamid, 72–73; emphasis in the original.

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including himself, which shortly acquire the more ominous form of outright violence and abuse. Thus the reader is made to acknowledge the growing difficulty of placing his/ her sympathies and an inability to determine who the actual villain is. The tension in Changez’s narrative escalates, on the plane both of his reminiscences and of real-time happenings. The goals of the American’s mission become more clearly revealed, just as Changez’s ulterior motives begin to surface. Still, dénouement is postponed, and the lack of a proper closure violates the norms of the thriller genre. The ending does nothing to satisfy the expectations one might have of a literary work, leaving the characters at the very brink of a decisive and irreversible turn of action, and the readers – in deadlock. Mohsin Hamid, when asked to explain the final impasse, confounded the expectant audience by saying that The Reluctant Fundamentalist is “a trial of trials” in which what is being tried is the totality of the processes by which we try. The statement, in the contemporary post-postmodern context, acquires a deeper purport the significance of which is all the more symptomatic in recent discussions on the relocation of global powerlines and, resultantly, on the transposition of sympathies and nexuses of withdrawal. However, the motivations and the outcomes of the acts to which they push the characters are at no time robbed of their unsettling purport. The very last paragraph of the novel only strengthens the sense of disbelief, anger, dissatisfaction, anguish, disappointment pertaining to a persistent lack of definitiveness: Ah, we are about to arrive at the gate of your hotel. It is here that you and I shall at last part company. Perhaps our waiter wants to say goodbye as well, for he is rapidly closing in. Yes, he is waving at me to detain you. I know you have found some of my views offensive; I hope you will not resist my attempt to shake you by the hand. But why are you reaching into your jacket, sir? I detect a glint of metal. Given that you and I are now bound by a certain shared intimacy, I trust it is from the holder of your business cards.111

Taken at face value, Hamid might be interpreted as presenting an account of an American undercover agent assigned to the task of assasinating a Pakistani ‘fundamentalist’ – thus, clearly, a potential terrorist. Chances are, and the novel does not at any point preclude these possibilities, that the American succeeds in what he intends to – or has to – do. When reference is made back to the present political war dialectic of victory and defeat, yet another line of convergence appears to spring up between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary,’ and in this context, Hamid’s novel might acquire yet graver and perhaps even ‘prophetic’ quality. 111 Hamid, 184.

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Zipping up the sleeping bag of oneself: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Literary responses to traumatic experiences vary in format and form, as well as in the practical and narrative strategies and solutions applied by the authors. Whereas DeLillo’s Falling Man answers quite thoroughly the ‘requirements’ of a post-9/11 novel of melancholy, with its focus on the story of a heterosexual couple whose relationship undergoes a crisis in the aftermath of the attacks, Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist moves away from this categorization, offering a different order of perspective and experience, which results from its at least partial reliance on the thriller genre. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (hereafter referred to as ELIC), returns to the mode of Nachträglichkeit novels, being however a work which aims to represent the working through of trauma, with different types of protagonists, subjectivities espoused by them, and temporal forms distinct from the novel of melancholy as exemplified by DeLillo’s Falling Man. Importantly, Foer’s ELIC stands out from the body of works grouped under the label “9/11 fiction,” being perhaps the only post-9/11 text to date which could indeed be categorized as a novel of mourning. Beverly Haviland ascribes this sparseness of novels of mourning to 9/11’s meaning being “not yet informed by much retrospective vision”112, contending that there must be “a period of latency before that change of meaning can take place”113. In this light, Foer’s novel acquires yet deeper significance as a relatively early post-9/11 work which has already managed to produce some retrospectival vision on the events through the creation of a temporal structure quite distinct from that typically employed by novels of melancholy. In the novel, set a year after the attacks, Foer creates a nine-year-old narrator, Oskar Schell, whose father Thomas died in the Towers. Oskar, an indefatigable adventurer, exhibits a wild imagination and a predilection for constantly inventing, creating and researching things, instilled in him by his father who had busied him with elaborate quizzes, mysteries and challenges which could only be solved by determination and watchfulness for clues that appear haphazardly in the most unusual of settings. Thomas Schell had frequently taken Oskar on adventure-seeking escapades, their last being the search for the ‘Sixth Borough’ of New York. The thrill from these outings kept Oskar preoccupied and focused; the search for the Sixth Borough, however, did not terminate with the ultimate 112 Haviland, Beverly, “After the Fact: Mourning, Melancholy, and Nachträglichkeit in Novels of 9/11,” in Gross and Snyder-Körber, 431. 113 Haviland, 431.

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discovery, and the project had been indeterminably suspended by Oskar. A year after 9/11, the boy still has not come to terms with his loss and the altered realities of his everyday life, with his “overactive imagination [becoming] a torture chamber”114. The Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit is crucial to understanding Oskar’s fragile condition, which results from his inability to assimilate the trauma of the worst day in his life. As Mitchum Huehls posits, following Freud’s theories, the ‘afterward-ness’ of trauma means that consciousness cannot absorb the traumatic event in the moment of its occurrence … [and] the time of the original event inflects all future times, thereby skewing temporal experience in general. Trauma is thus not of a moment, but instead spans an individual’s temporal continuum, constituting her past, present and future.115

Oskar’s obsessive-compulsive behaviour is a case in point here. Fixated on his loss, he initially cannot break the vicious circle of endless repetition of certain behaviours; his narrative, however, gradually moves away from that of a melancholic ego feeding upon itself, towards a transgenerational working through of mourning in order to finally arrive at recovery. ELIC, in contrast to novels of melancholy, constructs different subject/object relations played out on the level of narrators and characters – the novel employs multiple narrators who, apart from telling their own stories, also function as characters in the other narrators’ stories; moreover, it does not limit itself to the trauma of 9/11 but includes accounts of the Dresden firebombing of 1945 and the different paths Oskar’s grandparents’ survivals assumed. Through this, the novel presents both trauma’s continuum and its transference across generations, and the identification of new temporal forms that allow the narrators to move beyond their own traumas and losses in an efficient and productive way. As Huehls observes, the healing takes place through transgenerational shifting of subject/object positions so that a lost object in one narrator’s story can be ‘redeemed’ and successfully mourned when it is found and retrieved as an object in another narrator’s story116. In such a handling of a narrative of trauma, the temporal framework of the story is extended so that it can include an interlude that functions as a period of latency. When other generations can be produced in the future, then the subject-object relations produced by traumatic loss can be reconfigured in a different

114 Haviland, 434. 115 Huehls, Mitchum, “Foer, Spiegelman, and 9/11’s Timely Traumas,” in Keniston and Follansbee Quinn, 42. 116 Huehls, 43.

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story. They are displaced (metonymically) and thereby revealed. This is Nachträglichkeit writ on the scale of generations rather than the individual consciousness.117

In order to better grasp the “asymmetrical reciprocity”118 as a source of healing, it is vital to take a closer look at the three intertwining transgenerational narratives, i.e. the closely-linked stories of Oskar and his grandparents.

9/11, the Key Plot, and the Falling People: Oskar’s Story Richard Drew’s photograph of the ‘Falling Man’ and its potential to unsettle, already made use of by Don DeLillo, appears also in Foer’s work. The discussion which ensued following the publication of the photo and its subsequent disappearance from commercial media dwelt on issues related to photography and visual arts in general, and their ‘mission’ of at once serving the public good as a means of memorializing events and persons, and representing trauma in order to help overcome it. For some, following Roland Barthes’s and Susan Sontag’s119 discussions of photography and its relationship to death, it was indeed the best genre to capture the loss identified with and as 9/11; others, holding that the essence of photographs is their temporality, questioned the conviction that “one visual moment could unlock a whole narrative”120. Still, despite the debate over the quality and purpose of Richard Drew’s photo, it continued to fuel artistic imagination, perhaps even more so because it was officially stigmatized. The preoccupation with the figure of the ‘Falling Man’ is made manifest in Foer’s novel by inclusion of multiple pictures of an anonymous man in free fall, in various stages of descent, at various moments of the narrative. Whereas Don DeLillo’s use of the photograph consisted in a literary fictionalization of the Falling Man by giving the actual man, the actual victim, a peculiar copycat in the character of the performance artist David Janiak, Foer resorts to a less mediated and thus perhaps more direct application of the image. The symbolic resonance of the figure informs, or actually plagues, the entire discourse of the novel’s protagonist. A year after 9/11, Oskar still cannot recover from the loss, and is tormented also by his failure to answer the phone that day when his father called home three times, just minutes before the Towers collapsed. The boy’s guilt, however, 117 Huehls, 44. 118 Huehls, 44. 119 Cf. Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010 (1980); and Sontag, Susan, On Photography, London: Penguin, 2008 (1971). 120 Keniston, 194.

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prompts him to take action, which is, to establish the circumstances of his father’s death. Enticed by a secret key with the name ‘Black’ inscribed on it which he finds in his father’s closet – and fixating on it – Oskar embarks on a quest much in the manner of the mythical Telemachus, determined to find the lock the key fits and consequently, retrieve the missing elements in his knowledge of his father. Oskar’s quest, however, is not only for his father, who, despite the boy’s denial and much to his helpless anger, cannot be brought back. Oskar pursues predominantly knowledge and the right to know what his father’s last moments were. That knowledge has been arbitrarily denied him, in particular with regards to the short-lived publicization of images of people falling from the World Trade Towers. Oskar, plagued by the question of whether his father had been one of them, wants to gain symbolic understanding of the events with an as yet inexplicable but nevertheless overwhelming belief that “the more he knows, the more secure he will feel in his post-9/11 world”121. The lack of knowledge continues, daunting on the personal level and perpetuated by the policy of officials who take it upon themselves to decide for the citizens what is and what is not good for them and in their best interest. The state obstructionism takes particular toll on Oskar who attempts to learn more of the falling people, see their pictures, and read the relations of witnesses, but keeps running into an information barrier. Trying a different tack, Oskar googles “people jumping from burning buildings” in different languages and notes with irritation that “It makes me incredibly angry that people all over the world can know things that I can’t, because it happened here, and happened to me, so shouldn’t it be mine?”122 For Oskar, knowing is crucial. As he puts it: “I need to know how he died so I can stop inventing how he died. I’m always inventing”123. This knowing, however, comes with a perturbed obsession – to invent, to zoom in on images of falling people until the distorted pixels make it impossible to see anything, to avoid bridges and tunnels. Oskar’s compulsion to repeat situates him in the melancholic order whose dynamic leads to disavowal rather than healing. As Mitchum Huehls observes, Oskar, to prevent the skewed time of trauma from dominating his interactions with the world … must identify new temporal forms – new ways of incorporating time into his understanding of the world – that will move him beyond 9/11’s temporally traumatic effects.124

121 122 123 124

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Keniston, 47. Foer, 256. Foer, 256. Huehls, 42.

Oskar proceeds in his investigations, facilitated by a range of characters-helpers, including an elderly man whom he calls ‘Grandma’s Tenant’ and who, as their friendship develops, turns out to be his own grandfather. The novel abounds in similar re/discoveries and revelations, culminating in an anti-climactic moment when Oskar realizes that his pursuit of the lock will not take him any further and shifts his efforts to solving the mystery of the name “Black” and that person’s presumed relationship with his father. Still, he keeps a meticulous record of his adventures, experiences and findings in a journal, a flip-book he entitles Stuff that Happened to Me, including the series of photographs of the falling man. At the novel’s conclusion, Oskar removes the pictures from his journal only to re-attach them in an inverted order, with the result that flipping pages forward shows the falling man moving backwards, in defiance of fate. Significantly, the experience of the man’s backwards flight to safety extends beyond the narrativefictional world of Oskar – Foer includes the exact images as the last 15 pages of his actual novel, thus bringing Oskar’s Stuff that Happened to Me directly to the readers which, as noted by Huehls, renders the novel “performatively coextensive with Oskar’s journal”125. ELIC could also be perceived as memorializing the falling people and paying homage to them – not adding the last line that Szymborska talks about. A peculiar failure of knowledge, of language in particular, pertains to this aspect of the 9/11 tragedy, too – one thing that perplexed American officials and reporters was the question of the formal terminology that should be applied to those who jumped out of the Towers. As noted by Laura Frost, the New York Medical Examiner’s Office “called these people ‘homicides,’ refusing to use the terms ‘jumpers’ or suicides”126. Frost then cites a spokeswoman who stated that “a ‘jumper’ is somebody who goes to the office in the morning, knowing that they will commit suicide. These people were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out”127. The straightforwardness of these remarks is hard to question, though at closer scrutiny yet another, perhaps more troubling aspect of the victims’ act emerges. According to Frost, categorizing these people as ‘suicides’ conveys a suggestion that they actually willed their death, at the same time putting them on a level with “the other suicides of that day”128 – the perpetrators. The legitimacy of the comparison might be denied, depending on whether any degree of agency is granted the falling people. Following the thread of Oskar 125 126 127 128

Huehls, 43. Frost, Laura, “Still Life: 9/11’s Falling Bodies,” in Keniston and Follansbee Quinn, 188. Frost, 188. Frost, 189.

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Schell’s own reasoning, along the lines of the question he poses to himself – “Would I jump or would I burn?” – there might be the possibility of a heroic deed, of making what in the record of 9/11 has been called the ‘choiceless choice,’ as jumping out of the smouldering buildings meant meeting the very same fate as those who stayed in the Towers but on their own terms, not the terrorists’. As Frost aptly notes, the falling people remain a conundrum, a catch-22, because the real dreadfulness of the ‘jumpers’ is not captured by the still frame. It is what comes before and after: the drama of the compelled choice or suicide. The falling bodies have been seen, but they have not been understood; and their representation, by news sources and artistic forms alike, suggests a general desire that they remain beyond the reaches of understanding.129

Indeed, if – following Susan Sontag – a certain therapeutic function of photography is acknowledged, then viewing photographs, in particular these associated in the viewer’s mind with a memory of a painful experience, might help overcome trauma, defined psychoanalytically as a disorder of time. Laura Frost, drawing on Hirsch’s130 and Zelizer’s131 observations, states that photography can, by holding its ground temporally, give the viewer time to assimilate shocking circumstances. It is the temporality of the photograph – discontinuous time – that renders it powerful enough to represent ‘authenticity’ in historical circumstances that were surreal or unbelievable.132

Foer’s novel seems to at once contest and embrace this view. Initially, Oskar’s obsessive returning to the pictures of the falling man does not get him any further in finding out and understanding what happened to his father, thus trapping him in the “stunned present of traumatic time”133. The power of the photograph is not questioned; however, the effect it has on Oskar is not that of alleviating trauma but rather of melancholic haunting. It is only when Oskar comes up with the gravity-defying solution for the falling man – when he reverses the order of

129 Frost, 189. 130 See: Hirsch, Marianne, “I Took Pictures: September 2001 and Beyond,” in Trauma at Home: After 9/11, ed. by Judith Greenberg, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003, 69–86. 131 Zelizer, Barbie, “Photography, Journalism, and Trauma,” in Journalism After September 11, Zelizer, Barbie, and Stuart Allan, eds. New York: Routledge, 2002, 48–68. 132 Frost, 190. 133 Frost, 190.

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the pictures in his flip-book, thus turning the dreaded end into the beginning of the sequence. It proves to be a solution as close to satisfactory as Oskar can get, not fully satisfying but perhaps still more than one could actually wish for in the fragmented reality of the world after. It does seem to work for Oskar who, in the concluding pages of the novel, manages to confess to his mother about his father’s three calls from the Towers and the paralysing immobility that prevented him from answering the last call; he reconciles himself to the prospect of his mother falling in love again, sometime; and, along with the linear development of the story drawing to its end, he discovers his journal to be completely full which prompts him to a decision to “start a new volume soon.” Then, flipping forward the pages with the falling man and watching him move in reverse, he ponders to himself: And if I’d had more pictures, he would’ve flown through the window, back into the building, and the smoke would’ve poured into the hole that the plane was about to come out of. Dad would’ve left his messages backward, until the machine was empty, and the plane would’ve flown backward away from him, all the way to Boston… . I’d have said ‘Dad’ backward, which would have sounded the same as ‘Dad’ forward… . We would have been safe.134

Though the novel ends on a wistful note, it allows for an assumption that the work of mourning in Oskar’s case has been completed. Earlier in the book Foer signals Oskar’s taking a step towards the eventual acceptance of the loss of his father – or, in Freudian terms, of the ego’s beloved object – by his cathecting to a different object. The transference to the mysterious key and the displacement of his trauma from something as uncontrollable as the violent deaths caused by the attacks to a physically bound entity might be regarded as promising a potentially productive and enabling re/identification and recuperation.

Dresden Bombings, Loss of Speech, and the Unborn Child: Grandfather’s Story Although clearly Oskar’s narrative remains the dominant one in the novel, providing the most comprehensive take on the events before and after 9/11, his account is interrupted at several moments by fragments of Thomas Schell’s letters, written regularly for 40 years and addressed to Thomas Schell, Junior, his ‘unborn child.’ However, none of the letters in the massive collection has ever been sent – Thomas Schell, Senior, would only post empty envelopes, not daring to include in them his messages from across time and space. The passages in the novel 134 Foer, 325–326.

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containing Grandfather’s accounts are all entitled “Why I’m Not Where You Are,” and are attempts to come clean before his son, to explain himself to Thomas Jr., and to relieve at least some of his guilt and sense of failure at ‘not being able to be.’ The letters function also as a record of Thomas Schell’s life, beginning with his story when still in Germany, shortly before the bombing of Dresden during World War Two, which he survived and which he fled to America. Similarly to Oskar’s narrative, the Grandfather’s is also built around the central experience of trauma, the firebombing of Dresden, and in many ways resembles Oskar’s own grappling with tragedy and ensuing loss. The letters constitute a form of testimony and confession, exhibiting the nature of trauma and the peculiar workings of Freudian Nachträglichkeit in that the full impact of the traumatic experience hits the Grandfather belatedly, when he is already physically, spatially and temporally safe from danger and out of harm’s way in New York. Moreover, even though the letters he writes assume a degree of chronology and order, his account remains fragmented, dismembered, frequently jumping between past and present, and externalizing his anguish at going over his life again in the form of the text itself. Sometimes the letters on the pages slide into one another so that large parts of his narrative remain illegible, or are replaced by rows of digits by means of which Thomas Schell tried to communicate himself; sometimes the text is highlighted in red throughout the entire letter, or photographs of various objects are added; the flow of the story is also frequently interrupted by blank pages or pages with only one word or sentence written on them. Again, as in the case of Oskar’s narrative, through these inclusions Grandfather’s account becomes coextensive with the actual reading process as experienced by the reader. What is most characteristic about Grandfather and his story is probably his loss of speech, which could be viewed as a psychosomatic reaction to the belated experience of the trauma of the Dresden bombings. Significantly, he began losing speech shortly after arriving in America, and the process was gradual – words seemed to fail him one by one, starting with the name of his Dresden girlfriend, Anna: I couldn’t finish the sentence, her name wouldn’t come, I thought, how frustrating, how pathetic, how sad … it happened again two days later, and then again the following day, she was the only thing I wanted to talk about, it kept happening, when I didn’t have a pen I’d write ‘Anna’ in the air – backward and right to left – so that the person I was speaking with could see, and when I was on the phone I’d dial the numbers – 2, 6, 6, 2 – so that the person could hear what I myself couldn’t, myself, say.135

135 Foer, 16.

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‘Anna’ was followed by ‘and,’ ‘and’ by ‘want,’ and the aporia expanded to take yet greater toll on Thomas. For some time, though he lost ‘yes,’ he still had ‘no,’ so when wishing to answer a question in the affirmative he would say ‘not no,’ but then he lost ‘no,’ too, which led him to tattooing ‘yes’ and ‘no’ on his left and right palms, respectively. The loss which completed his silence was that of ‘I,’ and with that he began to keep blank notebooks and a pencil so that he could express himself in written form. He also devised a system which helped him maintain some of the small pleasures and rituals of the everyday, such as writing the lyrics of his favourite songs on his own body instead of singing in the shower, and the washing away of the words all over his body supposed to resemble the act of singing. With the loss of speech, he became as it were obsessed with words, sentences and exclamations, which flooded steadily growing numbers of notebooks, extending at times – for lack of paper – onto walls, ceilings, furniture, his own body, and those of the people he ‘spoke’ to. It was once he had already become silent that he met Grandmother, referred to in the letters to his child as ‘your mother.’ He stipulates that in fact it could have been his silence that had made their marriage possible – “she never had to know me”136. She was the one who approached him at the Columbian Bakery in New York: “You’ve lost everything,” she says, as if we were sharing a secret, “I can see.” … “It’s OK … Me too. You can probably see it from across a room. It’s not like being Italian. We stick out like sore thumbs. Look at how they look. Maybe they don’t know that we’ve lost everything, but they know something’s off.”137

At first she does not notice that Thomas doesn’t speak; when he breaks the news to her, she begins to cry, takes his notebook and writes on one of the blank pages: “Please marry me”138. He doesn’t believe her, and an exchange based on pointing to various already filled cards of the notebook ensues, culminating with Thomas’s pleading “Help”139. Their married life echoes the strangeness of their first meeting, showing both of them to be melancholically afflicted people. Thomas’s second letter to his child, dated May 21st, 1963, begins with a depiction of how they had to structure their lives in order to survive:

136 137 138 139

Foer, 28. Foer, 30. Foer, 32. Foer, 34.

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Your mother and I never talk about the past, that’s a rule. I never go to the bathroom when she’s using the bathroom, and she never looks over my shoulder when I’m writing, those are two more rules. I open doors for her but I never touch her back as she passes through, she never lets me watch her cook, she folds my pants but leaves my shirts by the ironing board, I never light candles when she’s in the room, but I do blow candles out. It’s a rule that we never listen to sad music … I change the sheets every morning to wash away my writing, we never sleep in the same bed twice, we never watch television shows about sick children, she never asks me how my day was, we always eat on the same side of the table, facing the window. So many rules, sometimes I can’t remember what’s a rule and what isn’t.140

The obsession with rules is made more acute with their creation of “Nothing Places” in which “one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist”141. Life according to such rules resembles grappling with the constraints of obsessivecompulsive disorder; still, for some time, they make it work. The date of the present letter, however, marks the day on which Thomas left Grandmother. His account does not make explicit the reason for his having to leave her but it can easily be inferred that it was a breach of the rules that had led to his decision. Before he gets to this point in his letter, though, Thomas goes back to his Dresden years, shedding light on the story of the love between him and Anna, who had been Grandmother’s older sister, and its sad conclusion. Thomas lost Anna in the bombing of Dresden; with her he had also lost his child, because she was pregnant, which she told him on the night of the air raid, the last time he saw her. In between the bombings, he goes out to look for her and sees terrible things: legs and necks, I saw a woman whose blond hair and green dress were on fire, running with a silent baby in her arms, I saw humans melted into thick pools of liquid, three or four feet deep in places, I saw bodies crackling like embers, laughing, and the remains of masses of people who had tried to escape the firestorm by jumping head first into the lakes and ponds, the parts of their bodies that were submerged in the water were still intact, while the parts that protruded above water were charred beyond recognition.142

The fact that Anna was Grandmother’s older sister already brings them close to one another, signalling a possibility of a new relationship, a new life, built on the ruins of the previous one, now lost. In a way, they save one another but it comes 140 Foer, 108. 141 Foer, 110. 142 Foer, 211.

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with an exorbitant price to pay, and life in the melancholic order turns out to be next to impossible. Thomas’s guilt, regret, and fear contribute to the realization that the span of one generation might be too little to overcome trauma: When your mother found me in the bakery on Broadway, I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I’d been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I’d be there with you now instead of here. Maybe if I had said, ‘I lost a baby,’ if I’d said, ‘I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,’ maybe that would have made the impossible possible… .  . And here I am, instead of there. I’m sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won’t be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to.143

The foresight granted to the reader makes Thomas’s account yet more bitter, pointing to a perverse circularity of trauma which opposes linearity and time’s forward push – the child he had been writing to all these 40 years would be lost to him, too. Having skipped a generation, the Grandfather returns, and the transgenerational transference of trauma places him back in New York on the day of 9/11, which is also the day when he wrote what he thought would be his last letter to his son. Shortly after the attacks, he’s walking around the city, reading the spontaneous mementoes that have sprung up everywhere, and he spots a poster saying, “ ‘Thomas Schell. Leaves behind a wife and a son,’ I thought, my son, I thought, my grandson”144. Two years after September 11, 2001, Grandfather finds himself writing yet another letter to his son: To my child: I wrote my last letter on the day you died, and I assumed I’d never write another word to you, I’ve been so wrong about so much that I’ve assumed, why am I surprised to feel the pen in my hand tonight? I’m writing as I wait to meet Oskar, in a little less than an hour, I’ll close this book and find him under the streetlight, we’ll be on our way to the cemetery, to you, your father and your son.145

In this final letter, the threads of Grandfather’s narrative are all finally bound together – having lost his son, a loss that he has not learnt (and will no longer able to learn) how to get over, he has found a grandson, a re(dis)covery which works both ways, proving perhaps that a loss incurred in one generation can be compensated for in another, even if there is a rift in between the size of an entire generation. In this way, both Oskar and his Grandfather go through periods of latency enabling them to cope with the trauma, and the compensation lies in the past and the future at the same time.  143 Foer, 216. 144 Foer, 273. 145 Foer, 267.

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Dresden Bombings, Forlorn Love, and Mysterious Renter: Grandmother’s Story The road to a final precarious recovery from trauma is a thorny one; Oskar’s grandmother has learned that the hard way, too. Also a survivor of the Dresden air raids, her life following the bombings had taken a course similar to Grandfather’s – she left Germany for America. Similarly to Thomas, she, too, writes letters, but hers, entitled “My Feelings,” are addressed to Oskar; moreover, her inclination to write letters goes back to her childhood when she received a 15-yeardelayed letter from a convict at a Turkish labour camp. Since that day, she has been asking everyone important to her to write to her, managing to gather a collection of a hundred letters: I had a letter from everyone I knew. I laid them out on my bedroom floor, and organized them by what they shared. One hundred letters. I was always moving them around, trying to make connections. I wanted to understand.146

Significantly, among her letters was also one from Thomas Schell: To Anna’s sweet little sister, Here is the letter you asked for. I am almost two metres in height. My eyes are brown. I have been told that my hands are big. I want to be a sculptor, and I want to marry your sister. Those are my only dreams. I could write more, but that is all that matters. Your friend, Thomas147

Her account proves complementary and indispensible to the Grandfather’s narrative in order to understand the entire story. Although their records overlap and basically tell the same history, each contains elements the other one lacks or purposefully conceals. She met Thomas again seven years after the bombing of Dresden, in which they both had lost everything: I walked into a bakery and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. I went right up to him. Are you Thomas? I asked. He shook his head no. You are, I said. I know you are. He shook his head no. From Dresden. He opened his right hand, which had NO tattooed on it. I remember you. I used to watch you kiss my sister.

146 Foer, 79. 147 Foer, 80.

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He took out a little book and wrote, I don’t speak. I’m sorry. That made me cry. He wiped away my tears. But he did not admit to being who he was. He never did.148

Soon afterwards this brief exchange she wants to leave, thinking of committing suicide by walking into the Hudson River “carrying the biggest stone I could bear and letting my lungs fill with water. But then I heard him clapping his hands behind me”149. With her suicide attempt forestalled by his stopping her, step by step, their relationship develops, manoeuvring over things forbidden to mention or to do. Looking for what she calls “an acceptable compromise”150, they agreed to live together, a decision negotiated on a scheme of meticulous regulations, the first rule laid down by Thomas being “No children.” In the following fragmented narrative, also maintained in a distinct manner and voice – short catalogue-like sentences, hardly any descriptions, and a curt, journalistic mode – it gradually is revealed how a misunderstanding with a child dressed up as a ghost on Halloween brought her to break the first and most important rule by realizing that she needed a child and consequently getting pregnant: One morning I awoke and understood the hole in the middle of me. I realized that I could compromise my life, but not life after me, I couldn’t explain it. The need came before explanations. It was not out of weakness that I made it happen, but it was not out of strength either. It was out of need. I needed a child. I tried to hide it from him. I tried to wait to tell him until it was too late to do anything about it. It was the ultimate secret. Life. I kept it safe inside me. I took it around. I wore loose shirts. I sat with pillows on my lap. I was naked only in nothing places. But I could not keep it a secret forever.151

The moment she tells him, eventually, she knows all too well this is the end of their compromising. No argument, no quarrel, no anger ensue; Thomas simply says that he is going to the airport to fetch her some newspapers, as he had done every weekend throughout their marriage – because she wanted to learn English, idioms in particular, but when she lifts his suitcase in which he’d always stock the papers, she finds it is heavy, far too heavy. She follows him to the airport, watches him from a distance, and finally approaches him, managing to persuade him to come home with her. Still, she fails to keep him, and the next day Thomas leaves definitely, and this time she does not dare to weigh his suitcase. She waits for him long into the night, and finally, giving up hope, sets free all of Thomas’s animals:

148 149 150 151

Foer, 81. Foer, 82. Foer, 84. Foer, 177.

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birds, fish, dogs, cats, insects, reptiles, and mice, a whole bunch of which he kept with him ever since he had had to kill wounded animals from the Dresden zoo on the night of the bombings. None of the menagerie came back. The penultimate chapter of Grandmother’s “My Feelings” takes up the events of ‘that day’ in September which, despite the tragedy, turns out to be also the day that begins the slow process of reconciliation. Quite in line with the shared American experience, 9/11 came as a bolt from the blue for Grandmother. She was watching a talk show on TV, which was interrupted by last-minute news that “something has happened in New York”152. Grandmother’s recollection of the events mixes the developing story of the attacks with her reminiscences of Thomas and of her father. A tense conversation with Oskar’s mother makes her realize that they both knew from the beginning what had happened to Thomas, who had been in ‘that building,’ without their naming the actual thing they were both so scared of. Grandmother rushes over to Oskar, finds him under his bed, and does all within her power to keep him from knowing, without as yet realizing that he, too, already knows everything but has decided to hide it “in the sleeping bag of [himself]”153. Oskar’s mother comes back, checks on Oskar, but fails to hide her anguish and fear. The two of them decide to make posters, which Oskar’s mother then takes downtown, again leaving Oskar with his Grandmother. They play games, go for a walk, and each of them senses the need to avoid talking about “what was on top of us”154. Oskar finally falls asleep, and Grandmother switches the TV on, giving in to the flood of images played over and over again, repeating the dreadful sequence obsessively to herself: Planes going into buildings. Bodies falling. People waving shirts out of high windows. Planes going into buildings. People covered in gray dust. Bodies falling. Buildings falling. Planes going into buildings155

She then recounts how she, too, collapsed finally when she no longer had to be brave for the sake of Oskar. Fixating on the image of Oskar’s mother making posters of Thomas, she gives in to the despair of seeing “fourty years of loving 152 153 154 155

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Foer, 224. Foer, 6. Foer, 230. Foer, 230.

someone become staples and tape”156. She concludes her account with the memory of Thomas’s funeral, which for Oskar was a ‘fake’ funeral because there was no body inside the coffin. After coming back home, she learns from the doorman that someone has left a note for her but initially she does not want to see it, not then, the next day, perhaps; but the doorman insists, so she eventually takes the letter and asks Oskar to read it out for her: I’m sorry, you said. Why are you sorry? No, that’s what it says.157

The note unleashes a torrent of emotion, taking her back to the fourty years she spent first hoping for Thomas to come back and then trying to forget him: I erased all of his writing. I washed the words from the mirrors and the floors. I painted over the walls. I cleaned the shower curtains. I even refinished the floors. It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over. I thought he had to look for what he was looking for, and realize it no longer existed, or never existed. I thought he would write. Or send money. Or ask for pictures of the baby, if not me. For forty years not a word. Only empty envelopes. And then, on the day of my son’s funeral, two words. I’m sorry. He had come back.158

In the account that follows, Grandmother adds the missing elements to Grandfather’s story of their reconciliation, with Grandmother refusing to share her grief with him. She declines, too, his plea of meeting Oskar, whom she warns not to speak to the ‘Renter’ should he ever see him. Aware that he is in no position to negotiate, Grandfather obliges and avoids direct contact with Oskar, but, with Grandmother’s permission, watches him one day hidden in a clothes’ closet, and discovers the depth of his own feelings for the boy who, somewhat uncannily, builds a transgenerational bridge over trauma, thus allowing Grandfather to gradually learn how to come to terms with the sense of loss within him. One day he and Oskar meet accidentally when Oskar comes frantic from his futile search for the lock and looks for his Grandmother but instead finds the ‘Renter’ in the apartment. Oskar recounts his story to Grandfather/the ‘Renter,’ at which point a

156 Foer, 230. 157 Foer, 233. 158 Foer, 233.

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doubling of knowledge and meaning occurs, because the record is already known to the reader from Oskar’s own narration, and in quite a similar vein it is already known to Grandfather, too, who, desperate to get to know his grandson without breaking the rule imposed by Grandmother, followed him everywhere during Oskar’s wanderings around New York in pursuit of the answers to the questions of his father’s death. It is also revealed in Grandfather’s record that Oskar’s mother, too, knew all about Oskar’s escapades and contacted all the people the boy was about to visit beforehand so that she could be sure he’d be out of harm’s way. At this point it becomes easier to perceive Oskar for who he actually was, his secrecy and self-professed conspiracy taken in the brackets of both his mother’s and his Grandfather’s protectiveness – a grieving lost boy unable to get over his father’s death, rather than a larger than life superhero alone against the world. It is also made clear that the final resolution of trauma takes its seeds in the figure of Oskar and his importance for his mother, Grandmother and Grandfather.

Oskar’s Story, Take Two “When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible”159 – in these words does Grandmother sum up her feelings for Oskar. However, with the knowledge yielded by the novel and its three distinct narrators, it appears that Oskar helped things make sense also for his mother, with whom he is finally reunited, and stood out as a redemptive figure for Grandfather, too. Only through combining the three narratives and working across generations, both temporally and spatially, was recuperation attainable. In this light it may be asserted that ELIC shows how trauma has been overcome, though it took time, though it hurt and left the personal universe of the protagonists forever altered and cracked. Working through mourning is especially evident when comparison is made to Don DeLillo’s novel. Falling Man presents only one perspective on the trauma of 9/11, relying on one major narrative, interrupted at times by a fragmented and debatable vision of the perpetrators, and through its use of the frame structure in the end it brings the protagonists back to the starting point, thus signalling an inability to break the circle of melancholy. In ELIC, each of the three narratives alone would also fail to efficiently fight the traumatic experiences because recuperation, though attempted, would still be incomplete and lacking in the regenerative substance necessary to make it work. It is only through connecting them and showing how each one is expanded and

159 Foer, 232.

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compounded by the other two that the tragedy can be left behind and seen as paving the way for a new future and a new life in a post-traumatized world. Just as one narrative alone is shown as being inadequate to cope with trauma, so does a reliance on a single genre, too, prove to be a partial solution in that it fails to offer a way out of melancholy, trapping the protagonists in a chain of nostalgic repetition. Also in this respect Foer’s novel makes use of innovative techniques which blur the divisions between different forms of artistic expression, challenging the more conventional, traditional approach to the novel and the act of reading itself. By means of graphic interruptions to the structure of the text, the implied passivity of reading gets broken and the reader is forced into an open relationship with the book as an interactive object making skilful use of its own physicality. Thanks to such devices, the reader experiences as if first-hand ‘the stuff that happened’ to Oskar, facilitating a fuller understanding of the boy’s story160. The novel was also made into a film, directed by Stephen Daldry and released worldwide around the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks161. The reception was, to say the least, ambivalent, Daldry coming in for heavy criticism on charges of ‘emotional exploitation’ of a tragedy which, according to some of the fiercest attackers, he attempted to exploit for the sake of commercial success. Other accusations included manipulation and misappropriation of a national calamity. At the same time, the film was nominated for some of the most prestigious film rewards, though in the end it won virtually none. The offence that was caused by the film echoes the earlier attacks on Richard Drew and his notorious photograph, because both works seemed to create an unhealthy interest in that which, for the common good, should be hidden from view. In both cases, the criticism appears to have been sparked by the sanctity discourse that began after the attacks, which allowed hardly any space for artistic meditations on the events, equating art with a sacrilegious tampering with tragedy. Within such a social climate, any artist deciding to take up the 9/11 problematics was stepping onto perilous terrain, and Daldry faced yet another challenge, namely the release of his film on the tenth anniversary of the the attacks. 160 The novel’s reaching out beyond its conventional(ised) borders makes a connection to yet another contemporary writer whose literary oeuvre extends perhaps even further than Foer’s formal experiments. In his 2007 novel The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk stretches the genre even more drastically, by building an actual museum hosting the representational world of the novel, thus allowing for an unprecedented experience of complementariness and metatextuality. 161 Daldry, Stephen, dir., Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, with Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, and Thomas Horn, Warner Bros., 2011.

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The film’s many critics, by allowing the debates of political and ethical propriety to perhaps cloud their evaluation, have overlooked several crucial questions, disregarding or significantly undermining the quality of acting, with a cast that includes Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock and Max Von Sydow, along with the powerful debut of Thomas Horn, who plays Oskar Schell. The claims about the film’s tasteless emotional manipulation and exploitation of the theme as a way to make money also seem somewhat exaggerated in that the film makes only very few direct references to the attacks, placing its emphasis visibly on Oskar and his quest and the question of his ‘extremely close’ relationship to his father. Technically, too, the film fares rather well in terms of camera work and shooting, and the director and his crew provide also a thorough reading of Foer’s novel, negotiating the effort to stay as true as possible to the original text and the structural demands of adapting a literary work for cinematographic purposes. Concessions and compromises obviously had to be made, but these only in rare cases turn out to the benefit of the film. The overall result is an insightful and powerful film stunted by the demands of Hollywood filmmaking policies and trapped in the still unresolved conundrum of how to speak about 9/11.

Memorializing – Museum (at) Work The conundrum of 9/11 extends to other areas, too. Following the initial shock of the tragedy and its unprecedented dimension, once the immediate emotions had settled, other aspects of the attacks’ aftermath surfaced. Gradually, the debate became dominated by questions of how to remember 9/11, especially by down-to-earth issues of what to do with the site of the tragedy in terms of everyday business practice. Naturally, such deliberations faced severe criticism from the bereaved families of the victims but the practical aspects could no longer be overlooked. The World Trade Center had been one of the economic hubs of New York, hosting companies, organizations, and enterprises of all sizes which employed thousands of people from all across the country. With the destruction of the Towers and their environs, these firms found themselves not only mourning their workforce, great numbers of which had perished in the attacks, but also deprived of physical space and facilities in which to conduct their operations. The challenge this situation posed proved to be difficult to negotiate, and for months consensus could not be reached about how to accommodate the seemingly contradictory needs – on the one hand, for a regeneration of business sites and workplaces, and on the other, for a suitable commemoration of the loss of human life. Any attempt at reconstruction had to be an extremely careful one, taking into consideration also the questions of what kind of message should be 90

sent out to the world, another dilemma which quickly divided officials, architects, and citizens alike. Some opted for a total reconstruction of the World Trade Center and a rebuilding of the Towers that would make them even higher than the original ones, a proposition which came in for heavy criticism from other groups on the grounds of arrogance and being a proud manifestation of having failed to learn any lesson from the attacks. From the opposite extreme, the suggestion that the entire site be closed off commercially and converted into a huge museum serving spiritual and commemorative functions exclusively eventually was also ruled out for its impracticality and impracticability. The ‘middle’ option – to try to balance a material restoration, which would allow at least part of the business activities to return to the site, with the creation of a comprehensive museum and memorial to the events – though seemingly level-headed and reasonable, did not satisfy all, either. Fears of too much tampering with Ground Zero emerged; among the doubts raised was the question of who would decide the border between commercial recuperation and preservation of the spiritually unique character of the site. A board of decision-makers was appointed, consisting of, among others, politicians, administrative officers and architects. A meticulous account of the bumpy road towards compromise is given by Michael Sorkin in his Starting from Zero: Reconstructing Downtown New York162 in which Sorkin, speaking from the perspective of a socially conscious architect, presents an overview of the origins of the plans and their gradual realization. Sorkin relates the stages of the design competition for the site in which a major rivalry developed between David Childs and Daniel Libeskind, at that time the already acclaimed and much pursued auteur of some of the world’s most famous modern structures, including the Jewish Museum in Berlin – the building “with the fourth dimension” – hailed as Libeskind’s masterpiece. It was Libeskind who won the master-plan contest, with his design praised for its putative lack of abstraction, its ‘deeply creative, organic relationship to the specificity of ground zero and its environment and meaning, as well as its accommodation of human needs and sensibilities … profoundly user-friendly on all levels … a miracle of creativity, intelligence, skill, and cutting-edge architectural thought’163.

162 Sorkin, Michael, Starting from Zero: Reconstructing Downtown New York, New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 163 Trachtenberg, Marvin, quoted in Sorkin, 130.

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Libeskind himself remarked that “it was almost as if he had won ‘a ticket to oblivion’”164. Despite winning the contest, eventually his design only served as a starting point for The National September 11 Memorial and Museum. Architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker were responsible for the memorial’s final look, which departed quite substantially from Libeskind’s original propositions. Critics who observed and analysed the process leading up to the founding of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum voiced some important doubts, though. The most divisive concern proved the question of the pedagogical value and function of the memorial, especially in the context of a generally acknowledged pedagogical factor inherent in the nature of similar, state-embraced sites. Seeing that both museums and memorials, especially those officially run and dedicated to historical events, are normally designed to teach a certain lesson and put across an easily-graspable cautionary message, heated debates arose around the issues of what ‘lesson’ the National September 11 Memorial and Museum should teach, what kind of audience it should be oriented to, and how it should function from a practical point of view. In an effort to describe at least tentative solutions, E. Ann Kaplan and Karen Engle highlighted the unavoidable problem with 9/11, trying to weigh against one another the two conflicting aspects of the attacks165. The individual/personal loss was devastating and the attacks led to deaths of thousands of innocent people, but in the dimension of global political and economic relations, the aspect of America’s guilt and/or responsibility could not be so easily ignored. Seeing that a memorial should ideally be apolitical and above divisions, the obvious difficulty was the practical solution to the question of how, then, to keep it from bias, prejudice and the risk of presenting history from a compromised perspective. In its official Mission Statement, The National September 11 Memorial and Museum thus attempts to answer these concerns: The Mission of the Memorial Museum, located at the World Trade Center site, is to bear solemn witness to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and February 26, 1993. The Museum honors the nearly 3,000 victims of these attacks and all those who risked their lives to save others. It further recognizes the thousands who survived and all who demonstrated extraordinary compassion in the aftermath. Demonstrating the consequences of terrorism on individual lives and its impact on communities at the local, national, and

164 Libeskind quoted in The Huffington Post, . 165 Cf. Kaplan, Ann E., Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005; and Engle, Karen, Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009.

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international levels, the Museum attests to the triumph of human dignity over human depravity and affirms an unwavering commitment to the fundamental value of human life.166

Bearing in mind that professed ideals and their practical application frequently do not go hand in hand, one might ask, how effective a response it actually is, especially once account has been taken of yet another disturbing aspect of communal appropriation of memory and the nationwide effort to recover. As with most sites of terror and suffering turned memorial, the 9/11 museum has become a destination for masses of people wishing to see, to experience, to pay tribute, and to commemorate, a desire probably as old as humankind itself. Recently, though, the ethics of pursuing such a ‘pilgrimage’ has been marred by the globalizationsponsored commodification of the experience and the emergent ‘disaster industry’ with its aggressive promoting of tourist expeditions to sites of historical grief and mourning. 9/11, too, has already become a trademark, with various items of 9/11 merchandise sold at the Museum Shop and online. Again, the management of the Museum has taken care to respond to this concern, as well: All net proceeds from our sales are dedicated to developing and sustaining the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Thank you for helping to build a lasting place for remembrance, reflection, and learning for years to come. The Memorial and Museum are only possible through your support.167

To a certain degree, the statement helps to alleviate fears of compromising the tragedy by exploiting it for material gain. Whether the practical policy solves the issue thoroughly, though, is bound to remain disputable. Still, perhaps the progressing fetishisation of the experience is in fact part of recovery168, similarly as was the case of the Berlin Wall. Now, the defunct wall – perhaps more singularly than serving as a grim and painful memento – has been transformed into one of the city’s tourist attractions, with tiny bits of it added to postcards, pens, keylocks etc., and larger blocks being bought up by hotels that then install them as permanent exhibits in their courtyards, with the Westin Grand hotel in Berlin providing a very apt illustration169.

166 167 168 169

See: http://www.911memorial.org/mission. See: http://www.911memorial.org/catalog. Cf. Engle, Seeing Ghosts. The Westin Grand–Berlin in Friedrichstrasse; the plaque installed on the Wall’s segment reads: “Das Mauersegment ist Eigentum des Hotels. Beschädigungen sind untersagt. This section of the Wall is the property of the hotel. Damage prohibited.” QR code has been installed on the reverse side of the segment, which can be scanned with a mobile device (smarthphone, iphone, tablet etc.) in order to access more information.

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Fig. 4-5.  The Westin Grand–Berlin; the author’s own archive

Fig. 6.  The Westin Grand–Berlin; the author’s own archive

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Assuming a more distanced and broader perspective, a question of a different sort emerges. What is going to be the future of museums? Is it going to remain as tightly linked to official state policies and public discourses as the example of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum shows? Or does it lie elsewhere altogether, perhaps? Which course will prove most effective and productive for the inherent human need to exhibit and/or collect objects, experiences, events, and histories?

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Chapter Two: Of Orhan Pamuk’s Delightful Obsessions Introduction Ever since the founding of the first official museum in the sense by which it continues to be understood today – the Capitoline Museum Complex in Rome, whose history can be traced back to 1471 – museums have come to constitute an integral part of human culture, providing a mirror to changes taking place within, beyond and across civilizations. Attempts to determine the original ‘spark’ that led to the establishment of the institution of the museum must take various forms – was it first and foremost human curiosity and an appetite for the foreign, or rather a sense of pride at that already in possession and a desire to make it known in order to inspire awe and envy in others? Or should that initial impulse be sought for rather in a sense of mission and responsibility towards one’s own culture and the general good of humankind? Or, perhaps, was it a need derived from something much more mundane, or possibly even sinister? The peak of museum development and expansion coincides with the era of colonialism and colonization, which gives rise to several considerations. Some of the world’s most renowned museums, e.g. the British Museum in London and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, have long faced criticism regarding the legitimacy of some of their acquisitions, including the Pergamon Altar and the Market Gate of Miletus, transported in pieces from Turkey and reassembled in Berlin, and the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon on permanent exhibition in the British Museum. Repeated calls for restitution of the monuments to their countries have been made, gaining support from a range of international organizations and independent societies. Perhaps the most notable illustration of the rampant (mis) appropriations of antique objects is the case of Heinrich Schliemann’s second wife Sophie wearing the supposed ‘Jewels of Helen,’ a story Schliemann himself liked to tell frequently. Although the seizure of artefacts and their shipment to European museums has contributed to the charge of museums’ and their management boards’ complicity in perpetuating the violence of colonization and colonial exploitation – or in fact the exploitation not only of colonized countries but also those otherwise subjugated – a counterargument in the debate might be the call for proper preservation of sites of historic or natural heritage which in their regions are not always well handled. Accounts abound of ancient stones and other artefacts 97

put to all sorts of stray uses by local communities who often accidentally stumble upon them, while the gravest example of abuse and disrespect is probably the notorious case of the Taliban’s tearing down the colossal Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, a globally condemned act of violence perpetrated on an official UNESCO World Heritage site. Similar are the recent proud announcements publicized by Daesh of the destruction of antique sites in Iraq – the temple at Nineveh, the ancient city of Nimrud – and the museum in Mosul which hosted ancient Assyrian statues; in Syria where they blew up the larger part of the Palmyra archaeological site, after beheading the site’s antiquities director. Neither Nineveh, Nimrud, Palmyra, nor the Bamiyan Buddhas could have been transported to a more peaceful location, but this practice has proved viable and beneficial for many other monuments discovered in politically unstable or impoverished regions, without the proper means – and consciousness of their importance – to preserve and protect them. The debate continues, though, especially now that many afflicted countries are beginning to realize the significance and value of archaeological finds within their borders and are making attempts to regain at least some of them. For instance, by bringing the issue up at the International Court of Justice in the Hague Turkey is now officially trying to take back from Germany the Great Altar of Pergamon, the most impressive remaining monument of the ancient city of Pergamon, which was one of the seven churches of Asia mentioned in the Book of Revelation (with the other six, Ephesus, Smyrna, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea, also lying within the present-day territory of Turkey). Still, museums function above these debates, and to a large degree fare relatively well. By providing widely accessible centres of education, research and development, community building and art sensitization, they contribute to the shaping of a culture-conscious modern society. Mixing various functions and offering often alternative forms of fun and entertainment, museums serve as sites catering to all ages and walks of life. Recently, museum-going has become very much ‘in vogue,’ especially in the West, with a weekend visit to one of the many museums ‘on offer’ seen as a respite, also owing to its more ‘social’ aspect such as meeting friends and family, going for lunch etc. A visitor’s personal development, a museum’s foremost function, is thus easily achieved in a pleasant and stimulating atmosphere carefully provided by the museum management in the shape of cafes, restaurants, and various ‘events’ taking place along with the permanent exhibitions. Long waiting lines at ticket windows or the chance to book one’s ticket in advance via museum online website seem to testify to the continuing popularity of museums. 98

This popular role of museums has however also spawned some controversy. Charges of consumerism, reductionism, an all-too-easy attitude to art, history, and culture, with the result that they come to constitute just another product to be, sometimes literally, consumed (consider, for example, gingerbread cookies made to the likeness of William Shakespeare’s face and sold successfully by the museum shop at the Globe Theatre in London) have been recently brought against the ‘fun’ aspect of the modern museum. Still, if account is taken of the overall picture of what a ‘full’ life has gradually come to mean for ever-growing numbers of individuals, such opinions can easily be dismissed as signs of backwardness and falling behind the times. One important factor is frequently overlooked, though. The profile of an eager museum-goer usually identifies him/ her as middle-class, educated, and widely travelled, pointing to a deep rift between developed and developing countries. In the former, attending museums, art galleries, operas and theatres has evolved into an expensive, though worthwhile, pastime, and something of a privilege, too, promising a broad range of positive emotions – elation, exultation and pleasure, for which one is willing to pay exorbitant sums of money, wait in long lines, or even travel from far off to see a particular exhibition or watch a particular opera performance. Developing countries still seem to struggle to assign a proper value to such experiences, and to culture in general. Often having to cope with state turmoil, budget deficits, and political turbulence, the governments and ruling classes of the developing countries tend to put culture and its institutions on the back burner, or, assuming a different strategy which ultimately, however, leads to the same result, they subsidize cultural institutions, relieving them of taxes and other obligations, thus allowing for low ticket prices, hoping to draw in large audiences. Cheap tickets, though, usually mean cheap quality, and audiences frequently enough fail to value the opportunity, assuming that if something is cheap or free, e.g. school trips requiring compulsory participation, it is simply not worthwhile. In this way, museums and other cultural institutions, along with how they are structured and how they operate, might be seen to reflect the structuring and management of countries and states. By extension, though more tentatively, it may be supposed that the condition of museums in general is commensurate with the condition of a given country, with its complex of preoccupations and spheres of interest. But what happens when a novelist is himself a collector, and builds an entire narrative on the basis of his collector’s experience? And, to make matters more complex yet, what if this collecting cuts across continents, decades, and realities, one reality being the ‘concrete’ one of the author’s own experience, the other the imagined universe of that author’s protagonists? That collecting is in fact obsession’s 99

next-of-kin has already been suggested, in both literary and theoretical works, and since obsession frequently emerges as a response to an internal(-ized) denial of reality, a close link between collecting and melancholia might be established, with the unwillingness to move on exhibited by a stubborn attachment to stray objects. Perhaps collecting, however, could also be approached from a different perspective, according to which the practices constituting the collector’s activities might be seen as a form of praising, commemorating and celebrating life, love, and everyday existence, the ordinary and the familiar. Such a celebration of the quotidian becomes Orhan Pamuk’s main preoccupation in his 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence, or at least one of the aspects of his agenda in writing this work. As the author himself reveals, The Museum of Innocence is “a novel … about life and family with its narrative built around the Keskin family’s and Füsun’s belongings”170, at this point only vaguely signalling the actual scope of his endeavour which relied heavily on “collecting from antique shops in Istanbul the objects that the Keskin family would use”171. Raiding flea markets merely for the sake of buying second-hand odds and ends would not satisfy his budding conception of the entire project; Pamuk planned to go much further and take his idea to greater heights. His artistic plan entailed a simultaneous bringing to life of two entities – the novel and the actual museum, one coextensive with the other, though being apparently autonomous. What fuelled him was “the thrill of explaining to visitors a life, with all its paraphernalia, many years after it was lived”172, and against all odds the thrill, in the end, proved sufficient to put his idée fixe into existence. Indeed, adversities proliferated during the time Orhan Pamuk was working on the novel and museum project, and apart from those easier for a writer to domesticate there were others, more sinister and threatening to the endeavour. In the years 2005–2006, Pamuk was under growing political suspicion which ultimately led to his being charged with insulting Turkishness, and tried. The trial, despite its outcome, i.e. Pamuk’s acquittal, made it difficult for the writer to move freely in Istanbul, which was vital to his collecting activities while gathering material for the project of The Museum of Innocence. As he found, the scale of his enterprise was much more complex and problematic than he had originally assumed, a realization which still came to him as a surprise. Seeing the essence of his project as nearly genially simple – along the 170 Pamuk, Orhan, The Innocence of Objects, trans. from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap, New York: Abrams, 2012, 17. 171 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 17. 172 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 11.

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lines of the exclamation, “Why has no one else ever thought of something like this, of bringing together a novel and a museum in a single story?”173 – Pamuk persevered in his designs and finally, in April 2012, The Museum of Innocence on Çukurcuma Caddesi in Istanbul opened its doors to the public, while the novel had been published already four years earlier. Musing on the question why creating the museum was such a pressing matter for him, Pamuk himself admitted that no reasonable answer came to his mind, and resorted to “an explanation like one from the Arabian Nights”174: Some spirit possessed me and almost forced me to make this museum. Aladdin had been scared of the genie that came out of the lamp, but what I was doing was making me happy, so I should consider myself lucky175.

That’s a rather modest remark for a Nobel Prize Laureate who spent the lion’s share of his prize money turning his dream into reality, but judging by the totality of the enterprise, it seems that Pamuk is simply telling the truth. Moreover, the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul affords a genuine feeling of vertigo, both to the curious visitor and seemingly to Pamuk himself, surprised at the eventual success of his endeavour. Still, despite Pamuk’s assertion that “the museum is not an illustration of the novel, and the novel is not an explanation of the museum”176, the two work best in tandem. The novel after all not occupy the strongest position in Pamuk’s oeuvre. Some 700 pages long, it loses momentum halfway through the story; from the very beginning it gives the impression of being somewhat chaotic and repetitive, though this perhaps could be accounted for by looking at it as a study of the obsession and compulsion of the main protagonist, Kemal. It lacks, however, the political agenda and involvement that have become Pamuk’s trademark since his 1990 novel The Black Book177, or the socio-cultural impetus of Snow178 (2002). Nor is the plot its strongest asset – spanning two decades, it recounts a plain love affair between Kemal, the heir to an already somewhat faded aristocratic family of Istanbul, and his distant cousin Füsun, daughter of a working-class father and a seamstress mother, and Kemal’s ensuing obsession as a result of his unrequited affection. Probably the novel’s greatest merit is its panorama of everyday life in

173 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 52. 174 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 255. 175 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 255. 176 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 18. 177 Pamuk, Orhan, The Black Book, translated by Maureen Freely, London: Faber, 2006. 178 Pamuk, Orhan, Snow, translated by Maureen Freely, London: Faber, 2004.

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Turkey in the 1980s, and its strength lies in the scale of the endeavour and in the minutiae of the protagonists’ lives captured down to their tiniest and most intimate details. The meticulousness of description and representation seems to stem from Pamuk’s self-professed artistic heritage – ever since his youth, Pamuk has been under the sway of the great Russian realists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and he cites Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky as his most influential inspirations; like them, he has always believed in the grand novel which, apart from telling a powerful story (like Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov), paints a multidimensional and memorable socio-cultural portrait of the reality in which this story takes place. With Pamuk, however, the case is somewhat more complicated – working in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, he realizes acutely that it is no longer possible to write novels as the great realists used to, not after Barthes’s declaration of the death of the author, and not in the era of (post-)postmodern restructurings. At this point, a particular problem arises, of which Pamuk is apparently aware but nevertheless unable to resist the nostalgic craving for a realist novel ‘of old’ – he remains torn between realism and postmodernism, to the latter style belonging sort of arbitrarily, and with the former tradition affiliated by choice and preference. His straddling of these two traditions results in a peculiar mix of writing styles, literary solutions and strategies which, though at times they complement one another, might also create a resonance in his novels, appreciated by some readers, faulted by others, of being ‘not quite’ one thing or the other. Yet another issue comes up when discussing Orhan Pamuk’s literary heritage. Despite his chosen subscription to the tradition of the realist novel, it cannot be said of Pamuk that he grew up in this tradition, which would legitimize his conviction of the affinities between his writing and that of the great realists he admires and respects. Being Turkish, Pamuk belongs to quite a different circle of cultural traditions the heritage of which – though rich and time-honoured, including forms such as the social vignettes of the Kutadgu Bilig by Yusuf Khas Hajib from the 11th century179, the 13th-century folktales of Nasreddin Hoca, and the Ottoman divan poetry – contains neither examples of fiction nor any clear analogies to European genres, e.g. romance, short story, and novel. The 19th century literature of Turkey came to rely heavily on French models, which resulted from the political closeness between the countries in this period. In the second half of the 19th century – along with the progressing westernization

179 This work is not originally Turkish but has commonly been treated as belonging to the body of Turkish literature.

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of Turkey – many French literary forms penetrated the Turkish literary scene, affecting authors who wrote under the influence of the French Realist and Naturalist movements. Yet another significant turn in literary orientation came with the turmoil of the Turkish War of Independence and the ensuing period of great reforms of Mustafa Kemal, later hailed as Atatürk, or “Gazi” – the ‘Hero’ – which eventually led to the formation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The literary scene at that time reflected both nascent nationalist sentiments and a peculiarly Turkish split between a yearning for an autonomously Turkish identity and a desire to ‘catch up’ with the West, to a large extent dictated by Mustafa Kemal himself and his far-reaching modernizing vision. Perhaps the most notable figure on the Turkish literary scene in the postWorld War II era was Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, poet, critic and novelist, who is considered the precursor of Turkish literary modernism. His 1949 novel Huzur180 (English translation A Mind at Peace, 2008, Archipelago Books) occupies today an iconic status in the body of Turkish literature, and Tanpınar’s influence – exerted on the level of themes, plot, style and mood of writing (the notorious Turkish melancholy, or hüzün) – has been frequently acknowledged by Orhan Pamuk. What is especially interesting about Tanpınar is that he was writing during the times when Turkey was undergoing a difficult transformation from – and actually doing away with – its Ottoman past with its cultural and historical legacy, to an ultra-modern European country, a revolution which entailed radical changes in virtually all spheres of the nation’s functioning, including a transition from the old administrative systems to ‘new’ French models of government, as well as a shift from the Ottoman-Arabic script to the ‘new’ Latinized Turkish alphabet. Tanpınar could easily move within both, an ability which meant decisively more than just knowing how to read and write in that it sensitized him to the two mentalities, apparently at war with one another in the period of Atatürk’s republic-building. A case similar to Tanpınar’s is that of Irfan Orga, a highly educated Turkish officer, born into a wealthy Ottoman family from Istanbul. Like Tanpınar, Orga experienced the transition first-hand; he, too, turned to writing. Orga, however, left Turkey in 1947, never to return. He fled to the UK where he had earlier fallen in love with a Norman-Irish woman which was the reason why he could not come back to Turkey – marriage to a foreigner was then a criminal offence. In 1950 he published, to rave reviews, his powerful memoir Portrait of a Turkish Family181,

180 Tanpınar, Hamdi Ahmet, A Mind at Peace, translated by Erdağ Göknar, New York: Archipelago Books, 2008 (1949). 181 Orga, Irfan, Portrait of a Turkish Family, London: Eland, 2006 (1950).

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written in English. The autobiography has since earned universal acclaim, and – though it focuses on World War One, specifically on the war’s impact on Turkish upper-class families like his own – remains, alongside Tanpınar’s Huzur, one of the most noteworthy Turkish literary works of the period. Among contemporary Turkish novelists read worldwide, apart from Orhan Pamuk mention should be made of Adalet Ağaoğlu, author of the trilogy Tight Times, which explores the changes in Turkish society between the 1930s and the 1980s; Yaşar Kemal, a long-standing candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his Memed, My Hawk182; Oya Baydar, a Turkish sociologist and writer involved in socialist activity who lived in exile in Germany from 1980 to 1992; and Latife Tekin, probably the best known Turkish feminist author, who writes in the magic-realist style. From a younger generation, one that experienced yet a different kind of revolution, i.e. the mass migration of Turks to Germany in the second half of the 20th century, note should be taken of Feridun Zaimoğlu, born in Turkey in 1964 but living in Germany since 1965. Novelist, poet, and visual artist, Zaimoğlu concentrates in his works on the problems encountered by the second and third generations of Turkish immigrants to Germany. Against this background, Orhan Pamuk strikes a distinct figure, owing not only to his international recognition and fame, but also to his acutely pronounced sensitivity to Turkish national complexes and anxieties, an awareness of which brought him to court in 2005 (under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which states that: “A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months to three years”). The ensuing trial electrified intellectual and political circles in Turkey and abroad, and cast doubt over the conditions of Turkey’s joining the European Union, which were then under negotiation. Though the charges against Pamuk were dropped in 2006, the case became an eye-opener for international observers, intellectuals, and politicians alike, shedding light on the paper-thin quality of the supposedly guaranteed freedom of speech in Turkey, which was vouchsafed also by Turkey’s ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Following the trial, Orhan Pamuk received death threats, and the state assigned him a bodyguard to ensure his safety. The pressure on Pamuk escalated, which led him to leave Turkey for some time, but that in turn made it difficult for him to go on with his museum project as he no longer could wander

182 Kemal, Yaşar, Memed, My Hawk, translated by Edouard Roditi, New York: New York Review of Books, 2005 (1961).

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through Istanbul street shops in pursuit of objects for his museum. Still he persevered, and his determination yielded palpable results. In a sense, it may be said of Orhan Pamuk that – with his identification with Russian and French realism and his simultaneous embrace of postmodern playfulness and experimentation – he is creating his own theory and philosophy of the novel. Drawing on his own experience of reading and writing novels, in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist Pamuk sets out to clarify what he sees as the nearly organic link between museums and novels, starting from the premise of the feeling of insufficiency or insatiability, the more severe the better the novel at the reader’s perusal183. “In order to relieve this particular frustration,” Pamuk goes on to explain, “novel readers want to validate the fictional world with their own senses even though they know that much of what they are reading has originated in the writer’s imagination”184. To support his claim, Pamuk gives the example of an annotated version of Anna Karenina which gave a range of practical information that “Tolstoy neglected to include”185. Further elaborating on the reader’s wish to “believe in [the story] even more and, just for a moment, to forget [their] feelings of disappointment and insufficiency”186, Pamuk identifies with the reader and acknowledges how we want to visit the streets and houses where the events take place. Contained within this desire is the urge to better understand the world of the novel and, in equal measure, to see that everything is ‘exactly as we imagined.’ Seeing l’image juste – evoked by the novelist using le mot juste – in real streets, homes and objects not only helps to alleviate the feeling of insufficiency we get from the novel, but also fills us readers with the pride of having imagined the details correctly.187

Here, Pamuk reveals what for him is the ultimate connection between novels and museums – for him, it is this pride exactly that constitutes novels’ and museums’ affinity: “This kind of pride and its variations are the shared feelings that link novels and museums, or novel readers and museum visitors”188. Exploring the affinity in more depth, Pamuk draws an analogy between the development of museums and the transitions in literary genres, highlighting “the 183 Pamuk, Orhan, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist: Understanding What Happens When We Read and Write Novels, trans. from the Turkish by Nazım Dikbaş, London: Faber, 2011, 124. 184 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 124. 185 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 126. 186 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 126. 187 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 128. 188 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 128.

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process by which epics and romances about the adventures of kings and knights gave way to novels, which deal with the life of the middle classes”189. He notes also one more important feature of novels, i.e. their archival quality, another point of convergence linking them to museums: Just as museums preserve objects, novels preserve the nuances, tones and colors of language, expressing in colloquial terms people’s ordinary thoughts and the haphazard way in which the mind skips from one topic to the next. Novels not only preserve words, verbal formulas and idioms, but they also record how they are used in daily exchanges.190

The core of the affinity, though, lies in “preservation, conservation and the resistance to being forgotten”191. The explanation Pamuk gives for this claim further legitimizes his own “Museum of Innocence” project in that he dwells on the pleasure that the sense of a past well preserved gives to novel readers and museum visitors alike, with the awareness, however, that these two kinds of pleasure – though essentially similar – differ from one another in terms of what the object of preservation is: in the case of museums, things and artefacts in their own right, whereas in the case of novels, “encounters with those objects … [and] our perception of them”192. One’s capacity to creatively encounter and perceive objects, their beauty and uniqueness leads also to the realization of one’s difference from others, another tenet of the experience of both novels and museums which – in turn – relates back to the possessiveness implied in the act of engaging with them. Such involvement, however, remains fraught with conflicts having to do with questions of representation and politics. Pamuk notes that while political issues affect museums more indirectly than they do novels, the extent of their influence on the latter might be “boundless” because “the novelist becomes political in the very effort to understand those who are different from him, those who belong to other communities, races, cultures, classes and nations”193. The problem, however, Pamuk goes on to say, affects more the non-Western countries, where the issue of whom and what to represent can be a nightmare for literature and for novelists. The obvious reason is that writers in poor non-Western countries often come from the upper classes. Their use of the Western genre known as the novel, their cultural

189 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 129. 190 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 132. 191 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 135. 192 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 136. 193 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 145.

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affiliation and engagement with a different segment of society, and their relatively limited audience are factors that exacerbate the problem.194

Here Pamuk appears to be talking also about himself and his own predicament, revealing what he calls his “personal prejudice” against American novelists “for their lack of constraint, for the confidence and ease with which they write – in short, for their naïveté”195. Seeking an explanation for his bias, Pamuk establishes that it might result from the conviction shared by writers and readers alike that they come from “the same class and community”196 which gives American novelists the privilege to “write … simply for their own satisfaction”.197 Pamuk, at least partially deprived of this possibility, puts forth a singular diagnosis of his determination to conclude the Museum Project, saying that since he “can no longer write solely for pleasure … [he is] creating a museum purely for [his] own happiness”198. In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard commented that “the museum, instead of being circumscribed as a geometric site, is everywhere now, like a dimension of life”199. Pamuk, explaining how his own museum is going to operate, asserts that the logic of my museum must be that wherever one stands inside it, it should be possible to see the entire collection because all the objects in my museum can be seen at the same time from any perspective.200

This remark reveals the scope of the endeavour, locating it within the space granted the modern museum, the sphere which breaks the confines of the divisions between ‘life’ as experienced first-hand and that represented by the frozen reality of conventional museum display. The present chapter, by relating Pamuk’s unprecedented act of creation to contemporary debates on the present and future of museums and museum studies, attempts to investigate issues of authorial intention and motivation, and the potential limits of the author’s ability to intervene in the reception and perception of his/her work. It aims to probe the

194 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 146. 195 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 146. 196 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 146. 197 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 146. 198 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 149. 199 Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994, 8. 200 Pamuk, Orhan, The Museum of Innocence, trans. from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, New York: Faber, 2010, 712.

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shifting grounds of the (post-)postmodern condition in an effort to dismantle the intertwining threads of Pamuk’s narrative and its physical extension, in order to show how the ultimate love story, the minute record of an individual’s everyday life in a post-imperial metropolis, and the testimony of compulsion come together in the joint “Museum of Innocence Project,” signalling a ‘Third Space’ in which the personal and the seemingly insignificant acquire legitimization and autonomy. The analysis, informed by the tradition of museum(-ification) studies, as developed by Benedict Anderson and Stephen Greenblatt201, endeavours to assess whether and to what degree the proposed arguments and hypotheses, along with the current state of research, corroborate, transcend or contend the original mode of thinking about and imagining the museum as a broadly understood cultural repository of artefacts and a warehouse of past, present and future cultural scenarios. In what follows, Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence will be approached and investigated in a twofold way, as: 1). a multi-level study of obsession, with emphasis placed both on the author’s creation of a character possessed by obsession, and on an examination of the novel as a literary work depicting the author’s own obsession, linked to: 2). a study of museums, their role, function, and condition, past and present, West and East; with the two strands of enquiry being grounded in a wide-reaching portrait of contemporary Turkey. With The Museum of Innocence Orhan Pamuk largely caters to readers’ expectations, inviting them to an appetizing feast of romance and betrayal, intergenerational family drama, and informed social critique, all enhanced by a colourful ‘Oriental’ setting. In a sense, The Museum of Innocence is a novel in the mold of the already-mentioned Anna Karenina, but the gravity of this comparison seems to intimidate even Pamuk himself. Still, the two novels exhibit some affinities. First of all, both recount tales of adulterous love portrayed against the backdrop of restrictive societies governed by unbreachable norms; both employ the motif of the heroine’s supposed suicide. Just as Tolstoy’s novel might be trusted to provide a reliable characteristisation of Russian aristocracy of this era, so does Pamuk manage to recreate the peculiar Istanbulite society, its fading glamour and way of life, in minute detail. And importantly, Pamuk does not evade or retouch Turkish complexes, anxieties and prejudices, painting a picture that is painfully truthful, at times embarrassing or moving. Finally, too, led by his postmodernist

201 Cf. Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

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collector’s instinct, Pamuk engages his readers in an elaborate game of illusions, shadows and mirrors.

Love’s Labour’s Lost? Triangles and Compulsions At the most superficial level The Museum of Innocence functions as a romance, telling the story of an illicit love and a misalliance. The love triangle includes Kemal Basmacı, the thrity-year-old heir to an affluent, though somewhat decayed, upper-class family, his elegant, slightly snobbish fiancée Sibel, widely travelled and educated abroad, and Füsun, Kemal’s distant female cousin, from a poor and simple background. Kemal and Sibel have now long been together and are planning their engagement party, which should “be as extravagant as a wedding”202. Their relationship is closely monitored by Istanbulite society which considers them to be a perfect ‘dream couple.’ Kemal, too, is aware of his luck, and proud to have such an emancipated, Westernized girlfriend. Both of them take pleasure in the progressive nature of their relationship, snubbing those less ‘modern’ and more traditional. They go to fashionable clubs and restaurants, throw parties, drink alcohol, and regularly have pre-marital sex, which at once assures Sibel of the seriousness of their relation and causes her anxiety over Kemal’s professed intentions of marrying her, though mostly she manages to block such thoughts. Marriage seems the only possible prospective path their relationship can assume. Kemal does not question the rightness of this step and appears satisfied and carefree, if somewhat inert, but he is peacefully resigned to the fate that is unfolding before him. His future secured, his wallet full, his virility confirmed, all his daily worries taken care of by doting relatives and a dedicated fiancée, he may submit to a comfortable, if slightly uneventful married life. He could, perhaps, have become a family man, a husband, madly jealous about his wife and just as unfaithful to her; he could have joined the ranks of so many other men of his means and idled his time smoking and drinking tea, alternately with rakı, only to come back home to a docile wife and slightly diffident children, nevertheless fascinated by the imposing figure of their father; indeed, he could have accomplished all of that, had his fiancée not spotted a certain handbag on April 27, 1975. From that day forward, events follow at a great pace and Kemal soon goes from courting Füsun to giving her mathematics lessons before her university entry exam, to finally making love to her in his studio at the Merhamet Apartments.

202 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 3.

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Their trysts initially elate Kemal and he soon understands that his desire for Füsun is dangerously compulsive, and that he would gladly go to great lengths to maintain the relationship: In one corner of my mind I kept thinking that Füsun and I would be meeting many more times in the Merhamet Apartments to make love. But I understood that the only way I could carry this off would be to act as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.203

Behaving casually is largely what Kemal continues to do, enjoying all the privileges of his life to the fullest and imagining a bright future for himself: The manly pleasures outside the realm of morality that God granted just a few favoured slaves – the happiness that my father and uncles had had only a taste of, and rarely before their fifties, not before they had suffered terrible torment – it seemed to me now that I was going to be able to enjoy the same good fortune – partaking of all the pleasures of a happy home life with a beautiful, sensible, well-educated woman, and at the same time enjoying the pleasures of an alluring and wild young girl – all this while I was still in my thirties, having scarcely suffered for it, or paid a price.204

At this point, it appears that a sensitive reader is not likely to feel sympathy for Kemal, who coldly contemplates a young girl’s downfall, uses her, and cheats his fiancée and all his friends and relatives. A prejudiced reader could perhaps even sum up his actions as falling in line with stereotypical (Turkish) male duplicity and machismo, as Kemal himself also notices when he says to himself: “I recognized myself among those men whose real source of happiness is their secret lover, but who pretend it is their wives and children – I, too, was acting as if it was Sibel who made me happy”205. Still, those observations do not prevent him from continually having sex with Füsun under the pretext of helping her in her studies until the night of his and Sibel’s engagement party. The next morning Füsun fails her exam and is sent away somewhere by her parents, her mother presumably having been let in on all the details of her lessons with Kemal, who now begins to descend into obsession and gradually loses his grip on reality, drifts apart from Sibel and becomes even more estranged from his family. His despair assumes the form of a melancholic and fetishistic attachment to any object that had once been touched or otherwise used by Füsun. Perversely, though, Kemal initially takes his obsession for a cure, imagining his fondling,

203 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 41. 204 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 161. 205 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 167.

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caressing, sniffing, and licking of Füsun’s things to be a form of therapy, and himself, “a patient taking stock of his medicines”206. As he candidly relates: I would make straight for a teacup, a forgotten hair clip, a ruler, a comb, an eraser, a ballpoint pen – whatever talisman I could find of those blissful days when we sat side by side, or I would rummage through the useless things … banished here, knowing that Füsun had touched or played with them all, leaving particles of her scent in incalculable measures.207

Step by step, he turns his flat into a sanctuary of stray, insignificant objects each of which in his eyes acquires symbolic meaning, made even more precious by his authority over them. For, as Jean Baudrillard notes in his essay “The System of Collecting,” the object is “a mental realm over which I hold sway, a thing whose meaning is governed by myself alone. It is all my own, the object of my passion”208. At this stage, Kemal’s affliction comes across as a classic case of melancholia, with his ego fixating on the objects reminiscent of a lost loved one. Looking for consolation, he invests all of his feelings and yearnings in the items he is left with, resorting to “the company of objects when he needs to recuperate,” as Jean Baudrillard puts it209. Deprived of Füsun and physical contact with her, he gives in to the collecting impulse which begins to serve as a degenerate substitute for direct bodily involvement with her, quite in line with what Baudrillard reads as a “correlation with sexuality … so that the activity of collecting may be seen as a powerful mechanism of compensation during critical phases in a person’s sexual development”210. However, as Baudrillard warns: this sort of passion is an escapist one. No doubt objects do play a regulative role in everyday life, in so far as within them all kinds of neuroses are neutralized, all kinds of tensions and frustrated energies grounded and calmed. Indeed, this is what lends them their ‘spiritual’ quality… . Yet this is equally what turns them into the site of a tenacious myth, the ideal site of neurotic equilibrium.211

Kemal manages thus to placate his most immediate urges, with the result, however, of fixating ever more on the illusion of possession granted by the objects he accumulates. Spending all his energy on nearly literally ‘consuming’ his precious

206 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 245. 207 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 245. 208 Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, Elsner, John, and Roger Cardinal, eds., London: Reaktion Books, 1997, 7. 209 Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 11. 210 Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 9. 211 Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 11.

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artefacts, he falls out of touch with reality, trapping himself yet more complexly in the circle of his compulsion. A year passes during which Kemal wallows in self-pity and despair, confesses his affair to Sibel but makes it “sound like a typical Turkish man’s silly indiscretion on the eve of his marriage”212, learns of Füsun’s return to her parents, pays them a courtesy visit, and experiences a shock and a blow to his pride on discovering that she is now married to an aspiring filmmaker named Feridun, a young man by all measures dull and unimpressive. He recalls the evening as the night when “at the hands of those householders, my pride had been shattered, I had been ridiculed, even degraded, but I had myself abetted in the humiliation, I now saw, by getting so drunk”213. He even resolves never to see “these people” again. In his impotent anger, Kemal goes on even to reduce his love for Füsun to a mere “reaction to Sibel and the prospect of marriage”214, again giving testimony to the full-bodied Turkish macho inside him who cannot, and will not, take any reproof from a woman, no matter how deeply enamoured of her he was or believed himself to be. (Here, a glimpse of Orhan Pamuk as an observant social critic is afforded the readers, with his acute eye for Turkish paradoxes and the Turks’ duplicitous mores.) The indignation, however, is short-lived, and Kemal soon reverts to type, surrendering himself to yet another protracted series of torments and humiliations. For the next two hundred pages or so, the reader is treated to a meticulous description of eight years of Kemal’s regular visits to the Keskins, which amount to – according to Kemal’s careful calculations – 1,593 visits in all. During those evenings, he willingly subjects himself to the agonizing experience of being right next to Füsun but unable to do anything else than politely chat with her parents and her husband. His only indulgence is the ferocious snatching of various objects from the Keskin household, including Füsun’s cigarette butts, which he stores solicitously, cataloguing, ordering and dividing them according to Füsun’s moods, which he believes himself capable of deciphering from the butts: Back in the Merhamet Apartments I would retrieve the butts from my pocket for careful examination … For example, I would see some as black-faced people with their heads and necks smashed, their trunks made crooked by the wrongs done to them; or I would read them as strange and frightening question marks … Sometimes I saw them as exclamation marks, one warning me to take heed of lurking danger of which another was an omen … Or I would see them as expressions of Füsun’s soul, even fragments of it, and as

212 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 263. 213 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 337. 214 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 337.

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I lightly passed my tongue over the trace of lipstick on the filter, I would lose myself in communion with her… Each cigarette butt in its own unique way records Füsun’s deepest emotions at the moment she stubbed it out.215

All this occurs in solitude, in the shelter of the silent sanctuary of his studio which signals what Baudrillard calls “the unmistakable impression of a guilty relationship”216 in that Kemal is bent on maintaining about his “collection an aura of the clandestine, of confinement, secrecy, and dissimulation”217. Only much later, while converting the Keskin household into a museum, notably with the help of Orhan Pamuk, the novelist, will Kemal reveal his treasure and display it with pride. For now, his collecting activity again seems to be a way of compensation which, though it “runs counter to active genital sexuality … should not be seen as a pure and simple substitute thereof, but rather a regression to the anal stage, manifested in such behaviour patterns as accumulation, ordering, aggressive retention and so forth,” as Baudrillard notes218. At this point, the novel seems to lose pace and close in on itself, constantly repeating the same patterns and emphasizing the same types of behaviours, seemingly wearing down the reader as much as Kemal. The eight years recounted over some two hundred pages create an impression of fatigue, causing irritation and the sensation of having had enough, perhaps leading one to question the length of the novel. Still, however, the exhaustion suffered by the readers as they plough through page after page of Kemal’s agony might be accounted for by Pamuk’s attempt to make his readers feel exactly as his character did, in order for them to be able to read Kemal’s motives and intentions more clearly, which would make the novel, Kemal’s experience and the readers’ experience coextensive with one another. In the narrative, a seeming breakthrough comes finally in April 1983, when Kemal and Füsun finally go out alone together: I was meeting this girl after an agonizing eight-year-wait – I had been put to so many tests, endured such pain – yet this is not how it felt. Rather it was as if I was meeting for the first time a splendid young girl who had been found for me by others, and who was, in their view, a perfect match.219

215 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 543. 216 Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 9. 217 Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 9. 218 Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 9. 219 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 582.

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Yet there can be no pretending that this is not what it was; both of them had changed and gone through turbulent moments; nor was the occasion of their first meeting after the long wait as innocent as had been imagined by Kemal. In a sense, they had come full circle – Kemal was once again Füsun’s tutor, preparing her for her driving test. Armed with hindsight, though, both of them acted cautiously and more insecurely, keeping to the rules, exercising diligently, avoiding touching or straying from the main purpose of their meetings. Bearing in mind the outcome of their previous lessons, neither of them seemed to have the courage to risk making the same mistakes again. The strategy paid off, though not without difficulty – after another three years of tumultuous arguments and tears of disappointment and anger, Füsun succeeded in passing her driving test, without bribing any of the instructors, which was her explicit wish, reluctantly granted by Kemal who was well aware of rampant bribery on all levels of Turkish administration. It seemed they had finally broken the circle of misfortune, missed chances, and wasted opportunities, and a bright future was now unfolding before them. A happy resolution would be a sought-after conclusion also from the perspective of the readers, who, well into the six hundred of pages of the novel, would welcome seeing the heroes reunited, in part as a way out of the misery of the previous few hundred pages. Of course an actual happy ending would be as improbable and out of place as a miraculous last-minute healing of Verdi’s Violetta Valery, or Puccini’s Mimi, or Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, or as a reversal of fate in Romeo and Juliet, or as Anna Karenina’s second thoughts at the last decisive moment. It could also be considered an affront to the intellect and literary sophistication of persevering readers who have accompanied Kemal throughout the seven-hundred-pages, until this very morning on the EdirneIstanbul road in Kemal’s father’s old Chevrolet, with Füsun at the driving wheel. A fatal accident, in all its tragic irony, looms inevitably. The car crash and Füsun’s death prove an ultimate turning point for Kemal who, after a long and painful physical therapy, is left with tragic memories and an acute realization of irreversible loss. Paradoxically, though, the tragic outcome of his second courtship of Füsun is an impulse for Kemal to fight back against melancholia and find a creative and effective way to mourn: Thinking about her now had no connection to the future, or to the desire I’d once felt; Füsun became a dream of the past, the stuff of memories. This was unbearably painful, now that suffering for her no longer took the form of desiring her, but of pitying myself.

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I was at this point – hovering between fact and remembrance, between the pain of loss and its meaning – when the idea of a museum first occurred to me.220

Initially, however, thinking about the museum dedicated to Füsun and his love for her is like wandering in the fog, with nothing concrete to fall back on. Feeling constricted by the Istanbul atmosphere, Kemal leaves Turkey and embarks on a long journey through the world’s museums, in pursuit of both inspiration and the understanding of his overwhelming craving to erect his own museum. Interestingly, Pamuk’s novel has provided a source of inspiration for a poetic means of expression. In 2015 Norbert Bugeja, a Maltese poet and scholar, published a volume of poetry called South of the Kasbah (translated from the Maltese by Irene Mangion), in which he included two poems influenced by Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, “The Consolation of Objects” and “Füsun’s Tears.”221 Both capture the sense of loss and its irrevocability, mixing the sweetness of love with the bitter longing created by its sudden disappearance, a void which not even the abundance of objects, souvenirs, and mementos can ever fill. In “The Consolation of Objects,” Bugeja thus depicts Kemal’s bereavement and overwhelming sensation of hopelessness: The scent of coffee at the bottom of her cup Smudges the mirror of my memory: In this envelope she put away The fragments of her heart. … This brush that ploughed into her dreams, This shell from the depths of the Bosphorus, This bruise in her mother-of-pearl pendant…222

For the cognizant reader, the reference to Pamuk’s novel is easy to make out; the assortment of objects which, when in their ‘natural’ capacity, signify life and its daily occurrences, strongly tied to physical and geographical entities, now remain strangely cold and inanimate, though at the same time intimate and deserving of preservation – preservation which takes the form of Kemal’s collecting passion. At this point in the novel, the experience of Kemal becomes identifiable with that of Orhan Pamuk himself who at the novel’s conclusion is also introduced to the story in quite a complex role, as Kemal’s interlocutor and confidante, his

220 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 673. 221 Bugeja, Norbert, South of the Kasbah, trans. from the Maltese by Irene Mangion, Santa Venera, Malta: Midsea Books, 2015. 222 Bugeja, 11.

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helper in organizing the museum, the chronicler of his life, and finally, as a renowned author, engaged in writing the novel at the dictate of Kemal. Actually, ‘Orhan Pamuk’ as a character makes quite frequent appearances in Pamuk’s novels. For instance, in Snow223 he is the narrator of the story of Ka, his poetfriend, and recounts one of their last conversations in Istanbul when “Ka had asked about my plans for a new novel, and I had told him about The Museum of Innocence, an idea that up to that point I’d kept from everyone”224. Given that Snow recounts the events taking place in Kars, and the novel itself was written during the years 1999–2001, it appears quite visible that in his style and strategy Orhan Pamuk cuts across the ‘concrete’ reality of his novelist situation, turning his works into inter- and metatextual endeavours, which deepen the writing and reading experiences alike, and achieve a greater engagement of the reader in these processes. In the case of The Museum of Innocence, this technique is often employed. Orhan Pamuk uses it early on in the novel when he introduces the Pamuk family into the story as guests at Kemal and Sibel’s engagement party at the fancy Istanbul Hilton hotel. He does so with a dose of auto-irony, remarking that sitting with his beautiful mother, his father, his elder brother, his uncle, and his cousins was the chain-smoking twenty-three-year-old Orhan, nothing special about him beyond his propensity to act nervous and impatient, affecting a mocking smile.225

The comment takes on a yet more ironic tone upon acknowledging that Orhan Pamuk, apart from being the ‘physical’ author of the novel, is also its narrator, telling it as Kemal Basmacı, and appointed to this role by Kemal himself. Such literary flourishes abound, particularly in the later part of the novel, when Pamuk’s function is ‘officially’ revealed. It may be stipulated that Pamuk’s entire “Museum Project” develops simultaneously on two planes, one being the fictitious world of Kemal Basmacı, the figment of Orhan Pamuk’s imagination, the other – Pamuk’s own direct reality in which he is the obsessed collector and the sole founder of the Museum of Innocence, responsible for its entire shape and functioning. Most importantly, however, the record of Kemal’s and Pamuk’s experience overlaps, and Pamuk’s own struggle to create the Museum virtually from scratch is mirrored in the story of Kemal, at times to the point of definite convergence, as is

223 Pamuk, Orhan, Snow, trans. from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, New York: Faber, 2004. 224 Pamuk, Snow, 265. 225 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 169.

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the case in the last chapter of the novel, “Happiness,” in which Kemal addresses the reader: It was around then that I decided my voice had been heard too much anyway, and that it was time I left it to him to finish my story. From the next paragraph until the end, it will, in essence, be Orhan Pamuk who is telling the story. Having paid Füsun such sincere, detailed attention during their dance, he will, I am sure, do no less in these last pages. Farewell!226

What follows directly is a somewhat abrupt switch to ‘Orhan Pamuk’ greeting the readers with a straightforward “Hello, this is Orhan Pamuk!”227. Preceding the change of narrators – at least on the purely fictitious plane, once credit has been given to Pamuk’s efforts to make readers follow him through the world of the story unconditionally and suspension of disbelief has been granted – is a detailed explanation of how Kemal has come to cooperate with Orhan Pamuk, “the esteemed [writer], who has narrated the story in my name, and with my approval”228, on preparing an annotated catalogue to Kemal’s collection of thirty years. Significantly, the annotated catalogue was one of Pamuk’s initial ideas for The Museum of Innocence, when he was hesitating between this form and that of an encyclopaedic novel.

Catalogues and collections: passion for the commonplace As Erdağ Göknar observes in Secularism and Blasphemy: Orhan Pamuk and the Politics of the Turkish Novel, his seminal work on the totality of Pamuk’s oeuvre up to The Museum of Innocence, the encyclopaedia trope is a recurrent one in Pamuk’s fiction229. In conjuring the encyclopaedic motif, Pamuk seems to be drawing on the one hand on the work of Reşat Ekrem Koçu and his Istanbul Encyclopaedia, a classic in Turkish literature, and on Borges’s “Library of Babel,” on the other. The encyclopaedia, Göknar notes, is a text that mediates between modernity and tradition. In its attempt at comprehensive knowledge of people, places, things, and events, it aspires to a modernist goal of universal knowledge. It is a genre susceptible to manipulation, as Borges establishes, by blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction.230

226 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 708. 227 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 708. 228 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 703. 229 Göknar, Erdağ, Secularism and Blasphemy: Orhan Pamuk and the Politics of the Turkish Novel, London and New York: Routledge, 2013, 221. 230 Göknar, 222.

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The ambivalent nature of the genre, its suspension between fact and fiction, also suggests its proximity to the novel, which further leads to associations with the museum, asserted by Pamuk himself in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist: “Novels form a rich and powerful archive – of common human feelings, our perceptions of ordinary things, our gestures, utterances, and attitudes”231. Thus history and literature are brought together, personified via the museum in the figure of the collector, and further on – also in the curator of the collected objects, a role ingeniously shared by Kemal Basmacı, “Orhan Pamuk,” and Orhan Pamuk. The intersection between collecting, museum, and literary text has already proven extremely productive for several contemporary writers, e.g. Jorge Louis Borges, John Fowles, Umberto Eco, and David Lodge, who – as Caroline Patey and Laura Scuriatti note in their volume The Exhibit in the Text – “turn to the museum as a favourite textual location and use it as the rationale of their work and a hermeneutic instrument”232. The text, Scuriatti and Patey observe, becomes an exhibit, at the same time that the exhibit is turned into text, a trajectory also applied by Pamuk in that, as Göknar asserts, in The Musem of Innocence Pamuk virtually “produces the object” that the novel describes233. The Museum on Çukurcuma Caddesi not only exists, it lives an active, media life. Its official webpage functions smoothly234, allowing the visitors to book their tickets online so that they can plan their trip in advance. It has its own recognizable logo which took its shape from Füsun’s silver butterfly earrings: Fig. 7.  The Museum of Innocence in Instanbul Logo; website: www.masumiyetmuzesi.org

231 Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 132. 232 Patey, Caroline, and Laura Scurriatti, eds. The Exhibit in the Text: The Museological Practices of Literature, Bern: Peter Lang, 2009, 4–5. 233 Göknar, 237. 234 Cf. the Museum’s website at www.masumiyetmuzesi.org.

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When looking for the Museum in the maze of Istanbul’s crowded and winding streets, visitors are assisted by signposts placed at strategic sites, as if meant to be discovered just as the visitors are about to decide they have got lost: Fig. 8.  The Museum of Innocence road sign; the author’s own archive

Present on all most popular social networks, the website regularly updates its timeline by including the latest news regarding Museum-related events, such as a post from April 27th, 2012, celebrating its first birthday: The Museum of Innocence celebrates its 1st anniversary! 27th of April is the first birthday of this one of a kind place that is made by the ones who ‘believe in the magic of the things’ and where the Time turns into Space. The Museum of Innocence is imagined ‘word by word, item by item, picture by picture in a very long term’ by Orhan Pamuk … four years after the release of the novel The Museum of Innocence in 2008. During this year, 40,000 people have visited the Museum and now it is considered to be the most mentioned Turkish museum in the world press. 15,000 of these visitors were international and 10,000 were students. In addition to that, 6,500 of the visitors had their ticket stamped on the last chapter of their books and visited the Museum for free. The visitors have especially bought Füsun’s earrings.235

Pamuk offers his readers/visitors a total-immersion kind of experience, with many of the novel’s/museum’s mementoes, like Füsun’s above-mentioned earrings, available for purchase at the Museum Shop. Such items, including also the admission ticket printed at the end of the novel, are more than just souvenirs or ‘fun-stuff ’; as Erdağ Göknar states, they are the means by which the readers/

235 See the Museum’s website, blog section at http://www.masumiyetmuzesi.org/Blog/.

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visitors “reunite novelist and collector … in the real world by returning to the museum – that is, to the objects that are the source and origin of the novel”.236 Fig. 9.  “The Museum of Innocence: Single Admission Only”; the author’s own archive

Fig. 10. “The Museum of Innocence: Single Admission Only” – how it works; the author’s own archive

Thus, the fictional world of the novel is brought into a concrete geographical location supported by concrete physical objects. Significantly, however, what happens in an Istanbul backstreet in Pamuk’s Museum represents much more than the local curiosity of an eccentric ‘Oriental’ writer, and may be read as a transnational phenomenon embracing similar sites in a global context. Pamuk creates a space for the mediation of the universal museum experience derived from his personal history, which he then passes to Kemal to express in the novel before he himself speaks up about it in The 236 Göknar, 238.

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Innocence of Objects. Kemal, looking for consolation in numerous small and somewhat neglected museums, finds solace and legitimization for his own obsession with ordinary, frequently defunct everyday objects and gradually builds up confidence to open the museum of his dreams: Whenever wandering alone through museums like this, I felt myself uplifted. I would find a room at the back … it was as if I had entered a separate realm that coexisted with the city’s crowded streets but was not of them; and in the eerie timelessness of this other universe, I would find solace… . Sometimes, thus consoled, I would imagine it possible for me to frame my collection with a story, and I would dream happily of a museum where I could display my life … where I could tell my story through the things that Füsun had left behind, as a lesson to us all… . On visiting the Musée Nissim de Camondo … I was emboldened to believe that in the Keskins’ set of plates, forks, knives, and my seven-year collection of saltshakers, I, too, could have something worthy of proud display … The Musée de la Poste made me realize I could display the letters I had written to her, and the MicroMusée du Service des Objets Trouvés legitimated the inclusion of a wide range of things, so long as they reminded me of Füsun … It took me an hour in a taxi to reach the Musée Maurice Ravel … and when I saw his toothbrush, coffee cups, china figurines, various dolls, toys, and an iron cage that immediately called to mind Lemon, with an iron nightingale singing within it, I very nearly wept. To stroll through these Paris museums was to be released from the shame of my collection at the Merhamet Apartments. No longer an oddball embarrassed by the things I had hoarded, I was gradually awakening to the pride of a collector.237

For Orhan Pamuk, too, small, off-beat museums provide the means by which he manages to challenge the dominant ideology of oblivion and negligence wielded against alternative histories and pasts: All small museums evoke similar sentiments: of how at one point in the past, some people had lived in a given street, neighbourhood, or city; and of how they had then departed, leaving behind old newspapers, masses of paper and objects, pictures, photographs, and furniture. An amateur collector, or one wealthy enough to set up a museum, who believed in the value of the objects abandoned by the people who had left or who had died, had then collected and conserved them. It was now up to new generations to reconstruct the lives and histories of these people of the past through the things that they had left behind… . I kept seeking out more small museums on my travels. What I found most enthralling was the way in which objects removed from the kitchens, bedrooms, and dinner tables where they had once been utilized would come together to form a new texture, an unintentionally striking web of relationships. I believe that when arranged with love and care, objects in the museum … could attain a much greater significance than they had before.238

237 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 680. 238 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 50, 51, 52.

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Orhan Pamuk shares his experience with his protagonist, using Kemal as a spokesperson engaged to express his own views and convictions, which go far beyond the immediate object of discussion, i.e. museums as actual buildings and institutions. Working from this basic stance, Pamuk expands his scope and launches into a critique of the nation-state and its impersonal and by no means innocent or impartial grand narrative. Starting from the micro-perspective, i.e. the Turkish context, Pamuk talks about the indifference of post-Atatürk generations to the pre-Republic past, an attitude he deplores in many of his novels. Although such a ‘progressive’ vision has been the cornerstone of Atatürk’s modernizing revolution, promising an unmatched development and prosperity for the Turkish nation, over the years it has come to constitute the crux of the Turks’ perennial affliction – the schizophrenic split between an urgent and deeply inculcated call for modernization understood as total Westernization, and the nostalgic longing for the mysterious Ottoman past, made nearly magical by decades of oblivion. Pamuk has openly spoken against this peculiar blindness to what came before the Turkish Republic, frequently landing himself in a tight spot with the authorities for his daring. He takes up this theme also in The Museum of Innocence, although from a less directly political perspective – he expresses his involvement in matters of venerating the past by drawing attention to homegrown collectors, or rather hoarders, a ridiculed and forlorn caste in Turkish society, scorned for their “uncontrollable attachment to things”239. Thinking of their plight, Pamuk notes that The museum-making, archiving, and collecting traditions were not as common in Turkey as they were in the West, and so those who lived in these strange hoarders’ homes … soon grew weary of explaining themselves and their objects, and began dolefully and self-deprecatingly to call themselves “sick”240

Again, Orhan Pamuk and his protagonist Kemal might be easily seen as sharing the experience of the ‘sick’ collectors – Pamuk himself had to answer persistent questions regarding why he was collecting such huge amounts of stray objects and what he was going to do with them, and what for; in the character of Kemal he articulates the shame that came with explaining himself and confronting the mocking disbelief in his interlocutors’ faces. Pamuk further describes the collectors’ plight, and his tone appears to suggest his embrace of their seemingly pointless devotion:

239 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 49. 240 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 49.

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These “sick” collectors were fully aware that their attachment to objects stemmed from personal heartbreak and sorrowful life histories, but they remained honestly convinced of the importance of their contribution to the very society that mocked them. One day Turkey too would be wealthy, and museums, libraries and archives would be set up, just like in the West. And when that happened everyone would realize the value of objects, and the pitied hoarders would become figures of admiration.

Kemal, too, voices a similar sympathy for the spurned archivists, observing the same opposition between the collectors of the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ – the latter he defines as the “The Proud Ones, those pleased to show their collection to the world”241, whereas the former – “The Bashful Ones” – are those who live in societies where collecting is not a reputable act that contributes to learning or knowledge [so they] regard their compulsion as an embarrassment that must be hidden. Because in the lands of the Bashful, collections point not to a bit of useful information but rather to a wound the bashful collector bears.242

Pamuk elaborates on his tribute to collectors by painting the broader picture of what could be called the contemporary condition of museums worldwide, or – in his own words – “A Modest Manifesto for Museums” in which: the question I would want to answer is not “Why did you build this museum?” - indeed, that is a question I never want to answer fully. What I want to do instead is to draw on my personal experience to address the question of how new museums should be made.243

This peculiar statement might be viewed as a summary of Pamuk’s agenda in writing the novel and opening the museum, as well as a diagnosis, albeit a tentative one, of the global relationships between (and/or across) cultures, nations, states, individuals, and histories. Drawing on his own experience and childhood memories of caustic and official government-run and sponsored museums, Pamuk asserts that “museums – just like novels – can also speak for individuals”244. Making this pronouncement a peculiar credo of his own, he presents an impassioned account of what might very well be called “good museum practice.” The Innocence of Objects, his 2012 ‘companion’ to The Museum of Innocence, apart from being a graphically beautiful catalogue to the exhibition, hosts a collection of Pamuk’s thoughts, recollections, deliberations, memories and observations spanning diverse geographical locations and covering a multiplicity of themes all of which, however, remain informed by the underlying thread of involvement 241 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 691. 242 Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 692. 243 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 53. 244 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 54.

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with museums perceived as the sites at which the “universal humanity of the new and modern man”245 is to be heard. Although Pamuk denies that the Manifesto may be read as an elaborate response to the Museum conundrum, still, by weaving his way through the minefield of political involvement, state interventionism, official policy and history making, Pamuk advocates a re/turn to the local and the familiar. Drawing strongly on his insistence on the affinity between museums and novels, he again stresses parallelisms in their development: We can see that the transitions from palaces to national museums and from epics to novels are parallel processes. Epics are like palaces and speak of the heroic exploits of the old kings who lived in them. National museums, then, should be like novels; but they are not.246

In what follows in the Manifesto, Pamuk calls for the elevation of the human element and moving away from official discourse into the realm of the homely and its inhabitants and ordinary heroes, many of whom have long suffered from the state’s oppressive policies which set the rules for what to think, say or believe in, as well as what to remember and forget. Thus, the museum as understood by Pamuk should “re-create the world of single human beings – the same human beings who have laboured under ruthless oppression for hundreds of years”247. Summing up his potentially path-breaking views, Pamuk enumerates the dominant elements of cultural discourse and shows that the emergent trends and features in museum studies have the capacity to successfully overthrow them, thus ushering in the ‘new’: WE HAD WE NEED epics novels representation expression monuments homes histories stories nations persons groups and teams individuals large and expensive small and cheap248

It remains a considerable feat that Orhan Pamuk manages to turn his dream into reality, though perhaps the long-term effects should still not be taken for granted. Among the nagging questions that persist with regards to the Museum’s 245 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 54. 246 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 54. 247 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 56. 248 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 57.

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future the most fundamental one is probably whether it will continue to draw in and enthral visitors, or, in simpler terms, survive? Although much can be said against state-sponsored, official museums, at least there can be no doubt over their continued existence. In confrontation with such strongholds, endeavours such as Pamuk’s may not fare particularly well. Perhaps, however, Pamuk’s strength and the potential vested in his Museum should be sought elsewhere. With his engagement and interactive involvement in the affairs of the Museum, along with the application of modern technology supported by time-honoured methods of display and cataloguing, Pamuk scores yet another significant goal. Through a complex account of collecting and the collector’s story, literal and actual – mediated in the novel and in the Museum – Pamuk proposes a redeeming reading of the practice and the experience which aims at – and succeeds in – elevating them. Kemal Basmacı and Orhan Pamuk, the protagonist and his creator, succeed in overcoming conventional and tradition-sanctioned imagining of the practice of collecting and the figure of the collector which, as noted by Sharon Macdonald, “may act as a trope for certain, generally negative, character traits”249. Drawing on John Fowles’s The Collector, Macdonald observes that in literary accounts collecting is contrasted with a genuine love of life and things, and cast as a reprehensible “deadening” activity in which mastery through possession dominates any kind of real sensibility to that which is collected. The museum, too, has sometimes been characterized in this way, particularly in the analogy with mausoleum.250

In Pamuk’s case, collecting proves to be a calling, a permanent occupation, and the collector, a perceptive individual with a clearly defined mission. The collector is a humanist, too, sensitive to the plight of ordinary people trapped in the indifferent machinery of modernity. Hence the museum, in the sense proposed by Pamuk, becomes what Göknar calls a ‘secular-sacred’ site, albeit one celebrating the familiar, the everyday, and the mundane, rather than paying tribute to the awe-inspiring immobility of days gone by and legendary, larger-than-life figures long dead. The example of Anıtkabir – Atatürk’s Memorial Centre in Ankara – illustrates Pamuk’s view that “large national museums … now national symbols, present the story of the nation – history, in a word – as being far more important that the stories of individuals”251:

249 Macdonald, Sharon, ed., A Companion to Museum Studies, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 83. 250 Macdonald, 83. 251 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 54.

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Looking at Anıtkabir – vigilant, majestic and silent, and considering also its elevated position on a hill above Ankara, it is hard to resist the impression that the monument presides over the capital and thus, by extension, all of Anatolia. The site draws in crowds of visitors who are by all means welcome, but modes of conduct and dress code, as well as tour direction and time allowed in the adjacent Atatürk Museum, are strictly regulated. The memorial inspires awe and a somewhat fearful respect for the man in whose memory it was erected; indeed, it is like an “epic … speak[ing] of … heroic exploits”252. From another, perhaps more daring or even slightly blasphemous perspective, the enormity of Anıtkabir and the blatant symbolism of the place might give rise to questioning of authority and its limits, its pride and implied indifference to those whom it governs. Fig. 11.  Anıtkabir, Ankara; the author’s own archive

252 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 54.

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Clearly, then, Pamuk’s museum occupies the other end of the spectrum, the opposite extreme. Responding fully to Pamuk’s own call for “modest museums that honour the neighbourhoods and streets and the homes and shops nearby, and turn them into elements of their exhibitions”253, the Museum of Innocence manages to achieve the sought-after distance from the state and its authority, shifting the focus towards single individuals and their mundane, frequently insignificant lives. Fig. 12.  Çukurcuma Caddesi in Istanbul; the author’s own archive

According to Pamuk, this is what the future of museums should be like – “inside our own homes”254; however, as noted earlier, the survival of such enterprises might require more than a single writer’s zeal and determination. 253 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 57. 254 Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, 57.

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Nevertheless, Charles Saumarez Smith – speaking from a more clearly delineated standpoint of museum studies – in his analysis of what the future holds in stock for museums, seems to agree with Pamuk, asserting that “museums need to represent the cult of the real”255. Further commenting on potential directions in the development of museums, Saumarez Smith again expresses an opinion quite in line with Pamuk’s argumentation, seeing that content- and/or mission-driven institutions “are more likely to be successful … [and] attract public support”256. Finally, Saumarez Smith voices his ultimate hope which also runs parallel to Pamuk’s veneration of the quotidian and homely, asking that museums “have the sense to choose the local [over the global], the opportunity to help define what is different and special about a particular community”257. Pamuk consistently works towards this goal, and his treatment of the novel genre – the way he entwines it with the museum, seeing one as an elaboration on the other, albeit each self-sustainable – enhances the final outcome of his efforts. Museums, however, do not – and are not likely to – function in a vacuum, screened off from state policy, politics, power relations, social moods or even changing tastes and trends. And, assuming a broader perspective, museums – apart from their ‘prescribed’ function of preserving the past – speak also about a country’s present and presage its future. In this fashion, talking about museums involves one with a tangible spatio-temporal reality, frequently bound to a specific geographical location, too.

255 Smith Saumarez, Charles, “The Future of the Museum,” in Macdonald, Sharon, ed., Companion to Museum Studies, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 550. 256 Smith Saumarez, 551. 257 Smith Saumarez, 551.

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Chapter Three: Of Temptations Lady Mary Discovered, and Shared with Others Introduction Much critical and scholarly attention has been devoted to a seemingly plain question which, however, continues to resist attempts at answering it – what makes a ‘good’ book? What is the key to the mystery of ‘quality’ novel writing? Or, more widely, what problematics, themes, times, situations, and characters might be deemed suitable for a ‘valuable’ work of fiction, and in fact any work of art, too? Immersing oneself in such musings quickly turns out to be like walking in a minefield, with dangers lurking for the (over-)zealous seeker each step of her/his way, including the risks of generalization, reductionism, and qualifying, to name but a few. One lasting formula for emerging victorious from this challenge was articulated by Edgar Allan Poe in his oft-quoted statement that The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.258

Even a cursory look at Poe’s bibliography confirms his loyalty the rule he set, which provided generations of writers with inspiration and a master idea for their own work. Apart from notable literary examples, the “poetical topic” of a woman’s death proved popular with opera composers and librettists, who enriched the cultural heritage with gems such as La Traviata, La Boheme, Tosca, Manon Lescaut, Carmen, Madama Butterfly, Adriana Lecouvrer and many others, all featuring exceptional, memorable, beautiful, passionate women who met a tragic end, one way or another – due to a terminal disease, driven to suicide, or even murdered. Each opera season confirms the audiences’ love for the doomed heroines whose stories are re-enacted all over the world with ever-increasing sophistication. Notably, all these are male-authored works. Orhan Pamuk, too, employs this strategy to the full. The Museum of Innocence climaxes with Füsun’s tragic, presumably suicidal death. The narrative inevitably leads towards this final dénouement, occurring at a point when both Kemal and Füsun could envisage a fresh start for their tormented relationship. The death of 258 Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Graham’s Magazine, vol. XXVIII, no. 4, April 28, 1846, 163–167, 165; http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm, retrieved March 12, 2014.

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the beautiful Füsun proves a turning point for Kemal who manages to tell the story to ‘Orhan Pamuk.’ He tells it, ‘Orhan Pamuk’ writes it down, Orhan Pamuk publishes it. Centred on a beautiful woman, the novel continually denies her a voice, constructing her – and making the reader construct her thus, too – from the perspective of a tortured, Werther-like lovesick man. Pamuk performs a peculiar ‘petrification’ of Füsun, immobilizing her in the car which becomes a literal cage, locking in the travelling woman as if into a coffin. Already such a perspective lends itself gracefully to a careful critical investigation; when the perennial question of East vs. West and the Western mode of the representation of ‘Oriental’ women is added, the prospective analysis gains a more complex purport yet. Further still, once women acquire an independent voice, they take to brazenly speaking about their experience; when the subject is Turkey, the clamour, sometimes glamour, too, of stories being told bursts out forcefully. The realization which surfaces then is that, across spaces and times, Turkey has continued to prove a women-colonized realm; explored, perused, abused, appropriated, analysed, adored, spurned, criticized, missed, longed-for, dreamt-of, Orientalized, exoticized, admired, and feared by women who have, for various reasons and out of differing callings, taken the leap into involvement with the land, the culture, and the people. The multifarious experiences springing from these occasions of contact have bred a complex body of writing recounting the often uneasy trajectories of involvement with Turkey, diversified in terms of genre – novels, memoirs, autobiographies, poetry, reportage, short story – but linked by the common denominators of travel and cross-cultural encounters as powerful leitmotifs of each narrative. Such encounters, in order to gain the cross-cultural status, become automatically defined as contacts along/across/against the ‘East’-‘West’ axis, the realizations of which might vary tremendously – from the outright violence of 9/11, to the supposed ‘peacefulness’ of tourism, educational travel (including e.g. such international programmes as the popular Erasmus Student Exchanges or Work&Travel Abroad), or diplomacy. All the same, however, each of these instances of contact remains tainted by the marks of confusion and split loyalties, be they conscious or not. The awareness of something being not quite ‘right’ lurks perhaps in the lopsidedness of ‘East’/‘West’ meetings, resonant in how they frequently oscillate between stark opposites and extremes, building a melancholic relationship of loathing/desire, shame/pride, fear/curiosity, repulsion/fascination, or threat/promise. Whether physical, mental, literary, or cultural, each such encounter involves movement and interaction, played out in the dynamics of travel, perceived as border-crossings, transgressions, aggressions, or assaults. It seems safe to assume that the epistemic 130

violence inherent in these contacts and exchanges stems largely from the West’s hubristic conviction of its epicentre status, and the peculiar Western blindness to the perpetuation of bias and essentialist reasoning pertinent to constructs such as “the West and the rest.” Thus, any discussion of issues at hand should commence from an acknowledgement that concepts such as ‘West,’ ‘East,’ ‘Orient,’ ‘Occident’ are in fact instances of what Roxanne L. Euben aptly calls “master signifiers” operating as “totalizing abstractions through which meaning and discourse can be organized”259. As such, they are not likely to produce new and complex knowledge but may only lead to a further enactment of relationships seen as “continuous and unitary”260. To attempt to overcome this particular bias would therefore mean to allow for a de-silencing and an un-covering of voices previously muted, especially poignant within the framework constituted by the dynamics of travel. The following analysis aims at providing insight into these questions by shedding light on the plural nature of travel and the imminent potentiality of occupying at once two places within the travel act, i.e. that of the travelling subject and that of the object travelled to. Linked to this is the realization of two main actions performed under the circumstances of travelling, best expressed in their bare infinitive forms – to see and to hear. Also here particular dichotomies apply, the most acute being probably the distinction between the subject that sees and hears, and the object that is seen and heard, and between the actions of seeing and hearing and the states of being seen and heard. Such divisions introduce the question of varying degrees of performativity which are unequally distributed between the subjects and objects; from a more nuanced perspective, however, it transpires that participation in these instances of identity performance, both in the active and passive mode, applies to all of the involved sides, thus (perhaps) doing away with the most fundamental binary, i.e. that of the subject and object. Although this might perhaps be going too far, the awareness of the subjects’ and objects’ mutual relations as being in permanent flux should continue to inform discussions and analyses of travel narratives and their ‘protagonists’ – the “embodied travellers whose sense of self, knowledge, time, and space at once emerges and is transfigured by the double mediation between rootedness and distance, familiar and unfamiliar”261. These experiences affect all who become involved in what Euben calls “the double-edged nature of travel,”262 which seems composed 259 Euben, Roxanne L., Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008 (2006), 8. 260 Euben, 8. 261 Euben, 11. 262 Euben, 38.

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of the threads of temptation, desire and promise, interwoven with those of danger, risk and anxiety, together tying a knot of exposures and riotous fantasies. In what follows I endeavour to explore patterns of (un-)tying these knots. Embracing Eric Leed’s contention that whereas “Odysseus may be the hero who has travelled a great deal … it is the immobility and fidelity of his wife Penelope that frame his voyage”263, I commence from the premise that “there is no free and mobile male without the unfree and sessile female, no knight without the lady, no father without the mother,”264 in order to investigate what ensues from a reversal of these pre-assigned roles. Paraphrasing Sidonie Smith, in the present Chapter I ask whether travelling – since it “makes a man a man”265 – makes a woman a man, too, or, in a broader context, what it actually makes a woman, and finally, what it means for a woman to “gain access to this defining area of agency in the West”.266 In the process, I attempt to conduct a wide-reaching ‘de-petrification’ of sessile, unfree, immobile ‘Füsuns,’ in an effort to see them liberated from their literal and metaphorical cages. To this end, I concentrate here on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters.267 Though certainly adventurous, there can be no denying that Lady Mary still did not manage to penetrate the circles of the officers … geographers, gentlemen, and diplomats commissioned to gather information from abroad… . Rather, they were often … the wives, concubines, nurses, missionaries, slaves, maids, pilgrims, ‘spinsters,’ or ‘eccentrics’ who travelled under duress, whose roles as travellers were severely circumscribed, or whose very mobility rendered them suspect or even outcasts from social convention by gender as well as by race or class.268

Lady Mary was the wife of Edward Wortley, a British officer sent as ambassador to Ottoman Turkey. She could also easily be characterized as an ‘eccentric,’ with her strong opinions, brisk temper and unabashed spirit; finally, she was English and representative of the upper classes of her times, embodiment and expression, too, of the then political and cultural climes and agendas. Travelling in the 18th century, she could well be seen as portraying the role of women in the British imperial and colonial apparatus. At the same time, however, she could also come 263 Leed, Eric, The Mind of the Traveller: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, New York: Basic Books, 1991, 114. 264 Leed, 114. 265 Smith, Sidonie, Moving Lives: 20th-Century Women’s Travel Writing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, x. 266 Euben, 134. 267 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, The Turkish Embassy Letters, introduced by Anita Desai, ed. by Malcolm Jack, London: Virago, 1994. 268 Euben, 137.

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across as an antithesis of the ideals and convictions of her times – an angel in the house was she by no means. Nevertheless, she was a colourful figure born and bred in the England of the Enlightenment. Interestingly, however, though she was an indomitable character in her native surroundings, it appears that in Turkey Lady Mary abstained from any form of socio-political activism and simply let herself be charmed and entertained, giving in to all the pleasures granted her owing to her position of privilege. What dominated the orbit of Lady Mary’s interests was the ‘women question’ – she saw Turkish women as much freer and happier than their European counterparts, with their personal liberties guaranteed, paradoxically, by the veil with which they covered themselves. In the following analysis, I take up this issue, extending it to confront and work through the cultural bias inherent in contacts between the ‘West’ and the ‘East,’ though geographically remaining on Turkish ground. My main interest here rests on questions of how Lady Mary negotiated her pre-defined position in terms of race and religion, and their bearing on cultural exploration and assimilation, vis-a-vis and in vivo challenging or even adversary circumstances, through which her inter-cultural experiences avoided the traps of reductionism and generalization, thus leading to a (supposedly) successful synthesis of the burden of heritage and its positive legacy. Lady Mary, in her inter-cultural adventure, managed to penetrate the closelyguarded realms of the harem, and her observations and musings constitute a considerable part of the letters she sent to her English relatives and friends. Her peculiar status of an outsider “within” allowed her to speak from the vantage point of one who at the same time sees and is seen, explores and is also explored in turn. Comparing the realities of English society of the Enlightenment era, its values and mores, with the rules and regulations of the harem, Lady Mary extolled the many personal liberties enjoyed by Turkish women but denied their English counterparts, contributing to the then-emerging trend of ‘deconstructing’ the Oriental harem fantasy. In what follows, I take up this trope and venture into an investigation of the harem as a powerful, frequently even overpowering, symbol functioning in the collective ‘Western’ imagination to the point of living a life of its own, fed by fantasies of sexual license, promiscuity and slavish female submission to the ‘pashas,’ a dream as alluring to Western men as it was disquieting. With recourse to Lady Mary’s first-hand experiences, as well as her meticulous descriptions and characteristics, I intend to re/trace patterns of disarming and debunking the harem myth, in this way hoping to arrive at a practical dis-enchantment of the harem, its inhabitants, its functions and spaces. In order to support my argument that the Oriental harem existed predominantly as a 133

projection of unfulfilled (and frequently unfounded, too) erotic fantasies, in this chapter I turn also to three paintings by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres – Le Bain Turc (1862), Le Grande Odalisque (1814), and The Valpinçon Bather (1808), and W. A. Mozart’s 1782 ‘exotic’ opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, with a libretto by Gottlieb Stephanie based on Christoph Friedrich Bretzner’s original text. Set in a (supposedly) Turkish pasha’s palace, the opera deserves attention for several reasons. Drawing on the trend of ‘exoticism’ in the arts, popular in the 18th century, with this opera Mozart performs several feats at once – gives testimony to the irresistible Western attraction to ‘Oriental’ themes, fuelling the imaginations of Western authors, artists and audiences alike; reinforces and, to a certain degree, perpetuates the harem myth, but at the same time disavows it, too, through the application of particular staging and interpretive strategies. By linking the opera, its plot and protagonists to Lady Mary’s observations on the nature of harem relationships and encounters, I endeavour to explore how Die Entführung emphasises the cosmopolitan aspects of the Ottoman courts and, by parodying the pasha’s palace, manages to turn the joke on the Europeans themselves, though not without granting them a number of significant redeeming qualities.

‘Tis just as ‘tis with you? Mediating cultural difference If you expect Passion, I am utterly unacquainted with any. It may be a fault of my temper. ‘Tis a stupidity I could never justify, but I do not know I was in my life ever touch’d with any.269 Was I to follow entirely my own Inclinations it would be to travel, my first and chiefest wish. If you really intend to travel, as it is the thing upon Earth I should most wish, I should prefer that manner of living to any other.270 Strong-minded, self-confident, assertive, determined – these are just a few among the list of character traits with which to describe Lady Mary Wortley 269 From Lady Mary’s letters to Edward Wortley, her future husband; August, 20, 1710; in Halsband, Robert, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 56. For more on Lady Mary’s and Wortley’s courtship, cf. Paston, George, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Her Times, London: Putnam, 1907, 28–39 (“Early LoveLetters”). Actually, “George Paston” was the penname for Emily Morse Symonds (1860–1936), a British author and literary critic. 270 From Lady Mary’s letters to Edward Wortley, her future husband; August, 16, 1710; in Halsband, Robert, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 56. For more on Lady Mary’s and Wortley’s courtship, cf. Paston, George, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Her Times, London, New York: Putnam, 1907, 28–39 (“Early Love-Letters”).

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Montagu. At the same time, she was curious and perceptive, and – as it turned out – profoundly influential and inspirational for generations to come, female and male alike. Gifted also with a talent for objective, at times even harsh, introspection, Lady Mary has cut a distinctive figure against the background of 18th-century British society, hailed and admired just as much as she was scorned and criticized among others, by those of her closest circle. In an introduction to the 1994 edition of Lady Mary’s Turkish Embassy Letters, Anita Desai suggests that by Lady Mary’s contemporary standards, she was way ahead of her times and thus could not have expected any other, more accommodating perhaps, reactions to her conduct, her strong opinions and acute irony, wielded as eagerly against her peers as her own self271. Indeed, Lady Mary did not mince her words and had no qualms in addressing even her husband-to-be, Edward Wortley, in the direct manner of the ‘engagement letters.’ Leaving aside, at least for the time being, questions of whether their marriage was a love match or an arranged agreement, it is apparent that Wortley managed to satisfy his wife’s “chiefest wish” - travel they did, perhaps not as extensively as Lady Mary would have wished, but still considerably more than was the share of any of their average society friends and relations. Still, despite her resolve to remain honest to her personal convictions, regardless of whether they caused incredulity and incomprehension among her peers, Lady Mary might have faltered at one crucial point. Given her craving and ardour for travel, and the abandon with which she immersed herself in the experience, her dismissal of “Passion” might seem a bit too hasty. Overall, there can be no doubt that Wanderlust and thirst for adventure and other than book-derived knowledge always accompanied her; but whether Wortley succeeded in sparking matrimonial desire in her as well would probably have to remain elusive, at least for now, as no accounts exist which would address the issue openly and thoroughly. As regards speculations and tell-tale hints to the matter, they will be referred to, to an extent, further on. Lady Mary seized the opportunity to leave England and ‘see the world,’ always mindful that travel is a double-edged affair – she saw, and at the same time acquiesced to being seen by the world in turn. Though obviously constrained by social mores and the inculcated etiquette, she could still enjoy a considerable dose of freedom, particularly when comparison is made to the predicament of

271 Desai, Anita, “Introduction,” in Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, The Turkish Embassy Letters, introduced by Anita Desai, edited by Malcolm Jack, London: Virago, 1994, xxxiv.

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her typical Victorian heiress. Enjoying the achievements of the British Enlightenment in virtually all spheres of life, sciences and culture, Lady Mary was not born and raised to become “a milk-white lamb that bleats for man’s protection”272, nor was it her fate to develop into the quiet and meek ‘Angel in the House.’ Thus, it should come as no surprise that in the eyes of many of her contemporaries she seemed a true free spirit who could move at will beyond the domain of the private and venture into the alluring realms of the public, going as far as the mysterious East, which was already so exotic that some of the responses to her journey made it sound as if she had actually eloped into the fantasy world of fables and myths. By no means were her “earthbound extremities” tied to a single spot. Landing in Turkey in April, 1717, Lady Mary quickly felt that she had found herself on a totally new but firm ground towards which she soon developed a relationship that, despite her firm denial of any knowledge of passion, can in fact only be described as passionate, in more senses than one. Upon entering Adrianople, present-day Edirne, Lady Mary exclaims: “This country is certainly one of the finest in the world … I am now got into a new world, where everything I see appears to me a change of scene”273. Similar statements frequently recur at various points in her Letters. Apart from testifying to the awe and admiration Lady Mary felt towards Turkey, a land grossly misunderstood and under-appreciated by most visitors (as she points out in no uncertain terms), the exclamations signal also the sensation of rejuvenation and renewal that she experienced during her stay at the Ottoman court. Lady Mary’s experiences, adventures and observations, which provided her with the material for the letters she sent from Turkey to her family and friends, supply most of the material for the present chapter. It falls into two parts, entitled “ ‘Tis just as ‘tis with you? Mediating cultural difference,” and “Dialogue inter artes,” respectively. The former, split into two sub-sections, will focus on Lady Mary and the effect Turkey, its people, and their culture and customs had on her; the latter will offer a more comprehensive and diverse scrutiny of the influence Lady Mary herself exerted on generations of travellers, artists, and intellectuals that followed. The second part will also be further divided into two sub-sections, each of which will assume different perspectives and methodologies, but which are joined by a shared leitmotif, i.e., intertextuality speaking from 272 Keats, John, “Woman! When I behold thee, flippant, vain,” in: Keats, John, Poetical Works, London: Macmillan, 1884; Bartleby.com, 1999.www.bartleby.com/126/. Accessed and retrieved March 7th, 2014. 273 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, The Turkish Embassy Letters, introduced by Anita Desai, edited by Malcolm Jack, London: Virago, 1994, 55, 57.

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multidisciplinary works of art whose creation has been in certain ways prompted and inspired by Lady Mary’s letters. Setting off in 1716 on a journey which would take her to the heart of the Ottoman Empire, Lady Mary, despite being accompanied by her husband, may well be deemed a pioneer paving the way for women travellers who from the 19th century onwards distinctly marked the previously male-dominated travel routes, transforming their landscapes irreversibly. The looming Victorian era was to be filled with adventuresses and ‘proto-tourists’ whose expeditions often differed much in character, scope and aim. Recruiting predominantly from the upper-classes, the Victorian travelling ladies engaged in a variety of travel-related preoccupations, which ranged cultured diplomatic visits as consorts to their husbands, to chaperoned ‘educational’ tours of the more distant, but still mappable regions, to reckless and outrageous ‘death-wish-pursuits’ of such remarkable figures as Alexandrine Tinne (murdered in a desert brawl by the Tuaregs), Margaret Fountaine (found by a Trinidadian monk next to her butterfly mesh, dying), and – perhaps more level-headed or simply lucky – Kate Marsden274. Lady Mary’s travels might seem child’s play in comparison with their adventures; however, it might just as plausibly be assumed that none of this would have ever come to much if not for the early-18th-century journeys of Lady Mary and an account of them preserved in the form of the letters. This is not to say that Lady Mary alone provided the stimulus to introduce women to travel, or that she was history’s greatest woman traveller, but Lady Mary has to be credited with courage, open-mindedness and curiosity which, in times lacking technological and ergonomic devices to make long journeys safe and bearable, allowed her to complete her trip and record her experiences with tactfulness, honesty and humour.

Lady Mary: observing and observed Lady Mary’s humour, however, sometimes took on quite a vigilant form, albeit never for the sake of simple spite. Rather, due to her observant eye and sharp mind, as well as the advantage of first-hand knowledge, she frequently took issue with the cherished travel accounts written by established male travellers whom she did not hesitate to characterize as “very fond of speaking of what they don’t

274 Cf. Gladstone, Penelope, Travels of Alexine, London: John Murray, 1970; Fountaine, Margaret, Love among the Butterflies: The Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady, London: Penguin, 1982; Marsden, Kate, On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers, London: Phoenix, 2001.

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know”275, that being one of her more benign remarks. What she found particularly disagreeable was the authors’ bending the truth in their accounts so as to make them more attractive to audiences back home. Such practice of ‘spicing up’ one’s experiences, apart from being dishonest, led to the creation and then perpetuation of stereotypes and false ideas which Lady Mary saw fit to reveal and debunk, even at the expense of producing a less captivating account – hers was firstly an exercise in truthfulness. As she stated in Letter XXX to her sister, Lady Mar: The manners of mankind do not differ so widely as our voyage writers would make us believe. Perhaps it would be more entertaining to add a few surprising facts of my own invention, but nothing seems to me so agreeable as truth.276

In a similar vein, in another letter she openly ridicules the air of arrogant omniscience of travellers professing themselves experts on all matters Turkish, whereas in fact they “can give no better account of the ways here, than a French refugee lodging in a garret in Greek street”277: ‘Tis a particular pleasure to me here to read the voyages to the Levant, which are generally so far removed from truth and so full of absurdities I am very well diverted with them. They never fail to give you an account of the women, which ‘tis certain they never saw, and talking very wisely of the genius of men, into whose company they are never admitted, and very often describe mosques which they dare not peep to.278

The occasions she enumerates here had all become parts of Lady Mary’s firsthand experiences – she had indeed spent a considerable amount of time among Turkish women in their private quarters, had conversed extensively with distinguished Turks, and made frequent visits to Istanbul’s many mosques, all of which gives her the right to express scorn for men travellers who relied on hearsay and, when even that was not available, filled gaps in their knowledge with pure flights of fancy. Lady Mary would not condescend to such strategies – when she spoke on a subject, she did it with the support of what she had seen; what she had not seen, she did not choose to make her topic. In many respects, Lady Mary made an ‘ideal’ traveller – enthusiastic, open-minded, curious, and just. When abroad, she went with the current of local customs in virtually all spheres of life, from clothing, eating, and entertaining, to such serious questions as vaccinating children. In fact, she became a staunch supporter of the 275 276 277 278

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Wortley Montagu, 85. Wortley Montagu, 72. Wortley Montagu, 60. Wortley Montagu, 104.

latter practice, inoculating her 5-year-old son against smallpox while in Turkey. Certainly she could see without judging, or, when evaluating, did so to the advantage of the evaluated, and excitedly praised and promoted what good she had learnt. When the time for her to leave Turkey came, she commented on what she had found out about the people and their way of life in a somewhat bittersweet observation, already sounding her regret to be going away soon: I am almost of an opinion they have a right notion of life; they consume it in music, gardens, wine and delicate eating, while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politics or studying some science to which we can never attain … Considering what short lived, weak animals men are, is there any study so beneficial as the study of present pleasure?279

Of course, the present-day reader could not accept the remark unconditionally, given the political turmoil across the Middle East, with Turkey occupying the conflicted position of a bridge between Europe and the Arab world, and not entirely knowing which way it should itself incline. Neither could the reader admit that back in the times of Lady Mary the affairs of the world were simpler and more straightforward – which they were not; perhaps, however, she could assume that the cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman Empire and its bustle provided a tempting alternative to the realities of life in a much quieter (and colder) Europe, but then the question would probably be whether it is not simply a case of longing for what one does not have, implying that similar desires might be professed by the ‘other’ side, too. Considering the high esteem in which Lady Mary held the segment of Turkish society she had the chance to meet, her praise of and admiration for many of its customs and social arrangements, and the ferocity with which she railed against the inaccurate or plainly falsified or made-up images and representations of Turkey, its people and their culture, it is not without a dose of disbelief and discomfort that one reacts to excerpts from her Letters which, like the passage quoted below, begin seemingly innocuously but develop into strongly prejudiced observations: Nor could I ever doubt but there were several different species of men, since the whites, the woolly and the long-haired blacks, the small-eyes Tatars and Chinese, the beardless Brazilians … and the oily-skinned yellow New Zemblians have as specific differences under the same general kind as greyhounds, mastiffs, spaniels, bulldogs or the race of my little Diana, if nobody is offended at the comparison … Now as the various intermixing of these animals causes mongrels, so mankind have their mongrels, too, divided

279 Wortley Montagu, 142.

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and subdivided into endless sorts. We have daily proofs of it here … In the same animal is not seldom remarked the Greek perfidiousness, the Italian diffidence, the Spanish arrogance, the French loquacity and all of a sudden he’s seized with a fit of English thoughtfulness bordering a little upon dullness, which many of us have inherited from the stupidity of our Saxon progenitors.280

Perhaps it could be said in Lady Mary’s defence that she saves the harshest assessment for the representatives of her nationality; still, when judged by modern standards, the passage cannot be otherwise perceived but as downright racist. At the same time, however, it does not do to call Lady Mary a racist and ascribe to her all the features pertinent to such a categorization. Rather, a certain concession to the socio-historical context of her times should be made. Born and raised in the Age of Reason, Lady Mary received what was then understood as proper schooling in the scientific spirit of the era – education based on facts of science as they were then known. Certain ideas had been inculcated in her, as has always been common practice in the processes of education, which she had no reason to question, especially belonging as she did to the privileged class of society. In order to understand Lady Mary’s untroubled comparison of “different species of men” to “greyhounds, mastiffs, spaniels, [or] bulldogs”, one should acknowledge that the ‘ontology’ of the Enlightenment, derived from the scientific developments of the 17th century, gave rise to convictions and beliefs which continue to hold sway well into the 21st century. As observed by David Theo Goldberg in Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning, the enthusiasm espoused during the Enlightenment for empiricism and rational – i.e. scientific – methods of classification and categorization was at least partly responsible for the emergence of the concept of race and, by extension, of various contemporary race-based ideologies: Empiricism encouraged the tabulation of perceivable differences between peoples and from this it deduced their natural differences. Rationalism proposed initial innate distinctions (especially mental ones) to explain the perceived behavioural disparities.281

Be that as it may, Lady Mary’s role in countering false representations and reductionist statements about non-Western cultures and their habits and customs remains influential and largely indisputable. Among the many qualities that she may be credited with, notable is her devotion to and persistence in the debunking of sexually-loaded and ‘exoticized’ images and visions of ‘Oriental’ women, 280 Wortley Montagu, 111. 281 Goldberg, David Theo, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning, Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, US: Blackwell, 1994, 28.

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frequently fed by Western male fantasies derived from their focus on the myth of the ‘Oriental harem’ as a men’s paradise of unlicensed erotics. Because first and foremost, Lady Mary’s sympathies were with the Turkish women, whom she regarded with admiration, respect, and perhaps, too, a dose of jealousy.

Lady Mary and the Ottoman ladies They have naturally the most beautiful complexions in the world and generally large black eyes. I can assure you with great truth that the court of England, though I believe it the fairest in Christendom, cannot show so many beauties as are under our protection here. Though complimentary about the physical beauty of Turkish women, Lady Mary ascribed to them many more virtues than just that of a gracious external appearance. She seemed to embrace their lifestyle, to the point of herself adopting their attire, as well as following some of their customs. Where contemporary male travellers saw sexual oppression and the subjugation of the women to their “Pasha” husbands, Lady Mary discerned liberty and the power to control marital sexuality. In her account, tiresome and loathed duties gave way to a life of undisturbed pleasures, comfort, material security and indulgence of all sorts. Her views on these matters find corroboration in the account of Demetra Vaka Brown from nearly two centuries later in which – commenting on her encounters with Turkish ladies – she exclaims, “Nowhere have I seen such pure enjoyment of life. Nothing was bothering them. They had no other career except that of being beautiful and happy”282. And beautiful they indeed were, paying great attention to questions of make-up and hairstyles, clothing, and personal hygiene in general which went hand in hand with their professed knowledge of seduction and ‘ensnaring’ male hearts, not necessarily with the view of pursuing some illicit involvement with men (though Lady Mary listed also such cases), but for the sheer pleasure of being adored. On the Turkish women’s make-up and coiffure habits both Lady Mary and Demetra Vaka Brown comment extensively; Lady Mary focused on the eyes:

282 Brown Vaka, Demetra, Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Turkish Women, Piscataway, NJ, US: Gorgias Press, 2005, 70. Vaka Brown was an Ottoman subject of Greek origin, growing up in Ottoman harems; she was also one of the pioneers of Greek women’s migration to the USA where she pursued a career in journalism. In 1904 she married Kenneth Brown who strongly encouraged her to write fiction and non-fiction on themes related to the Ottoman Empire. Haremlik, which Vaka Brown dedicates to her husband, was published in 1909.

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They generally shape their eyebrows and … have a custom of putting round their eyes on the inside a black tincture that … adds very much to the blackness of them. I fancy many of our ladies would be overjoyed to know this secret, but ‘tis too visible by day. They dye their nails rose colour.283

Demetra Vaka Brown meanwhile elaborated on the impressive hairstyles, somewhat eccentric, at least to the eyes of a European (not that she herself enjoyed the ‘privilege’ of a straightforward Western identity): She was ready for the night – her hair done up in that queer Oriental fashion becoming only to Eastern women. It was divided in two and parted in the middle; each division again subdivided in two, and each braided loosely. Then the ends of the two front braids were tied up by a wide, soft piece of silk, which hung loose in the back and formed a kind of background for the face.284

It would be unjust to consider such attention to physical appearance as vanity or a sign of the women’s ‘uselessness’ for the performance of any greater tasks in society. Actually, such exertions facilitated and contributed substantially to the fulfilment of a woman’s most fundamental duty before both society and God, i.e. bearing children, and hopefully lots of them, on which Lady Mary remarks with characteristic irony: In this country it is more despicable to be married and not fruitful, than it is with us to be fruitful before marriage. They have a notion that whenever a woman leaves off bringing children, ‘tis because she is too old for the business, whatever her face says to the contrary, and this opinion makes the ladies here so ready to make proofs of their youth … When they are with child ‘tis … common … to say they hope God will … send two this time.285

Here, Lady Mary touches, too, on yet another vital matter in the life of a Muslim woman – religion and religiosity. Having already delved into the culture- and religion-imposed role of women in a Muslim society, she hastens to dispel any impending criticism by her correspondents of how women must therefore be inferior creatures, made to suffer repeated pregnancies and deliveries, and often deprived of any respect and care once they cease to fulfil this obligation, asserting that “‘tis certainly false, though commonly believed in our parts of the world, that Mohammed excludes women from any share in a future happy state”286. What follows is a humorous and ironic recounting of the women’s duties 283 284 285 286

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Wortley Montagu, 70. Brown Vaka, 74. Wortley Montagu, 107. Wortley Montagu, 109.

before God which Lady Mary uses skilfully to accomplish two goals at once – to purge Muslim religious tradition, albeit somewhat light-heartedly, of the accusations that it entirely ignores women, not only in the earthly dimension, but in the heavenly one, as well, and to relativise, and thus seemingly vilify, the Western sacralization of female chastity by showing how it may be read in an altogether contradictory manner: Here are maxims for you, prodigiously contrary to those of your convents. What will become of your saint Catherines, your saint Theresas, your saint Claras and the whole bead roll of your holy virgins and widows, who, if they are to be judged by this system of virtue will be found to have been infamous creatures that passed their whole lives in a most abominable libertinism.287

Though made in a humorous and semi-serious tone, such a critique was bound to cause tremors within the rather caustic English society of the times; all the more so coming from a young society lady. It is exactly in moments like this that Lady Mary comes the closest to being what could be labelled a ‘revolutionary,’ perhaps even a proto-feminist, though not through what she actually advocated for women, nor what she disavowed – surely a ‘proper’ feminist would have none of either – but, rather, through taking up this issue in the first place, and the outspoken manner in which she went about talking of women and their sexuality. What might surprise contemporary readers with even the slightest experience of feminism as it is understood today is that what Lady Mary found liberating in the lives of Eastern women was exactly what to her successors, such as Rose Macaulay and the majority of present-day feminist authors, activists and scholars, constitute the crux of enslavement, bondage, and denial of human rights – the veil and the harem, two particularly suggestive topoi functioning in the collective Western imagination. It is the “liberating concealment” granted by being veiled and living in the seclusion of the harem that will become the focus of the ensuing discussion. Perhaps in order to equip oneself with the necessary background to understanding Lady Mary’s oxymoron, it is worthwhile to consider first a later source, Demetra Vaka Brown’s Haremlik. A harem woman, Djimlah, with whomVaka Brown has an illuminating, albeit frustrating, conversation asserts with all earnestness that “Woman has no soul … she is all emotions and senses”288. This is particularly interesting when attempting to see whether feminism managed to penetrate the inner circles of those whom it regarded most oppressed, and how this would, in 287 Wortley Montagu, 110. 288 Brown Vaka, 60.

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retrospect, bear on the women from Lady Mary’s accounts. In her Pages from the Life of Turkish Women Vaka Brown shows that by the beginning of the 20th century feminism did force itself into the seemingly impenetrable harem, but in a particularly devious and dangerous manner which led women to contemplate committing desperate acts in the name of a ‘philosophy’ they did not understand properly and from which they selected only the most extreme components. There can be no denying that feminism was needed in Turkey, but in the times of the Ottoman empire – especially during its prime, as pictured in Lady Mary’s letters – it was largely nonsensical and could even be detrimental to the women themselves. In early 20th century, when Vaka Brown was working on Haremlik, the socio-political mood was already changing, and the Ottoman Empire would soon give in to the momentum of Mustafa Kemal. Thanks to his wife, Latife Uşakizâde289, feminism would be partially de-stigmatized and more broadly propagated, though even for Mustafa Kemal, the enlightened founder of the Turkish Republic, it would still contain points he could never accept or tolerate. The situation, by and large, remains the same today, with the main difference being that the official discourse of support for equality and justice has managed to partially conceal the continued reign of tradition in everyday practice. Thus, Lady Mary’s mid-18th-century opinion that Turkish women were the only ‘free’ individuals in Turkish society is all the more remarkable. As noted by Ruth Bernard Yeazell290, the careful separation of sexes within Ottoman society created an effective system of what could be called ‘gateways and walls’ which however at closer scrutiny “undergo a curious transformation”291 – they do not consign women to the secluded interiors of the harems but rather keep out ‘intruders,’ frequently including the ladies’ spouses, and – Yeazell continues “the coverings that hide women when they venture outside positively enable their freedom”292. Lady Mary indeed is quite explicit on this point: in stressing the

289 For a detailed and up-to-date the only biography of Latife Uşakizâde, cf. Çalışlar, İpek, Madam Atatürk: The First Lady of Modern Turkey, translated from the Turkish by Feyza Howell, London: Saqi, 2013. The book offers an in-depth study of Mustafa Kemal’s and Latife’s complex relationship which developed in parallel to the emergence of the Republic of Turkey, and makes daring attempts to demystify the legend of Turkey’s great leader – with the effect that Çalışlar, like Pamuk, faced charges of insulting Turkishness with her work. 290 Yeazell Bernard, Ruth, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art. And Literature, New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. 291 Yeazell, 84. 292 Yeazell, 85.

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significance of the veil as a means of promoting women’s freedom to pursue their ‘inclinations,’ Lady Mary hinted, too, at women’s power to regulate and control sexuality, with regards not only to performing marital duties, but to indulging in affairs of their own, as well: You may guess how effectually this disguises them … and ‘tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street… . This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery … You may easily imagine the number of faithful wives very small.293

Similarly, Lady Mary does not mince her words when she talks about one of Islam’s concessions to men, polygamy. What is striking, though, is that in describing the practice she treads in a rather roundabout fashion. This could be read as revealing her ignorance of the custom, which that does not seem plausible, given the extent and depth of her knowledge, or as a peculiar reluctance on her part to admit the legitimacy of polygamy and the women’s consent to being involved in polygamous marriages. Commenting on the practice, Lady Mary presents it as the husband’s “inconstancy” which means that “he keeps his mistress in a house apart and visits her as privately as he can, just as ‘tis with you”294. In contrast, Demetra Vaka Brown cites an explanation of polygamy given by one of the wives of a wealthy pasha which denies feelings of remorse, guilt or sense of hurt on the part of either of the parties. The justification put forth by Djimlah, the fourth wife of an established effendi, troublingly rational at times, deserves to be quoted at length: You never share your husband. What a man gives to one woman he never gives to another… . It always amuses me how slow you European women are to understand men. You put up with the greatest outrages in order to remain the only wives. A man is not like a woman, who is essentially a mother. A man by nature is polygamous … whatever he does, the love of one woman is not and cannot be enough to occupy him. When a man has a nature to love more than one woman … according to our sacred laws he may marry them. They are loved and honoured by him, and the children of this second or third love are his children, and share his name as they share his property. But what happens in your country and with your habits? A man repudiates his first wife, generally with a great deal of scandal, for a second. He gives her little money, and her children lose their father’s companionship. If the man cannot divorce his wife, he leads her the life of a dog, and lives a libertine himself. Or if he loves another woman, and she loves him,

293 Wortley Montagu, 71, 72. 294 Wortley Montagu, 72.

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and they live together, the woman carries a burden of shame, and the children born out of their great love are outcasts.295

The passage, apart from anything else, testifies also to the harem’s interception of some knowledge of Western ways, and at several points quite accurate. Of course, the conversations between Demetra Vaka Brown and her harem friends took place much later than the events related by Lady Mary, namely around the turn of the 20th century; still, it appears that with regards to polygamy, no matter how reluctant Lady Mary might have been to acknowledge the practice, not much changed until 1917, when the already weakening Ottoman Empire restricted it by introducing the requirement of the first wife’s consent to her husband’s taking any new brides. The end came nearly a decade later, with Mustafa Kemal prohibiting the practice altogether in 1926. The two dates coincide also with the closing down of Turkey’s most famous and magnificent harem – that at the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, which eventually led to the disappearance of other harems, too. Atatürk’s policy was quite lucid – and from a political standpoint, completely understandable – aiming to facilitate Turkey’s progress on the path to modernization (and Westernization). Such establishments would be but infamous reminders of an Ottoman past which Atatürk spurned, and serious obstacles to thorough reforms that he had in mind for the Turkish nation. The harem closed down, its inhabitants were freed and invited to go back to their preharem lifestyles, and the whole place was turned into a museum.

Harems of the mind have lasted, though Just how appealing a harem could be was Lady Mary’s direct experience, which she did not fail to record, in this way inflicting yet another blow to the overzealous male travellers who vied with one another in their descriptions of harems and their inhabitants. With a typical irony she exposed their pretences to providing their readers with actual depictions by noting that men could only be admitted to the external part of a household – and for Christians, the chancesof being granted even such a privilege were very slim indeed. Thus, what other writers could report with some accuracy was only the outside of a household which, according to Lady Mary, “makes no great appearance”296. She, in contrast, could enjoy the hospitality of the harem’s inmates, and recounted the occasion thus:

295 Brown Vaka, 76–77. 296 Wortley Montagu, 85.

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Their harems are always forbidden ground … and the women’s apartments are always built backward, removed from sight, and have no other prospect than the gardens, which are enclosed with very high walls. There is none of our parterres in them, but they are planted with high trees which give an agreeable shade, and, to my fancy, a pleasing view. In the midst of the garden is the kiosk, that is, a large room commonly beautified with a fine fountain in the midst of it. It is raised nine or ten steps and enclosed with gilded lattices round which vines, jessamines and honeysuckles twining make a sort of a green wall. Large trees are planted round this place, which is the scene of their greatest pleasure, and where the ladies spend most of their hours, employed by their music or embroidery.297

Spending nearly two years in Turkey, and abstaining during this time from political activism which was one of her major vocations in England, Lady Mary managed to penetrate the households of several important Turkish figures, being invariably met with hospitality, kindness and respect. Apart from harems, she also frequented other women-designated spaces, such as the public baths, hamams, where, relying on her “intimate outsider”298 (Mary Roberts) status, she became privy to further customs, rites, and even secrets of Turkish ladies. Her account of these encounters provided unique insight into realms generally inaccessible to Westerners, and, perhaps yet more importantly, her observations, even in such a brief fragment as the one cited above, included the ‘buds’ of virtually all threads of contemporary discourse on the harem. Beginning her description with the term “forbidden ground,” she already hints at the etymology of the word “harem,” or harrama in Arabic. Harrama means “that which is forbidden” or “that which is sacred,” and its semantic field, as noted by Marilyn Booth, is neither “specifically gendered”, nor related to connotations of “‘depriving’ or ‘forbidding’ women space or movement”299. Strangely enough, though perhaps not that surprisingly after all, “Euro/American dictionary definitions,” Booth continues, “had little to do with the meanings of the Arabic term; rather, they housed harem with impurity or love-nest”300. In fact, harems were parts of households the basic function of which was protecting their inhabitants from the intrusions of the outside world. No element of imprisonment was originally contained in their definition, and nor was gender segregation their founding quality. Rather,

297 Wortley Montagu 85–86. 298 Cf. Roberts, Mary, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 299 Booth, Marilyn, ed., Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces, Durham: Duke UP, 2010, 4. 300 Booth, 5.

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the division of a Muslim household ran along the outside/inside or public/private dichotomy, embodied in the presence of the spaces of selamlik and harem. Elaborating on these divisions, Irvin Cemil Schick says that the presence of an inside/outside dichotomy and the overlay of gender upon that dichotomy are two very different matters. Contrary to received opinion, the relegation of Muslim women to the internal half of a bisected space is not clearly mandated by the Qur’an … Rather, this principle is based upon a particular reading of the so-called Verse of the Veil.301

According to the “Verse of the Veil,” adult men and women could share a given space if they were bound to one another by kinship ties which made it impossible for them to marry. Since, as Schick writes, “most men and women are not each other’s kin”302, then, following his interpretation, “the effective consequence of the Verse of the Veil … was often the creation of two relatively distinct – if not necessarily reciprocally hermetic – subspaces”303. Still, the most complete definition of the harem would insist that it constituted a sort of a sacrosanct space for both female and male inhabitants of the household to take shelter in, away from prying eyes. Women spent considerably more time within its confines than men, but their experiences inside were by no means limited to the stereotypical Oriental languor and (guilty) pleasures. In her description, Lady Mary devotes quite a substantial amount of space to the practicalities of how a harem was constructed in order to facilitate the performance of its functions. Again, she misses no point in observing that “the women’s apartments are always built backward, removed from sight, and have no other prospect than the gardens, which are enclosed with very high walls”304. These precautions were necessary to protect harem inhabitants from exposure to vulgar interest from visitors to the household, often representing all walks of life – merchants, dignitaries, beggars. Therefore, the architecture had to perform a mighty feat – a harem had to “embody an architecture that was built to remain unseen”305. The most exquisite example of such architectural techniques is to be found in the labyrinth of gateways, walls and courtyards securing the harem of

301 Schick, Irvin Cemal, “The Harem as Gendered Space and the Spatial Reproduction of Gender,” in Booth, 69–84, 70. 302 Schick in Booth, 71. 303 Schick in Booth, 71. 304 Wortley Montagu, 85; emphasis mine. 305 Lad, Jateen, “Panoptic Bodies: Black Eunuchs as Guardians of the Topkapı Harem,” in Booth, 137–176, 142.

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the Topkapı Palace, where the architects resorted to strategic deception in order to divert the curiosity of the guests through misleading “decoy gates”306: The first and most conspicuous was the Gate of Felicity … the celebrated porta regia whose promise of fabulous and limitless possibilities had captivated outsiders for centuries. Yet its magnificence served to deceive … In a shaded corner of the courtyard, two unassuming iron gates might escape attention. They appear identical except in small details; however, one may be considered a decoy. The other … announced itself through gilt inscription as the actual entrance to the harem … This guarded treatment of the harem’s thresholds … deceived many European visitors to the palace.307

It is this meticulous attention to secrecy and safety that is at least partially responsible for the fantasies, suspicions, rumours which grew up around harems. Having fallen on fertile – Western – ground, the speculation led to the eroticization of this space and the creation of ‘imaginary’ harems which, stemming from a repository of unfulfilled Euro/American dreams and further piqued by ungratified curiosity, revealed more about Westerners than they did about ‘Orientals.’ What the fantasies laid bare was not particularly flattering. The over-reliance on hearsay and ‘half-truths’ or sophisms, along with the stimuli provided by the magical lore of The Arabian Nights, resulted in a false and reductionist knowledge, and an obsession with some recurrent motifs and figures. Ruth Yeazell captures this in her remark that Westerners “were long fascinated by what they could know of the harem [but] what they could only imagine excited them still more”308. Since stringent precautions on the part of ‘Orientals’ were taken to guarantee the inviolability of the harem, imaginations could run wild. Again, Yeazell’s observations locate the core of the issue; having drawn attention to the common Western practice of projecting one’s fears and desires onto the ‘others’ from one’s fantasies and dreams, she concludes that “the blank space of the harem, sealed by definition from the eyes of Western men, only magnified the temptation”309. Temptation, promise, and threat indeed played a part in fantasies of appropriating the ‘East,’ the ‘Orient’ for Western man’s perusal, pleasure and thrill, encouraging the emergence of a discourse whose attractiveness consisted in being a powerful mixture of these three elements. The passive, obedient and temptingly sensual odalisque thus became permanently pre-figured in these imaginings as the promised prize for courage and virility in confronting the threat of Oriental

306 307 308 309

Lad in Booth, 145. Lad in Booth, 144–145. Yeazell, 1. Yeazell, 1.

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‘savagery.’ As vividly put by Reina Lewis, “For men, the harem woman trapped in a cruel polygamous sexual prison was a titillating but pitiful emblem of the aberrant sexuality and despotic power that characterized all that was wrong with the non-Christian Orient”310. The Western “harem myth” took hold quickly, strengthened by the escalation of Western, predominantly male, East-bound mobility and the dawning of the era of touring, with an ‘Oriental’ journey seen as an educating experience essential to the forming of a proper Western gentleman. Despite the element of commerce, which for some might have played an important part, Eastern travels were also about re/discovering the origins of Western civilization, through the experience of a peculiar time-freeze – the Orient, with its palimpsest-like history, granted people the opportunity to feel, sometimes in quite a palpable, corporeal way, the presence of the past out of which had sprung the great achievements of Western culture. Nerval and Flaubert both gave in to such “hallucinations of memory”311, on which Flaubert commented by saying that “Anyone who looks at things with some attention rediscovers still much more than he discovers”312. Lady Mary, over a century earlier than the two Frenchmen, also fell prey to this sensation, recalling how visits to the actual sites she had previously known only from Homer helped her gain better understanding of the Iliad: “While I view’d these celebrated Fields and Rivers [at the ruins of Troy], I admir’d the exact Geography of Homer, whom I had in my hand”313. The visit also proved helpful to understanding “several little passages … that I did not before entirely comprehend the Beauty of, many of the customs and much of dress then in fashion being retain’d”314. On the one hand, her excitement at the revelations she had experienced among the ruins can be read as an appraisal of what Turkey had to offer its visitors – bliss of enlightenment, so to speak; on the other, the thrill with which she makes these re/discoveries is somewhat compromised by the realization that Turkey thus loses the corporeality of a country undergoing the unceasing flow of time, and rooted in geography and history constantly reshaped by the occurrence of various events, becoming frozen in time or timeless. Travel accounts naturally abound in those ‘epiphanies’ which from a more casual perspective could be read as testimonies to the great impact that the places 310 Lewis, Reina, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem, London: Tauris, 2004, 13. 311 Yeazell, 236. 312 Flaubert quoted in Yeazell, 237. 313 Wortley Montagu, 235. 314 Wortley Montagu, 235.

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visited exert on the travellers. The grounds for taking issue with such ‘explosions’ of awe and admiration generally have to do with the travellers’ assuming a somewhat compromised attitude to what they behold and their resultant tendency to reduce peoples, places, artefacts, even nature and animals, to mere ‘props’ on display, instead of perceiving them in their own right as signalling spaces that are far from static but which might further the dialogue between cultures and arts.

Dialogue inter artes It is worth considering Lady Mary and her heritage specifically in this context of dialogue inter artes. Since its publication, The Turkish Embassy Letters – as well as sparking continued interest among readers of various generations, motivations, agendas, and purposes – have also proven their significance in initiating the sort of inter-disciplinary dialogue mentioned above. Lady Mary’s Letters have been abundantly cited, and have inspired scholarly, artistic and popular works; and certain passages – such as the one on the controversial vaccination issue and the apotheosis of Turkish women’s freedom – have ignited heated debates and have been variously confronted and related to. The references vary in scope and depth, from single comments intended as asides, to more elaborate polemics on a particular matter, to complete works, including poems and paintings. With some, it is relatively easy to capture the links; others prove more ‘cryptic’ and require more effort to be revealed; with yet others, tracing their connection to Lady Mary’s original is an exercise in interpretation, which becomes all the more gratifying when it is made possible by pinpointing an elusive but still palpable resemblance. By focusing on a selection of inter-/trans-disciplinary works of various genres – literature, visual arts, music – the following part will explore the particular junctions within the web of cross-dependent texts of culture at which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu might be seen as assuming the role of a pulsating ‘beacon’ irradiating the investigated material, and a ‘ghostly’ presence at the same time, haunting the imaginary spaces of each of the texts under analysis, being at once tangible yet transparent, eloquent yet unobtrusive. In what follows I aim to unravel a range of references to Lady Mary, in order to illuminate and explore patterns through which various texts of culture enter into complex dialogues with one another, regardless of the spatial, temporal and social distances between them. To facilitate this analysis, the following section is divided into two sub-sections, in one of which I investigate works that have a direct intertextual relation to Lady Mary, and in the other those that have a more nuanced and subjective connection. 151

“A spectacle which would make a hundred painters drop their brushes in astonishment”: Lady Mary, painters, men of letters, and the Hamam Although inter- and metatextuality have gained perhaps the greatest popularity with the dawning of the postmodern era, when experiments with form and structure have encouraged artists to seek for and employ innovative devices in their works, cross-referencing and metafictionalizing have long been used in creative acts of various proveniences, and for various purposes. When it comes to travel writing, ‘intertextuality’ in many cases is unavoidable, especially once certain destinations become particularly ‘fashionable,’ a circumstance given a semi-serious and hilarious portrayal by Rose Macaulay in The Towers of Trebizond, when all of sudden everyone was writing their ‘Turkey books,’ and rivalry escalated to nearly murderous intensity. Turkey has actually experienced many waves of popularity; with some periodic ebbs it has been a land of special interest to travellers, but also artists, writers, and musicians, all desirous of capturing the ‘perfect’ moment, scene, or landscape. Naturally, particularly cherished were the descriptions of the very first impression made on the visitor upon such memorable occasions as entering the city of Constantinople/Stamboul/Istanbul – for Lady Mary, on April 1, 1717, this meant entering “a new world”315 which offered a new sensation around every corner, an experience in many respects still possible today. Surely the occasion yielded similar emotions for Edmondo De Amicis who arrived in Constantinople in 1874, fully aware of the challenges posed by attempting to share what he saw and felt at the moment, but at the same time quite confident in the power of the display: Kings, princes, potentates, all you who are blessed with wealth and good fortune, how I pitied you: at that moment my place on the ship’s deck was worth all your treasures put together. I wouldn’t have sold the view I saw for an empire … Here is the city of Constantinople! Endless, sublime, superb! The glory of creation and of the human race! So such beauty had not been a dream after all!316

Power of display notwithstanding, De Amicis was soon confronted with yet another daunting task: And now, poor wretch, try to describe, to profane with your words that divine vision! Who would dare to describe Constantinople? Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Gautier – all

315 Wortley Montagu, 57. 316 De Amicis, Edmondo, Constantinople, translated by Stephen Parkin, foreword by Umberto Eco, London: Alma Classics, 2013 (1877), 12.

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mere stammering! And yet images and words rush to my mind and flow from my pen. I see, I speak, I write, all at once, with no hope of success but in a drunken haze of delight.317

Despite his own display (that of modesty), he rose to the challenge and produced a powerful illustration of his first sighting of Constantinople, enhanced in spectacularity through his interest in the then budding cinematic art due to which the description acquires the sort of momentum later provided by the characteristic ‘zoom-in, zoom-out’ movements of the camera. Still, the truly ‘high stakes’ were involved in yet another task, the advanced standards of which had been introduced by Lady Mary herself – dispensing ‘unbiased’ knowledge on such nearly ‘mythical’ creatures as the Turkish women that De Amicis had set his sights on. It is also at this juncture in his account of Constantinople that he makes an explicit reference to Lady Mary and her expertise on the issue of Turkish women. A casual enough gesture – a writer acknowledging the work and know-how of a fellow crafts(wo)man – it does bear quite significant implications. That De Amicis makes this gesture in the first place signals that he deems Lady Mary important enough to include her in his own account; moreover, his neutral tone in making the reference suggests that he might actually have held her in higher esteem than he did the ‘giants’ of French literature and politics, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Gautier, whose attempts to describe the city he dismisses swiftly with a flippant remark - “mere stammering!”318. This is however as far as he would go with the already rather reluctant praise of Lady Mary – despite the acknowledgement, De Amicis proceeds to undermine her observations, or even contradict them altogether, in that he takes issue with her opinion on the issue of Turkish women’s freedom, as if ‘reverting to type’ and belittling Lady Mary’s capacities for critical examination – was she not, after all, a woman bound to err in her judgements? The result of the entire exercise seems to be that, though good enough for a starting point to an investigation, Lady Mary and her views only provide material to be explored, and material in need of a ‘corrigendum’ supplied by De Amicis in the ensuing discussion which, interestingly, does not really identify the nature of Lady Mary’s inaccuracies: They are free; it is a truth which is obvious to the visitor almost as soon as he arrives. It is an exaggeration to say, like Lady Montagu, that they are freer than European women, but whoever has been in Constantinople will laugh when he hears them spoken of as “slaves” … To see a Turk in the streets of Constantinople in the company … of a woman – not arm in arm, but just walking by her side or stopping to talk to her – even if

317 De Amicis, 12. 318 De Amicis, 12.

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they carried placards round their necks declaring they were man and wife, would seem to everyone the most unheard-of thing, an act of unbelievable impudence … In this sense, Turkish women enjoy greater freedom than their European counterparts, and their delight in their liberty is indescribable; they rush into noise, crowds, light, open air with wild excitement, while in their homes they only ever see one man, and live behind grated windows and in cloistered gardens. They run about the city with the joy of a liberated prisoner. It is amusing to follow one of them from a distance to see how she manages to eke out and refine the pleasures of gadding about.319

The aspects of Turkish women’s freedom that are greater than among their European counterparts, in De Amicis’ observations, consist in being relieved of their husbands when out “gadding about.” Moreover, this “gadding about” is so unimportant and silly that, really, no wonder the men do not wish to be bothered with the duty of accompanying their wives while they pursue their insubstantial fancies, De Amicis seems to be saying, through this managing, too, to denigrate the Turkish ladies, supposedly to the advantage of European women, but in consequence succeeding in compromising the female sex altogether, depicting its representatives as creatures driven by emotions solely, with no rational mind to come to their aid. The informed reader, however, familiar with Lady Mary and her Letters, would surely become alerted here to the sweeping oversimplifications and reductionisms that he indulges in. De Amicis’ patronising views of women, as well as of the culture and the peoples of the country which had filled him with such awe, resurface at several points in his account, to the effect, perhaps, of revealing De Amicis himself to be deeply implicated in the commonly accepted notions and ideas of the times. Despite De Amicis’ not particularly favourable opinion of the Turkish ladies, there can be no denying that he still allowed himself to be amazed by some of their customs, especially those related to a code of courtship that the harem women followed, displaying ingenuity and resourcefulness. Although he calls these practices “sweet childishness”320, he nevertheless grants them the privilege of a nearly pagelong description: They have a thousand objects – flowers, fruits, leaves, feathers, stones – each one of which conveys an agreed meaning, an adjective or a verb or even a complete sentence, so that they can make a letter out of a bouquet of flowers, or say a hundred things with a box or purse full of various small objects … Each object is associated with a line of verse, so lovers can compose a love poem in a few minutes. In translation, a clove, a strip of paper, a slice of pear, a bit of soap, a match, a snatch of gold thread and a pinch of

319 De Amicis, 140. 320 De Amicis, 142.

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cinnamon and pepper mean: “I have loved you for a long time. I burn, I languish, I die for love of you. Give me a little hope – do not reject me – send me one word of reply.” They can say many other things besides: reprimand, advice, warning, news, everything can be communicated in this way.321

Importantly, De Amicis here does not pretend to have acquired this knowledge first-hand, and mentions that such ‘gems’ can only be accessed in a sort of roundabout way, at least for a male author of his standing, i.e. through the mediation of a “Christian friend” whom “occasionally some good-natured hanim might confide in”322. Although he does not credit Lady Mary here in a direct manner, there might indeed be good cause to suspect her influence and assistance – in Letter XLII to an unnamed Lady, dated 16 March 1718, she assembles a Turkish love confession composed through what might appear a random assortment of some odds and ends and provides it with a translation for her friend’s reference: “I have got for you, as you desire, a Turkish love letter, which I have put in a little box … The translation of it is literally as follows”323. Significantly, the peculiar ‘lexicon’ enclosed with the box lists each of the objects mentioned by De Amicis, exactly in the order in which he arranged them, and their definitions, too, directly correspond to the meanings he granted them324. Perhaps a coincidence, but then, both De Amicis and Lady Mary seem to be authors who treat their work too seriously for that to be a mere chance. Thus, it seems safe to assume that De Amicis had a thorough familiarity with Lady Mary’s Letters and, seeing his reluctance to acknowledge her expertise explicitly, felt a certain regret that the experiences she had had were denied him to observe and then express in writing. In fact, he admits the presence of at least some vicariousness in a passage describing the dress of Turkish women which, despite all its vivacity and colourfulness, is strewn with verbs such as “imagine” or “picture.” The readers are thus invited to follow the author in what might actually be a flight of fancy inspired by the imagined vision of the beauty and originality of Turkish women’s fashion, further problematised by the circumstances of its re/creator in this instance – white European male of notable background, careful upbringing and distinguished manners. His wonder and admiration at Turkish mores is continually seasoned with criticism, at times quite severe, which, however, is not of the type that could be dismissed out of hand, as would be the only right approach had it stemmed from a narrowness of the mind or an incapacity to fathom difference when confronted with it. Certain 321 322 323 324

De Amicis, 142. De Amicis, 142. Wortley Montagu, 120. Cf. Wortley Montagu, Letter XLII, 121.

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aspects of De Amicis’ critique actually resemble the beliefs professed by Western first-wave feminists – commenting on the Turkish social system and marital law and the actual position of women within this machinery, he observes with mounting indignation: Her children’s interests are injured, her own self-respect is wounded … It may be said that Turkish women know that the same things happen to European women: true, but they also know that a European woman is not obliged by civil and religious law to respect and live in amity with the woman who poisons her life, and that she has at least the consolation of being regarded as a victim, as well as having many ways of vindicating and alleviating her position, without her husband being able to say, like the Turk: “I have the right to love a hundred women, but it is your duty to love me alone.”325

It is here that De Amicis enters into a polemic with Lady Mary on the issue of women’s freedom, and – it has to be admitted – he does so with accuracy and tactfulness. The passage develops cleverly, relying more on the knowledge that was actually available to De Amicis – i.e. about the liberties and privileges of Turkish men – which he then swiftly applies to a characterization of women’s status and their resulting predicament, arranging the entire argument, as it were, in a series of hypotheses and counterarguments to them, exposing, too, a certain naïveté in Lady Mary’s happy-go-lucky reading of harem life. His survey and assessment of the situation of harem woman is quite radical but, despite the stigmatizing tone with which he frequently speaks of the women, it is not at them that he directs his criticism. Rather, he attacks the men-introduced and men-operated social system that produces them, with utter disregard for women’s education, or proper diversions to occupy them. The comparison ultimately favours European laws and outlooks, and the sort of ‘moral spine’ developed in consequence: “Finally what right have these men who are the most addicted on earth to the nefanda voluptas to preach to us of morality?”326. It is one thing, however, to persecute the overindulgence in the “unspeakable pleasures”; it is quite another to denounce them altogether. Since the pleasures might be indulged in vicariously, too, De Amicis evidently saw no reason to condemn them. Because his own involvement with the famed Turkish baths must have been vicarious, after all. A mythologised sanctuary of beauty, frivolity, languor and lasciviousness – the bathing halls, just as the harem quarters, were forbidden ground for men. Here at least De Amicis does not aspire to firsthand knowledge and admits that he renders the hamam scenes “according to the

325 De Amicis, 148. 326 De Amicis, 150.

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testimony of European ladies who’ve been there”327. Again, a reference to Lady Mary appears to be made here. Her testimony of the visit to the baths is scrupulous and recorded in a characteristic, slightly ironic tone, not devoid of humour. Her observations accentuate the extreme kindness and sincerity with which the women received her, and provide perhaps the most provoking descriptions to be found in her Letters: I was in my travelling habit … and certainly appeared very extraordinary to them. Yet there was not one of them that showed the least surprise or impertinent curiosity, but received me with all the obliging civility possible… . The sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies … without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature … stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed. Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture amongst them … So many fine women naked, in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their cushions while their slaves … were employed in braiding their hair in several pretty manners … I was at last forced to open my shirt, and show them my stays, which satisfied them very well, for I saw they believed I was so locked up in that machine, that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband.328

This faithful illustration by an 18th-century English lady indeed caused a bit of a stir among some prominent Western male artists, some of whom took over two decades to find their own way to respond to the scene portrayed by Lady Mary. Remarking upon the nature of the experience of the baths, Edmondo De Amicis noted exuberantly that it was “a spectacle which would make a hundred painters drop their brushes in astonishment”329. Whether the number was indeed a hundred remains a question as yet unsolved; what the facts corroborate is that for one particular painter not even so much as the ‘spectacle’ but already the mere imagination of it was enough to drop his brush somewhat helplessly and seek Lady Mary’s guidance. Despite finding the required assistance it still took him nearly thirty years to artistically ‘digest’ Lady Mary’s vision and respond to it with the means granted him by his talent. De Amicis too seems to have found it hard to keep to his polished and journalistic style with some aspirations to objectivity when recording his impressions of the hamam: There, in those dimly lit marble halls, round the fountains, sometimes more than two hundred women gather, naked as nymphs, or semi-naked … Here the snow-white

327 De Amicis, 162. 328 Wortley Montagu, 58–60. 329 De Amicis, 162.

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hanim can be seen next to the ebony-black slave; the buxom matron who represents the old-fashioned Turkish ideal of beauty; slender brides hardly out of girlhood whit short curly hair, looking like boys; fair-haired Circassians with long golden tresses falling to their knees, and Turkish women with their thick black hair hanging loose over breasts and shoulders, or in a frizzled tangle like an enormous wig … half-savages with tattooed arms, and fashionable ladies whose waists and ankles are still red from their corsets and boots … A hundred different elegant or unusual poses and groupings can be seen. Some are stretched out smoking upon their mats, some are having their hair combed by their slave-women, other are embroidering or singing; they laugh, splash and chase each other, shrieking in the showers, or sit in a circle eating and drinking.330

There can be no denying that the Oriental bath scenes lend themselves particularly gracefully to appropriations and interpretations through art. Already the descriptions by Lady Mary and De Amicis reveal enough to make one’s heart race; should they be supplemented with visual representations, the effect would, in all probability, prove even more sensual. However, for Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres it was not recreating the sensuality that caused him the most trouble (and a helpless droop of his brush); rather, with the decision to render the Turkish harem scenes, the painter found himself a victim of a peculiar obsession having to do with a pursuit of a license for fantasizing – not, as would perhaps be more rational, with a search for a credible source of inspiration which could ultimately authenticate his vision. Between 1862 and 1863, Ingres added final strokes of the brush to Le bain turc, concluding work on the painting with his unmistakeable signature. He initiated the endeavour, though, nearly thirty years earlier when he copied two excerpts from Lady Mary’s Letters into his notebook. He then set it aside but, as Ruth Yeazell notes, after a lapse of over two decades the passages re-emerged in his preparatory sketches for Le bain turc331. As observed by Yeazell, what Ingres had in mind was not a simple visual transcription of the Letters, but rather their “transformative adaptation”332. The first of the two passages Ingres adapted came from Lady Mary’s letter to an unnamed countess, written in Constantinople and dated May, 1718. At first glance, the painting and the fragments do not bear much actual resemblance, except for the overall atmosphere of the scene and the specific decorum it observed. In technical terms, it appears that the passage is not an asset to Ingres – he could well portray the beauty of the nude female body without the aid of any 330 De Amicis, 162–163. 331 Yeazell, 36. 332 Yeazell, 36.

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description. Rather, what he found in the fragment was the legitimization for his imaginative rendering of the scene through Lady Mary’s allusions to classical texts. Theocritus’ poems, to which Lady Mary compared the wedding ceremony she had witnessed, might have assured Ingres of the apparent ‘timelessness’ of the Orient which, along with the common Western belief that travels to the East were indeed essentially about going back in time, provided the painter with the license to indulge in his own dream of gazing upon and admiring the origins of Western civilization, exactly through the East’s supposed state of being ‘frozen’ in time, or located outside time altogether. With the means available to him, Ingres offers a response to and elaboration on Lady Mary’s recollections of the wedding: I was three days ago at one of the finest [bath houses] in town and had the opportunity of seeing a Turkish bride received there and all the ceremonies used on that occasion, which made me recollect the epithalamium of Helen by Theocritus, and it seems to me that the same customs have continued ever since.333

The other fragment Ingres copies – from Lady Mary’s letter to an unnamed lady, sent from Adrianople on April 1, 1717, seems to resonate more substantially with Le bain turc. Lady Mary depicts the variety of Turkish women’s physiques, remarking on their “fine skins … [and] … delicate shapes… proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn by Guido or Titian”334. Although there appears to be no explicit allusion to the two painters in Le bain turc, it is important enough that the theme, introduced by Lady Mary, is undertaken by one of their fellow craftsmen. The ladies, in turn, with their preoccupations and diversions, feature in the painting in all their abundance, and the somewhat sleepy, dreamy atmosphere of their congregation quite closely matches Lady Mary’s depiction: I was here convinced of the truth of a reflection I had often made, that if it was the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed. I perceived that the ladies with finest skins and most delicate shapes had the greatest share of my attention, though their faces were sometimes less beautiful than those of their companions… . so many fine women naked, in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their cushions while their slaves (generally pretty girls of seventeen or eighteen) were employed in braiding their hair in several pretty manners. In short, ‘tis the women’s coffee house, where all the news of the town is told, scandal invented etc. They generally take this diversion once a week, and stay there at least four or five hours, without getting cold by immediate coming out of the hot bath into the cold room.335

333 Wortley Montagu, 134. 334 Wortley Montagu, 59. 335 Wortley Montagu, 59.

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Importantly, Lady Mary actually interacted with the women, and this involvement extended well beyond the customary airs and graces or the exchange of pleasantries. She not only observes but is observed, too, with apparently just as much curiosity as she invests in looking upon the women. She goes even further, and extends the exchange from word and gaze to touch, thus stressing the universal ‘communion’ of women, especially once the ‘ignominious’ practices of her husband become revealed. Significantly, Ingres does not in any way refer to that interaction, eliminating Lady Mary’s presence from his painting altogether. This erasure is one of the fundamental changes effected by Ingres on Lady Mary’s original, and will be returned to and discussed in more depth further. The other vital difference between what Lady Mary saw and what Ingres painted consists in the character of the space each of them represented. Ruth Yeazell remarks that the scene recorded by Lady Mary took place at public baths, and as such belonged to the sphere of “civic spaces, in which women from different households could come temporarily together”336. Elaborating on her observation, Yeazell suggests that in his decision to convert a public occasion into intimate, private scenes, Ingres might have been implicated in the machinery of Western male fantasizing about the Orient which, backed up with what she benignly calls “wishful ignorance”337, mis/led him into assuming that any gathering of more than two “Oriental” women could only have taken place within the sheltering confines of the harem338. The explanation Yeazell offers could also account for the ‘buzz’ over one particular gesture captured by Ingres, hinted at by Lady Mary herself. Seeing that the intimate and languid shelter provided by the harem might have indeed created a mood of general negligence, enhanced by the sensuality of a number of nude women, some contemporary critics have speculated on the elusive yet palpable homoerotic current in Lady Mary’s Letters. Naturally, lesbianism among the haremites was already a compulsory motif in the travellers’ tales of the time, but, for obvious reasons, it had to be consigned to the realm of suspicion, as the male travellers had no access to what went on within the harem walls. Lady Mary pried the door slightly open, first through her descriptions, but also through hints, perhaps unintended, on her part regarding her own proclivities. Her professed reluctance for any “passion” but that for travel, which she expressed in one of early letters exchanged with Wortley; her longing for an autonomous,

336 Yeazell, 40. 337 Yeazell, 41. 338 Yeazell, 41.

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women-only space within which she could engage in a tête-à-tête with Sappho; her youthful dreams of going to a convent where she could enjoy the presence of other women; finally, her own admiration for women’s beauty – all this has led some critics to assume a potential homosexual element in Lady Mary, albeit perhaps not (fully) realized by her. If Ingres, reading Lady Mary’s Letters, gave these ‘suspicions’ some credence, then the mysterious hand cupping the breast of another woman in the foreground of Le bain turc might be read as an unobtrusive manifestation of his ‘insider’s knowledge.’ However, perhaps in order to maintain the elusiveness displayed by Lady Mary in this matter, he paints the hand at the breast in such a way that the “salient gesture”339 might very well be an illusion. The hand remains mysterious, preserving the original indeterminacy and avoiding crude explicitness. The dubious case of the hand on the breast has also inspired a contemporary artist who in his rendering of the painting directly refers to the ambiguous element. Richard Frost’s 1970 poem “Jean Ingres’ Le Bain Turc”340 constitutes a meticulous description of the painting and the circumstances of its creation, rendered in free verse, adding yet another voice to the peculiar artistic conversation between Lady Mary and Ingres which then becomes a polyphony, linking individuals across different times and distant locations. On the depiction of the hand, Frost writes: Over on the right, wearing a ruby necklace, is a sleepy redhead with her forearms behind her neck in that timeless pose, and she partly obscures two others so that you can’t tell whether one of them is fondling her own breast or the other is doing it. Except that when you look at their faces, you know which one.341

Also Frost seems to stop just one sentence before saying too much, before being too explicit, and still manages to get the sensuous message across. The entire poem gives off such a tantalizing impression, rich in descriptive detail, that it could well serve as an elaborate museum label explaining the painting. Apart from depicting what Le bain turc presents, the poem also in a way guides the reactions of the potential viewer of the painting, first expressing a sense of certainty on a given issue, only to disavow it a couple lines further, thus testifying,

339 Yeazell, 41. 340 Frost, Richard, “Jean Ingres’ Le Bain Turc,” in The New Orleans Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter 1969), 160–161. 341 Frost, 160.

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too, to Frost’s own knowledge of this particular painting and the its creator, as well as Ingres’ other works: You feel sure that Ingres knew exactly what he was doing. Ingres must have posed twenty-four live models and set to work busily. You feel sure of this until you notice that the woman with the mandolin is exactly as he painted her fifty-five years before by herself sitting on a bed.342

The fragment adds yet another piece of information about how Ingres actually painted Le bain turc – Lady Mary’s Letters were not his sole reference for this piece; for the centrally placed figure of the woman with the mandolin sitting with her back to the viewer Ingres returned to his 1807–1808 painting of The Valpinçon Bather and faithfully transcribed her into Le bain turc. Whereas with Lady Mary’s Letters he aimed at creative transformation, with The Bather he obviously was after a literal and accurate adaptation. The characteristic posture, headscarf, and lines of the back create a close resemblance to the bathing odalisque from Le bain turc, an effect today achieved either through advanced Photoshop manipulation or the plain ‘copy-and-paste’ operation. Ingres here can be seen citing himself, an interesting and quite ‘postmodern’ strategy in a 19th-century classicist painter. With this self-referential gesture, the dialogue inter artes has tied another knot but still leaves space for further negotiation. The choices and decisions made by Ingres in Le bain turc benefit considerably from a comparison to yet another ‘hamam work.’ In 1781, nearly a hundred years before Ingres’ painting was completed, Daniel Chodowiecki, a painter and printmaker, made an engraving inspired by Lady Mary’s visit to the baths. At the time, Chodowiecki lived and worked in Berlin, and the engraving could very well have been the result of a contract with the Berlin publisher August Mylius – the image appeared as the frontispiece to Mylius’ 1790 edition of Lady Mary’s Letters. Whether Daniel Chodowiecki himself was familiar with Lady Mary and her work could not be determined within the scope of the present study; in 1762, the year that Lady Mary died, Chodowiecki was still an aspiring artist of 36, and he did the engraving two decades later. The web of connections, nevertheless, continues to grow thicker – Chodowiecki and his work might have very well been familiar to Ingres343 who, having seen the engraving on a subject he himself had been so engrossed in, may have – after due consideration of the work’s merits and of his own 342 Frost, 161. 343 Cf. Yeazell, 42.

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notebooks with excerpts from Lady Mary’s Letters – reached a long sought-after solution as to how, in technical terms, he should work on Le bain turc. In the end, Ingres went for adaptation, both in the case of the letters and of Chodowiecki’s engraving, which, as Ruth Yeazell observes, “is less instructive as a possible influence on Le bain turc than as an alternative”344. That Chodowiecki’s vision differs from that of Ingres’ is discernible at first glance: the painters make an entirely different use of space. In Chodowiecki’s work, the high walls, the floor, and in particular the rooftop dome occupy roughly two-thirds of the engraving, with the dome being the most arresting. Probably made of glass, its main function must have been to let in as much light as possible – many traditional Turkish baths relied solely on natural light The overall impression of the interior is of spaciousness, in contrast to the sweltering crowdedness of Le bain turc, and much more in agreement with Lady Mary’s description: “I went to the bagnio around 10 o’clock … It is built of stone in the shape of a dome, with no windows but in the roof which gives light enough”345. The nude bathers are of course there, “negligently lying on their cushions”346, but Chodowiecki moves them from the foreground to the rear of the picture. Finally, perhaps the most significant difference between Chodowiecki and Ingres is that, strategically placing her in the foreground of the image, Chodowiecki introduces a fully-clad European lady who, with her back to potential viewers, is being received and shown around the hamam by one of the naked bathers. Again, this echoes Lady Mary’s account of the visit – Chodowiecki’s European woman may easily pass for Lady Mary in her “riding habit” and the solicitous bather for “the lady that seemed the most considerable amongst them [who] entreated me to sit by her”347. In contrast, Ingres does not include the presence of Western observers of – or participants in – the scene, an act which, according to Linda Nochlin, is “one of the defining features of Orientalist painting”348. A further comparison of the two images reveals even more qualities symptomatic of the practice of ‘orientalizing’ in Ingres – as has been mentioned earlier, his bathers appear to be entirely outside of history, so that the scene could well depict ancient nymphs; in Chodowiecki’s engraving, the episode could be relatively accurately traced to a particular moment in history, first due to the characteristic fashion of the 344 345 346 347 348

Yeazell, 42. Wortley Montagu, 58. Wortley Montagu, 59. Wortley Montagu, 59. Nochlin, Linda, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society, New York: Harper and Row, 1989, 36.

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European lady’s outfit, but also due to the architecture of the place. The women, though enjoying each other’s company, appear alert to the presence of a foreign woman and her gaze resting upon them. However, this is a reciprocal gaze – the eyes of all the hamam ladies are fixed on the European, and it is she who is the ‘other’ in the scene, the trespasser. This again relates to Lady Mary’s experience of the strangeness of the scene, which for her, however, was accompanied by the awareness that she must have “appeared very extraordinary to them”349. Thus, “a relativity of viewpoint”350 is introduced because, as Yeazell observes, “the rules of undress governing the occasion so thoroughly reverse the customary standards of propriety”351. In this light, Chodowiecki’s image might be read as a record of an inter-cultural encounter, with the representatives of the two cultures experiencing the same emotions – curiosity, wonder, self-consciousness, perhaps a bit of shame and the awareness of their own foreignness. Chodowiecki manages to capture a moment which is unique and unrepeatable in that it is subject to the relentless forward motion of time, in stark contrast to Ingres who, by choosing a dreamy, de-realized timelessness, is interested not so much in telling a particular story as in showing the erotically-loaded abandon of his subjects, who could exist like this totally indifferent to the sensuality of their appeal to the viewer. That is not to say that Chodowiecki’s engraving is not appealing or attractive; it is indeed, though it stirs the curiosity of the viewers, rather than their senses. The eroticism of the scene, exaggerated in Ingres, in Chodowiecki becomes so diminished that, despite the presence of so many naked women, it might be taken as de-eroticized altogether. The appetite that is being whetted is the curiosity about what sort of story is being told, or is going to be told, which also compliments the choice of this image for the frontispiece of the Letters – a good marketing strategy. Today, however, with the raging sexualization of virtually every sphere of life and human activity, in order to sell and make a profit precedence could actually be given to the more explicit art of Ingres which by some might be perceived as titillating and more easily accessible than the more nuanced but also more demanding work by Chodowiecki. That this should be so leads to the crude question of what actually sells better, nudity or brains, but to address it here would be stretching the scope of the present discussion too far. Thus, in order not to

349 Wortley Montagu, 58. 350 Yeazell, 43. 351 Yeazell, 43.

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stray from the our chosen course, let us remain within the tangle of Lady Mary’s artistic influences. As Joan DelPlato notes, Ingres scholars have long been in agreement with regards to the painter’s copying fragments of Lady Mary’s Letters while preparing to work on Le bain turc.352 DelPlato considers another work by Ingres in which she also detects the influence and guidance of Lady Mary, i.e. the 1814 painting Le Grande Odalisque. Embracing DelPlato’s theory, I wish to extend it with a suggestion of dependency which again involves Edmondo De Amicis. In what follows, I intend to elaborate on the similarities discerned by DelPlato between Le Grande Odalisque and Lady Mary’s letter to the Countess of Mar, her sister, sent from Adrianople (today Edirne) on April 18, 1717. Then, referring to several passages from De Amicis’ Constantinople, I will make an attempt to highlight and defend the influence that Ingres might have exerted on De Amicis in turn. In the letter addressed to the Countess of Mar, Lady Mary recounts the visits to two harems that she made on the same day. With the first, she is rather unimpressed, finding the household and the lady rather bland; the second harem, to which she goes only because of her Greek interpretess’s pleading, turns out to be a distinctly different place, and immediately charms Lady Mary: It was nicely clean and magnificent. I was met at the door by two black eunuchs, who led me through a long gallery between two ranks of beautiful young girls, with their hair finely plaited, almost hanging to their feet, all dressed in fine light damasks, brocaded with silver. I was sorry that decency did not permit me to stop to consider them nearer. But that thought was lost upon my entrance into a large room, or rather pavilion, built round with gilded sashes, which were most of them thrown up, and the trees planted near them gave an agreeable shade, which hindered the sun from being troublesome The jessamine and honeysuckles that twisted round their trunks shedding a soft perfume, increased by a white marble fountain playing sweet water in the lower part of the room, which fell into three or four basins with a pleasing sound. The roof was painted with all sorts of flowers, falling out of gilded baskets, that seemed tumbling down.353

Surrendering entirely to the thrill of the promise that such an opulent interior implied, Lady Mary is shortly rewarded with the sight of a stunning beauty, and the admiration with which she fills her is total: On a sofa, raised three steps, and covered with fine Persian carpets, sat the … lady, leaning on cushions of white satin embroidered … her beauty effaced everything I have

352 Cf. Joan DelPlato, “Dress and Undress: Clothing and Eroticism in NineteenthCentury Visual Representations of the Harem,” in Booth, 261–289. 353 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, and Lady Louisa Stuart, The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893, 314, 315.

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seen, all that has been called lovely either in England or Germany and [I] must own that I never saw anything so gloriously beautiful, nor can I recollect a face that would have been taken notice of near hers… . I confess … I was so struck with admiration, that I could not for some time speak to her, being wholly taken up in gazing. That surprising harmony of features! that charming result of the whole! that exact proportion of body! that lovely bloom of complexion unsullied by art! the unutterable enchantment of her smile! … She was dressed in a caftan of gold brocade, flowered with silver very well fitted to her shape, and shewing to advantage the beauty of her bosom, only shaded by the thin gauze of her shift. Her drawers were pale pink, green, and silver, her slippers white, finely embroidered; her lovely arms adorned with bracelets of diamonds, and her broad girdle set round with diamonds, upon her head a rich Turkish handkerchief of pink and silver, her own fine black hair hanging a great length in various tresses, and on one side of her head some bodkins of jewels.354

The ardour Lady Mary exhibits in the description, along with her meticulousness and attention to the details of the woman’s physique and attire, produce such a visual and vivid effect that a reader possessed of some artistic talent would be hard-pressed to resist the urge to actually paint the haremite. Then, looking at Ingres’ Le Grande Odalisque, it is not too difficult to imagine the response to his painting rendered in Lady Mary’s highly emotional lines. Although the resemblance may not be one-to-one, echoes and convergences abound. “Where Ingres emphasizes the figure’s arms and jewellery, especially the distinctive belt, head jewels, and hair plaits”355, Lady Mary exclaims about “her lovely Arms adorn’d with bracelets of Diamonds, and her broad Girdle set round with Diamonds”356. Moving up, what captures attention is the odalisque’s turned head and her furtive glance towards the painter, the viewer, or Lady Mary, perhaps, which again resonates with Lady Mary’s observation: “upon her head a rich Turkish handkerchief of pink and silver, and on one side of her head some bodkins of jewels”357. DelPlato elaborates on three other similarities – the incense burner next to the odalisque’s feet, the luxurious-looking materials that she is lying on, and her position358, comparing them with corresponding passages from Lady Mary’s letter – the dancing girls enter the room with “silver censors in their hands and perfumed the air with amber, aloes wood and other rich scents”359; Lady Mary encounters

354 355 356 357 358 359

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Wortley Montagu and Stuart, 348–350. DelPlato in Booth, 267. Wortley Montagu and Stuart, 348. Wortley Montagu and Stuart, 350. DelPlato in Booth, 267. Wortley Montagu and Stuart, 350.

the woman “in the innermost room … sitting on her sofa”360, whereas the clothes underneath her body could easily resemble a “caftan of gold brocade, flowered with silver very well fitted to her shape, and shewing to advantage the beauty of her bosom, only shaded by the thin gauze of her shift”361. Ingres’ odalisque is naked, but this is plausibly explained by DelPlato, who remarks how “Ingres rather inventively – but cautiously – piles these ‘authentic’ clothes atop one another rather than risk draping them erroneously over a standing body”362. Perhaps also with this painting Ingres aimed at a transformation of Lady Mary’s description, not at a simple re-presentation of the odalisque in visual form. What is more, Le Grande Odalisque could just as easily as Le bain turc pass for an example of a somewhat de-historicized and de-contextualized image of a sensual and languid Oriental beauty, indifferent to circumstance and frozen as if in a still; alone but observed, languid in pose, but alert to the possibility of being watched. Perhaps at some point Edmondo De Amicis had the opportunity to see Le Grande Odalisque, given the painting’s popularity, which was stirred by rumours of scandal regarding Ingres’ choice of subject and the explicit nudity of the picture, before in 1877 he published Constantinople, a substantial part of which is devoted to the ‘enigma’ of Turkish women. This is not to say that, despite his admiration for Oriental ladies, De Amicis held them in particularly high regard; quite the contrary, in many places he accuses them of sloth, ennui, passivity, and light-headedness: Accustomed to the liberty, not to say licence of the harem … and weakened by too many warm baths, she tires immediately of any rigid composure. She throws herself down on her divan, twisting and turning about and getting her long garments into a great tangle; she leans on her elbows, clasps her feet in her hands, puts a cushion on her lap and her elbows on the cushion, stretches and wriggles her limbs, arches her back like a cat, rolls off the divan onto the mattress, from the mattress onto the carpet, and from the carpet onto the marble floor, and sleeps wherever she feels sleepy, like a child.363

Already this passage corroborates Ingres’ rendering of his odalisques; although perhaps Ingres grants them more dignity – De Amicis does not mince his words and even cites a certain French traveller who “has commented that there’s something mollusc-like about their postures”364. Even though De Amicis makes it clear that the blame for Turkish women’s poor manners or their inability to concentrate 360 361 362 363 364

Wortley Montagu and Stuart, 350. Wortley Montagu and Stuart, 350. DelPlato in Booth, 267. De Amicis, 152. De Amicis, 152.

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on any task more challenging than “gazing at the spirals of blue smoke from their cigarettes”365 lies with their husbands, the Pashas and Efendis who do not even consider them human beings but mere playthings, his criticism at times is indeed quite severe, which starkly contrasts with the opinions of European women-travellers who possessed after all the advantage of first-hand experience. There is however one particular point on which De Amicis, Ingres, even Chodowiecki and Lady Mary alike seem to be in agreement – the grace of Turkish women, to De Amicis especially manifest in what could be dubbed ‘the art of sitting.’ Even a quick glance at any of the paintings discussed here is enough to make the viewer notice the variety of poses, head-neck-arms constellations, bows and crossings of long and smooth legs, with Ingres’ Le Grande Odalisque occupying pride of place. Perhaps it is her loneliness amid the opulent harem paraphernalia, or the contrast between her marble-coloured skin and the deep blue curtain behind her and the dark background, or the elegant and harmonious poise and unforced control over her body – for whatever reason, it seems hard not to agree with De Amicis that The gracefulness of Turkish women is all in repose, and in the art of displaying the soft lines and curves of their reclining forms, with the head thrown back, the hair tumbling loose, and the arms hanging limp – this is the art which extracts gold and jewellery from her husband and drives her eunuchs wild.366

Whether the eunuchs were actually moved by the women they had in their custody might be questioned – after all, eunuchs were eunuchs exactly for their nearly mythical immunity to such an abundance of grace; still, it seems that Lady Mary, Ingres, De Amicis and, perhaps, Chodowiecki, all fell prey to the spell of the odalisque. It does not matter really whether each of them experienced the charm first-hand; the graceful dialogue of eyewitness, written report, and visual medium represented and transmitted their dreams and fantasies, and coloured their quotidian. These mutual inspirations and influences, not to say infatuations, have certainly contributed, too, to the Orientalist discourses, with the Orient continuing to function as a seemingly infinite repository of exoticism-coloured cultural and artistic scenarios. As the above-presented cases of broadly understood intertextuality have attempted to show, it is frequently the Western obsession with the ‘alluring Orient’ that constitutes the basic thread from which is woven the complex web of connection and convergences that spans genres, materials, places, 365 De Amicis, 153. 366 De Amicis, 153.

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spaces, times and socio-political moods. Significantly, the knowledge yielded by such (often purely imaginary) encounters contributes to the formation – or expansion – of Western identity and the Westerners’ perception and understanding of their relationship to the ‘rest’ of the world. In some instances, fortunately, the acquired ‘wisdom’ manages to pry open some windows on those ‘others,’ too. How successful such attempts actually prove remains a contested question, though. Whereas in the case of literature and painting, validity and justification of the author’s intentions might be at least partly finite – no matter what (post-) postmodernists try to say to the contrary, in crudely technical terms each book and each painting was only created once, with any resultant prequels, sequels or adaptation all having their respective authors, too, performing arts, Western opera specifically, may distort or even destroy the sense of security resultant from this finity.

Harems, Pashas, and mistaken identities: Lady Mary and W. A. Mozart First of all, it may be said of an opera that it comes into being through a joint effort of the composer and the librettist, thus, in a way, having two distinct authors. To complicate the issue further, the conductor and the director may be perceived as creators of particular opera performances, not to mention the artists themselves without whose interpretation no opera character could be thought of as rounded and complex. These issues acquire specific acuteness in the case of operas which, as Ralph Locke observes in Musical Exoticism, “are obsessed in some way with the split … between the Western/European/metropolitan Self and some kind of Eastern/primitive/rural Other … [this] split … is sometimes presented in ways that … seem ludicrous”367. As Locke goes on to note, this ludicrousness may largely be attributed to opera librettos which necessarily “simplify and intensify concepts and contrasts, making them seem … almost childishly naive … prejudicial, or defamatory”368. In consequence, the representation of distant lands, ‘foreign’ cultures, and the peoples belonging to these ‘non-standard’ realms frequently suffers from stereotypes, sweeping generalizations, and reductionism. This is one of the reasons why the role of the director plays such an important part in staging ‘Oriental’ operas today – a wily regisseur might succeed in thus manoeuvring the ‘pitfalls’ of a given work that they provide a strong comic effect, 367 Locke, Ralph, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011, 79. 368 Locke, 79.

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sometimes sufficient to relieve the accumulated tension, or – by means of allegory or extended metaphor – the original ‘flaws’ may be made into the production’s strongest assets. Of course, among operatic works now grouped under the ‘Oriental/ist’-‘exotic/ ist’ label, not all of them will rely on a compromised handling of cultural difference which, as Locke observes, often has to do with how they manage to negotiate stereotypes embedded in their structure and the ‘ideology’ they espouse369. This is what Mozart should be given credit for – though in many of his operas he employed ‘exotic’ themes, locations, and protagonists, he succeeded in creating works which even today – and despite some preposterous elements and turns of action in the libretto – do not really strike the audiences as “noxious or oppressive”370. If they do, it is usually in a devious prelude to the ultimate lieto fine. There are several reasons why Mozart’s 1782 opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail371 lends itself particularly gracefully to being investigated within the context of, on the one hand, post/colonial anti/exoticist discourse, and the feminism-smacking harem discussion, on the other. To uncover and explore them, in what follows I will focus on the opera’s main protagonists, their personal inclinations and mutual relations, and the broader framework of dependencies within which they are implicated. Whereas the tension along the male/female axis are immediately visible, the conflict of the ‘Self ’ vs. the ‘Other’ plays itself out in a more nuanced way. The discussion will thus aim at a comparison of the opera’s problematics with two concrete locations, in a tentative attempt to test how the symptomatic circumstances of the performances subvert the pre-conceived readings and receptions of Mozart’s work, influencing, too, the audience’s experience and the overall ‘message’ of the opera. When attempting an analysis of any of the ‘great five’ of Mozart’s operas (Don Giovanni, Le Nozze de Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutte, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Die Zauberflöte), one needs to account for the special socio-historical climate of the time. All of them were composed in Vienna, during the reign of Emperor Joseph II, which is virtually synonymous with the era of Austrian Enlightenment. Joseph II was Mozart’s direct employer, as the composer officially worked for the imperial court and received payment for the operas he was commissioned to write. The librettos of the five grand operas Mozart composed under the patronage of 369 Locke, 80. 370 Locke, 81. 371 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Deutsche Grammophon, 2015. 0289479-40647. 2 CDs.

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Joseph II in their own right give testimony to the plurality of Austrian, Viennese in particular, cultural tradition of the time – they express on the one hand the fading conceptions of the feudal order, and the novel aesthetic ideals of the nascent bourgeoisie, on the other, which might at least partially account for the presence of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ elements in Mozart’s works of the time. Brought into contact with one another, often quite forcefully, they achieve a (mildly) revolutionary total effect, Die Entführung aus dem Serail being no exception here. Although the opera features certain stock characters, it juggles them effectively, throwing the protagonists into problematic, if at times improbable, situations through which they are confronted with conflicts of an entirely new order. Such is the case with Pasha Selim, the omnipotent ruler, at whose mercy the opera’s two lovesick couples find themselves. A charismatic figure, Pasha Selim possesses with seemingly unquestioned authority and power which it is his noble right to exercise as he sees fit. Selim resembles many other of Mozart’s kings, emperors and sovereigns, some of whom are evil, some benign, some God’s ‘anointed,’ others usurpers, but all given elaborate arias to highlight and confirm their status. All but Pasha Selim. The ruler of the Serail operates solely by the means of the spoken word, remaining consistently mute in musical terms. Even at such a critical junction in the opera as Konstanze’s powerful aria of defiance, Martern aller Arten, Pasha Selim is not granted the chance to retaliate in what would be “a raging, vengeful aria as sounding proof of his threats”372. What is more, Gretchen A. Wheelock notes that “Konstanze seizes the moment and hijacks her captor’s opportunity to vocalize his rage: taking the words right out of his mouth, she turns them back on him to voice her defiance in an aria that silences the tyrant for nearly ten minutes”373. Interpretations of the Pasha’s voicelessness range from contextualized ones, like Lucjan Puchalski’s suggestion that it was Mozart’s allusion to the emperor’s lack of “aesthetical competence”374, to the more theoretical and ‘ideological,’ having to do with, as Wheelock observes, “Konstanze as subject, role, and performance”375. Puchalski ascribes Pasha’s silence to Mozart’s playing an innocuous trick on the ideal of the enlightened ruler – since the Pasha 372 Wheelock, Gretchen A., “Konstanze performs Constancy,” in Smart, Mary Ann, ed., Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000, 47–66, 51. 373 Wheelock in Smart, 51. 374 Puchalski, Lucjan, Oświecenie po austriacku: świat przedstawiony w operach Wolfganga Amadeusza Mozarta, Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2011, 80. All translations from Puchalski’s work mine. 375 Wheelock in Smart, 51.

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does not possess the ability to express himself through music, he is not ‘overall’ perfect, as “his moral immaculateness does not match aesthetic sensitivity”376. As Puchalski goes on to observe, Emperor Joseph II, though a wise and progressive ruler, never exhibited any deeper interest or understanding of the arts and did not achieve much in terms of promoting the ‘muses’377. In this light, the Pasha’s flaw could be read as Mozart’s mild criticism of the Austrian emperor. In turn, Wheelock directs attention away from the Pasha himself, focusing instead on Konstanze, who “not only take[s] over the Pasha’s words and potential aria … she also takes on a new and powerfully mixed voice … imperious and imploring, athletic and elaborate”378. Thus she assumes at least part of his authority and “effectively erases her captor’s voice and neutralizes his power over us”379, too. The argument proceeds with the further analysis of Konstanze and issues regarding her (supposed) empowerment. Both of these interpretations of Selim’s lack of musical voice add interesting and by no means mutually exclusive angles to the discussion of this ruler figure. Further exploration of the Pasha reveals yet other problematic and analytically attractive aspects of his character. Selim is a Muslim but, contrary to the rather natural assumption one could make, not a Turk. Due to a range of turbulences and radical turns of fate he is expelled from Christian Europe, forced to flee, and finally lands in Turkey where he converts to Islam. This complicates any attempts at judging Selim and turns a seemingly see-through plot into a substantially more complex construct. Were Selim a Muslim and a Turk it would be a clear-cut case – Christianity would be compromised through granting the capacity to forgive to the non-Christian ‘Other,’ thus smuggling in a message of tolerance and/or a shame-induced but nevertheless valid realization that difference may not always imply inferiority and backwardness. Selim, however, is a renegade – a fact which, as aptly observed by Yeazell, “returns both his knowledge of how to love and his capacity for forgiveness to their supposed origins in the West”380. If that is emphasised, then the original message loses force and, what is more, turns into its opposite, positing the superiority of the Western ‘Self ’’ over the ‘Eastern’ Other. In a stage production, the decision which ‘version’ to accentuate remains with the director; significantly, it appears that European performances oscillate towards the second option – with Selim’s nobility stemming from his European origins, which is also further validated by the original 376 377 378 379 380

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Puchalski, 80. Cf. Puchalski, 80. Wheelock in Smart, 51. Wheelock in Smart, 51. Yeazell, 42.

historical context of the opera and Mozart’s involvement with Emperor Joseph II. Eastern, specifically Turkish, productions draw on the former potentiality, quite understandably, but they, too, claim legitimacy to do so, seeing in the Pasha Selim an embodiment of Sultan Selim III who had a reputation as a kind-hearted, for an Ottoman at least, ruler, living virtually all his life at the Topkapı Palace381. The two contrasting interpretations should not, however, be read as expressions of two systems and ideologies hostile towards one another; rather, they should be respected in their own right for the way in which they give testimony to the plurality of history, its relativity, and the multiplicity of ‘versions’ in which it functions. Perhaps reconciliation can be achieved and appeasement found in the fact that, regardless of whether the Pasha is Christian or Muslim, European or Turk, it is he that makes a true – actually, the only – sacrifice in the opera. As Ruth Yeazell remarks, despite Konstanze’s daring defiance of Selim and her readiness to endure all tortures the Pasha might inflict on her, or her and Belmonte’s vows to die for each other if need be382, in the end it is Selim who loses the most, and who does so consciously, almost of his own will. By no means is he the stereotypical “lustful Turk,” vengeful, violent and crude. This role is reserved for Osmin, Selim’s servant and guardian of the palace. In a way, Osmin functions an antithesis of Selim – he is brutal, nearly beastly in his passions, and crude in exercising his desires. Whereas the Pasha, despite his omnipotence, pleads with Konstanze to love him, Osmin demands affection from Blonde in no uncertain terms: “I order you to love me, immediately!” He does wield some power at the court, which might be the cause of his delusions of grandeur, but still he remains the subject of Selim. At first glance there appear virtually no redeeming qualities to his character; perhaps the only way to see him in a more “human” light is to acknowledge that Osmin, too, is a victim of unrequited affection, and Blonde’s refusal and resistance drive him to despair which he can only vent through violence. Then, again, when one considers that Osmin is a Turk, such an ‘apology’ eventually too hits the rocks of racial prejudice. Moreover, despite all his professed violence, in most productions (at least the more conventional ones) he never actually goes on to realize his threats, and Blonde does not really fear him, which she manifests in her frequent pranks at his expense. This could, too, signal Osmin’s emasculation which, when viewed symbolically, could again imply the inferiority and un-wholesomeness of the ‘Eastern other.’

381 Cf. Interview with Erdem Erdoğan: Appendices, 193–195. 382 Cf. Yeazell, 142.

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However, what needs to be considered in the case of Osmin is, again, the sociopolitical specificity of the context in which the opera was composed. In this light, the figure of Osmin gains in importance and deserves more attention than he usually gets in contemporary analyses. Apart from being ascribed the role of the “lustful Turk,” Osmin performs yet another function in the opera which Lucjan Puchalski characterises as that of the “Viennese Hanswurst”383. According to Puchalski, Hanswurst: is a glutton and a sot, womanizer and traitor, coward and miscreant … brawler and fraud, insatiate erotomaniac and ultimate failure, braggart and loafer … parasite and spendthrift … naive but cunning, cocky, stubborn, ungrateful … vengeful, jealous, licentious … and nosy.384

The comic and satiric elements of this character constantly mix with his more sinister side; overall, however, the figure of Hanswurst does conceal more philosophical depth – as Puchalski observes, such an anti-hero constitutes also a certain ideological revolt against the progressive rationalization of all spheres of human life brought on by the spread of Enlightenment ideals385. In this way, Hanswurst represented on stage the physicality and materiality of human nature, reminding the audience both of its contradictions and fissures, its frailties and weaknesses, and the spontaneous joy derived from a purely carnal existence and the pleasures of a sensual interaction with the world.386

Such is Osmin’s behaviour – he lusts after women, does not overwork himself, and when he tries alcohol he drinks himself into an alcoholic stupor and reckless neglect of the moral prescriptions of the Islamic faith, culminating in the “Vivat Bacchus” aria. His wayward nature might indeed bring him closer to the audience – marred by his imperfections Osmin may actually prove to be a more ‘approachable’ and human character than the restrained Pasha. What also speaks in defence of Osmin is his unhappy love, an experience audiences could again easily relate to387, as opposed to the larger-than-life and all-too-altruistic sacrifice made by the Pasha.

383 384 385 386 387

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Puchalski, 58. Puchalski, 59. Puchalski, 59. Puchalski, 59. For more on Osmin and the grace concealed in this character – see interview with Elijah Moshinsky: Appendices, 195–200.

Unhappy love, or love difficult to attain, is a strong motive in the opera. It is not Osmin’s fate to find reciprocity in the affection he feels for Blonde; nor does the Pasha succeed in winning the heart of Konstanze. The bliss of a happy love relationship is also outside the reach of the two young couples – as long as they remain in the Serail, they are consigned to a loveless existence. And yet, the harem – and obviously this is where Konstanze and Blonde are held captive within the palace grounds – in popular idiom functions as an emplacement for ‘love’; how, then, to account for this paradox? A reasonable explanation is provided by Ruth Yeazell who, referring to the Western tradition of ‘harem fiction,’ notes that “as Europeans imaginatively dedicated the harem to eros, they also imagined that ‘true’ love had no home there… . As the West liked to tell it, a harem love story almost always meant the end of the harem or the flight of the lovers”388. The observation is useful also for clarifying the complexities of the libretto of Die Entführung in that it explains why the motif of the ladies’ escape – their abduction from the Serail – constitutes the plot’s driving force. Following this line of reasoning, the opera fits neatly into the body of harem writings which, as Yeazell puts it, “the more specifically they speak of ‘love’ – rather than erotic obsession – the more routinely they oppose the freedom of the heart to the imagined despotism of the harem”389. From this perspective, Mozart might indeed be seen as holding on to spent Western readings and perceptions of the harem, quite in line with the views expressed roughly a century later by De Amicis, and in stark contrast to what women’s accounts were proposing and even defending. Once again, however, the social moods pertinent to Mozart’s times should be called upon to supply at least a partial apology for the composer. Making a gentle woman such as Konstanze his main heroine – who, after all, was already quite progressive in the defence of her right to a marriage of love – Mozart needed to equip her with virtues that would “assure the Viennese audience of the strength of a gentlewoman’s moral resolve, even in the face of dire consequences”390. Konstanze’s predicament has been described by Wheelock as “the gendered catch-22 of [her] staunch rejection” which, she argues, means that “not only must she honour the love that she has pledged to Belmonte, even if it kills her, but her staunchness makes her more attractive to the rejected one – and, most importantly, to the 18th-century audience as well”391. Konstanze remains unshaken which ultimately pays off because 388 389 390 391

Yeazell, 137. Yeazell, 140. Wheelock in Smart, 52. Wheelock in Smart, 54.

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she gets what she wants, even if “all she wants is her man”392. Still, her success in gaining the fulfilment of her desire should not be too readily belittled through a slavish adherence to contemporary feminist thinking – after all, ‘happy ends’ are few and far between in opera as a rule, and the chances of a woman merely surviving the pursuit of her desires/dreams/ambitions severely limited. The man lives on, though naturally crushed by the outcome of the drama; the woman ends up murdered, or she commits suicide, dies of an incurable disease, or, at best, succumbs to a hopeless existence. The fact that Mozart, in the 18th century, allows Konstanze to have her dream, to defend it victoriously, and eventually to bask in the glory of its fulfilment, even if that dream consists merely in marriage to the right man, argues that he empowered his women and was even a ‘feminist’ of sorts. Surely had he lived some two hundred years later, he would have known that a woman might dream dreams far removed from the romantic yearning for her beloved, but in the era when it was a norm to arrange marriages according to the best material interest of the two families involved, and women were consigned to the ‘three K’s’: Kirche, Kinder, and Küche, such an outcome is by no means an insignificant gesture. From a technical perspective – for Konstanze Mozart composes the longest aria he had ever written for any character – again, quite ‘something,’ given that Mozart’s oeuvre covers some six hundred works, including 21 stage operas, 15 masses, more than 50 symphonies, 25 piano concertos, 12 violin concertos, and 17 piano sonatas. With “Martern aller Arten” Konstanze responds to Selim’s catalogue of tortures, rejecting them against all odds and “effectively rob[bing] him of a voice … appropriating in her aria of defiance the conventional opportunity for a thwarted ruler’s rage aria”393. Thus, it is not possible to see eye to eye with Gretchen Wheelock, who claims that despite Konstanze’s strenuous and impressive … imploring and defiant exertions, she is obviously not a free agent… . However heroic her resistance to the Pasha’s threats, however heroic her voice, Konstanze has no recourse to real heroic action … her only hope is to convince him that as an enlightened ruler he must respect her wishes for his own good.394 395

392 Hunter, Mary, “The ‘Gaze’ and Power in ‘Martern aller Arten’ and ‘Batti, batti’”, in Smart, 48. 393 Wheelock in Smart, 47–48. 394 Wheelock in Smart, 54. 395 For more on the empowerment of Konstanze – see interview with Elijah Mohsinsky, Appendices, 195–200.

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Such reasoning does not do justice to the revolutionary and progressive spirit of Mozart who already seems to be pushing the line of what women were at the time believed capable of, when he constructs the figures of Konstanze and Blonde to make rounded and complex characters. Of course, juxtaposed to the present-day achievements of feminism, his ‘concessions’ fare rather poorly, but such a qualification is exactly the sort of errant rationale not infrequently embraced by feminist theorists who, perhaps unawares, fall into the trap of evaluating everything according to just one measure, their own, disregarding the socially-, historically- and politically-specific nuances incumbent to each era, and in this incumbency – greatly varied and largely incommensurable. Naturally, this is not to discredit or vilify feminism; rather, I wish to keep some balance in a discussion which otherwise could turn into an empty dithyramb. It would be pointless and perhaps made yet more futile once one realizes that the inflated ideology might have stemmed from Mozart’s private sentiments. It is not for nothing that the main female protagonist is called Konstanze and throughout the opera lives up to prove the virtue recalled by her name. Critics are generally in agreement that the operatic Konstanze could have been, to some extent, influenced by the projection of the composer’s real-life fears of rejection by Constanze Weber to whom he proposed shortly before starting work on Die Entführung and could not shake off anxieties about whether his beloved would not eventually favour another suitor over himself. Judging by the development of events in the opera alone, prospects must have been gradually brightening for Mozart, reaching a fortunate apex in the upbeat lieto fine, and in Mozart’s and Constanze’s wedding on August 4, 1782 (less than three weeks after the premiere of the opera), less unproblematic than the opera’s resolution, though. Die Entführung aus dem Serail, despite or, perhaps, precisely due to, its potential to spark off controversy and move artists, audiences and critics alike to heated exchanges of pro/con arguments, occupies a safe place in opera repertoires. During the opera seasons between 2005 and 2010, Die Entführung continuously scored in the ‘top 20’ of the most performed operas, Mozart alternating with Verdi between the first and the second place in the ranking of composers396. Of course statistics need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but what such charts undoubtedly testify to is Mozart’s timelessness. In a broader perspective, the popularity of Die Entführung might be read as the unfading Western craving for the ‘exotic,’ with all the time-honoured controversies applicable, the handling of which frequently unleashes waves of criticism towards the director who is responsible for the 396 Statistics from operabase.com

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overall vision and the resultant impression. Productions thus vary from the more traditional, e.g. Karl Böhm’s cherished 1980 version directed by August Everding, with Edita Gruberova as Konstanze397; the less conventional – as in Dresden, with Carolyn Smith-Meyer being if not the only then surely one of the very few African-American Konstanzas to date (dir. Harry Kupfer, 1976398); to the scandalous and verging on the pornographic production by Calixto Bieito at the Komische Oper Berlin (2004)399, and the recent ‘extravaganza’ from the 2013 Salzburg Festival, with the opera staged at Hangar-7400. Another notable adaptation is a partopera, part-documentary film by Elijah Moshinsky, shot entirely at the Topkapı Palace – unfortunately, Mozart in Turkey401 (2000) features only 64 minutes of singing, with the remaining time spent on commentary by the director and the performers, interesting but at times somewhat superficial402. An event which hardly ever makes it to international news feeds and thus suffers from relative obscurity is the annual Istanbul Summer Opera Festival. Since its founding in 2010, the Festival has presented a range of popular operas, including a selection of Turkey-related titles, each staged at Istanbul’s former Ottoman “Sarays,” the Topkapı Palace being reserved for the given season’s highlight. For an opera fan, the condition of Turkey’s opera scene leaves much to wish for, with the 90-million-inhabitant country running only six opera houses (in Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, Samsun, and Mersin), state-sponsored and controlled, situated mostly along the Western coast, with the easternmost outpost located in Mersin. The government-run institution Devlet Opera ve Balesi functions in a manner resembling of the late 16th- and 17th-century ‘itinerant’ theatres, frequently shuttling the artists between cities for particular performances. Despite obvious material shortages, the houses attempt, in some cases effectively, to maintain good standards of artistic performance, notably the Izmir State 397 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Orchester der Bayerischen Staatsoper conducted by Karl Böhm. Direction: August Everding. With Francesco Araiza and Edita Gruberova. Munich, 1980. 398 Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Peter Gülke. Direction: Harry Kupfer. With Carolyn Smith-Myer and Armin Ude. Dresden, 1976. 399 Orchester Komische Oper Berlin conducted by Kristiina Poska. Direction: Calixto Bieito. With Claudia Boyle and Adrian Strooper. Berlin, 2004. 400 Camerata Salzburg conducted by Hans Graf. Direction: Adrian Marthaler. With Desirée Rancatore and Javier Camarena. Salzburger Festspiele – Live from Hangar-7, 2013. 401 Moshinsky, Elijah, and Mick Csáky, dirs., Mozart in Turkey, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, with Kodalli, Yelda, Desiree Rancatore, and Paul Groves, Opus Arte, 2003. 402 For an extensive discussion of the film see interview with Elijah Moshinsky, Appendices, 195–200.

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Opera and Ballet House. The theatre regularly stages Die Entführung, and the production could compete with performances from better-off Western operas. A thoroughly traditional production, the Izmir Saraydan Kız Kaçırma403 could easily win the applause of a diversified audience – the director, Recep Ayyılmaz, takes pains to remain reasonably true to the libretto, to avoid any content that would be too explicit, and uses somewhat unoriginal but nevertheless successful scenographic strategies. The production’s greatest strength lies with the cast whose members all give an earnest effort, with some gems like Erdem Erdoğan’s Belmonte, sung with poignancy, yet subtly and smoothly. The artists manage to elicit all the right responses and reactions from the audience – soaring emotion at Konstanze’s and Belmonte’s plight, compliant smile at Blonde’s pragmatic attitude to life and love, or bursts of laughter at Osmin’s exploits. What needs to be stressed, though, is that on an average night, the audience is composed mostly of Turkish nationals, entertained by a rather homogeneously Turkish cast which, given the context of the opera, might have some bearing on the overall atmosphere and, in a sense, on the ‘propriety’ of the performance. More a case of selfmockery among a circle of one’s ‘comrades,’ than a re-enactment of Greenblatt’s ‘Balinese dancers,’ the production is bound to convey a strong impression of belonging versus estrangement, depending on the position one occupies – whether that of an outsider, smiling somewhat awkwardly and trying to restrain a sense of discomfort at being suddenly privy to an experience not meant for their eyes; or an anonymously secure ‘one-of-the-crowd,’ assured in their knowledge of just how to relate to what is being shown. The Turks’ assumption about Pasha Selim representing the actual Sultan Selim III, makes sense in terms of setting, climate, and the general historical outline; still, to attempt to legitimize and add credibility to thus re/formulated story – by drawing solely on a potentially coincidental names’ convergence – might eventually prove too far-fetched to gain widespread agreement, especially when the traditional version enjoys confirmation from the libretto, the socio-political context of the work’s creation, and, perhaps most of all, over two centuries of historical corroboration through research and analysis. The arguments seem to speak clearly to rational minds, raised to respect logic and transparency. Why, then, have these very same minds stubbornly and persistently refused to accept eye-witness testimonies to the reality of the harem,

403 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. Die Entführung aus dem Serail (KV 384). Original text byJohann Gottlieb Stephanie. Turkish version (Saraydan Kız Kaçırma) by Behçet Başak. Izmir State Opera, conducted by Gaetano Solıman, 2013.

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instead giving in to fantasizing and misconceptions? Or, from the other end of the spectrum, indulging in what at times is difficult to perceive otherwise than cases of blown-up, de-realized and decontextualized ideology? This is what Elijah Moshinsky seems to be asking when he remarks on the pitfalls of “tak[ing] modern critical language and using it in an irrelevant way to the piece”404. Whereas this observation indeed raises a crucial issue, much too frequently overlooked by ideologically-minded contemporary scholars dealing not only with this particular musical work, Moshinsky’s dismissal of racial and gender stereotypes with regards to Die Entführung is more problematic. Perhaps the dissonance stems from a different approach to the matter; what Moshinsky understands as stereotypes were likely not so in Mozart’s times; rather, the opera offers representations of cultural attitudes representative of the period which only through constant re/ use across have gradually become worn-out and discredited as clichés and reductions. While there is much accuracy in Moshinsky’s observation that “stereotyping is given a light touch by Mozart. Playful rather than ideological. Everything channelled to creating a humanism to operatic character,”405 what could be taken issue with is the terminology he uses to make his point – it is not ‘stereotyping’ that receives a light treatment from Mozart but the dominant cultural attitudes of the times in their own right. No doubt the Enlightenment philosophy and humanist ideals constitute the core of the work. When paired with inter-cultural perspectives and their contemporary implications, analysis of these issues yields interesting insights into Mozart’s impact on culture, thus enriching the state of research on reception of his operas and further accentuating Mozart’s significance and innovative, well-ahead of his times vision. It would be interesting to confront Elijah Moshinsky and Erdem Erdoğan with regards to their views of the Pasha. Erdoğan, expressing probably the shared belief of a specific group of people (Turkish opera artists and audiences) claims Pasha Selim for their own, as Sultan Selim, through this ascribing to the sultan features that Mozart, in turn, assigns to the enlightened ruler – and Moshinsky, too, when he notes that “the guiding principle of the Enlightenment which [Selim] expresses is derived from an idea of universal goodness”406. Significantly, however, Moshinsky does not pursue the question of the Pasha’s origins, accepting him as a figure which “looks forward to the all-encompassing idea of freedom in Beethoven’s Fidelio”407. It appears that he also disregards the subtleties 404 405 406 407

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See Appendices, 195–200. See Appendices, 195–200. See Appendices, 195–200. See Appendices, 195–200.

coming to surface once the possibility of Selim’s Western background is given credit, dismissing any resultant implications of such a complication of the Pasha’s identity: “I do not find it useful or accurate to read into him the idea of a cryptic message about the West’s superiority”408. This is a pity, though, because looking at the Pasha from this particular perspective allows for the emergence of new interpretations of this character, very much in line with contemporary post/colonial discourses which it is not possible to ignore today when dealing with a work so interestingly loaded with elements of exoticist practices. What strikes the reader at several points in the interview is Moshinsky’s palpable reluctance to get involved with racial, ethnic and gender issues; he prefers instead to focus solely on the work, and avoide more exploratory excursions into how the opera’s perception and reception have changed across time. Yet, it has to be stressed that his rendering of Die Entführung aus dem Serail in the film Mozart in Turkey is a complex endeavour, with great attention paid to temporally and historically specific details. Notably, the musical pieces are played confidently and gracefully, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by one of the best Mozartian conductors, sir Charles Mackerras. Much of the success of Mozart in Turkey is due to the cast engaged in the production, made up of artists most of whom in the year 2000 were at the threshold of their international careers and have since managed to earn a secure position in the operatic world, perhaps not that of opera ‘superstars’ but of well-established and recognized abroad singers for sure. Paul Groves (Belmonte in the Moshinsky production) is engaged as lead tenor in a range of opera houses in Europe and the USA; Desiree Rancatore (Blonde), a young Italian coloratura soprano, has apparently progressed with her career and moved on from background roles to prima donna parts in important theatres in Europe, mostly in France and Italy. Her appearance at the 2014 Salzburg Festival as none other than Konstanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail proved a huge international success. In contrast to her fellow singers Yelda Kodalli, who sang Konstanze in Moshinsky’s production, appears to have withdrawn from performing life – her last engagements noted in the well-esteemed portal operabase.com are from March 2010. Significantly, Yelda Kodalli was the only Turkish singer in Mozart in Turkey, the others being American, British, Italian, and Austrian. Although Moshinsky does not regard this as imbued with any deeper meaning (in fact he quite vehemently refuses such a possibility: “The casting of the opera does not carry any burden of

408 See Appendices, 195–200.

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meaning beyond trying to get the best possible cast together”409) it is difficult to deny this choice a critical and analytical importance. First of all, the very staging of a ‘Turkish’ opera at one of the pinnacles of Turkishness and the country’s most important royal seat, the Topkapı Palace, with a generous grant from the Turkish Ministry of Culture, without any local participants could be read as an act of arrogance, to say the least. Thus, having a Turkish representative seems not so much a choice as an obligation, if for no other reasons than for the sake of propriety at least. That such an ‘ambassador’ turns out to be a woman, cast in the major female role, introduces an ideological element to modes of perception and reception of the work. This in turn converges with questions raised by Mary Ann Smart with regards to the artist and the character she enacts on stage, concerned with “the interface between performing an aria … . and performing a culturally scripted function”410. Along with the debate on Konstanze’s empowerment or lack thereof, Kodalli’s performance acquires a deeper purport which relates, too, to contemporary women’s status in Turkey in particular, and globally, as well. Whether the director decides to acknowledge this or not remains a separate issue linked more to one’s personal choices perhaps, than to the undertones such a stance elicits.

409 See Appendices, 195–200. 410 Smart, 48.

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Temptations Revisited: Conclusion Chapters Two and Three of the present study have followed a complex vector rather than a simple linear development, beginning with a tentative delineation of the predominantly Western museum tradition, coursing through Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence double-bound project, then taking a short detour via Edgar Allan Poe’s poetics of composition and the impact his ideas have exerted on generations of artists, writers mostly, to finally turn to The Museum of Innocence – the novel, its collectors, lovers, and their obsessions, evolving since into a form of ‘resurrection’ of women continuously museumised by male authors. Though no official caesura marks the moment, with the discussion of Lady Mary Montagu commences a re/vocalization of women, Western and Eastern alike, involving issues such as the harem and the notorious harem myth, fantasy and Orientalization, and a debunking or perpetuation of these perceptions in literature, visual arts and music, through the works of Edmondo De Amicis, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Daniel Chodowiecki, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Despite the diversity and plurality of issues, notions and works investigated here, the two chapters maintain a close relationship with one another through the reoccurrence of several themes across the entire structure, concerned with the problematics of the uneasy bond between the discursive realities of the ‘East’ and ‘West.’ At the start of Chapter Two an attempt is made to situate museums within the contemporary socio-political context and the particular historical moment, taking account of the differing attitudes to museums which emerge along the developed vs. developing countries axis. The comparison considers also some moral issues which have to do with, on the one hand, propriety and justice, and more down-to-earth practicalities regarding how world heritage sites and artefacts should be best handled and preserved, posing the troubling question of whether treasures such as the Pergamon Altar or the Elgin Marbles should be returned to their places of origin, or, rather, further maintained by grand Western museums in Berlin, London, or Paris. Against such a background, in the next step focus is shifted to Orhan Pamuk and the curious case of writer-cum-collector, who experiences this duality in reality, in the novel he writes, and in the museum he creates. The core of the analysis in Chapter Two consists in the exploration of what Pamuk perceives as the affinity between novels and museums, with his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence employed as direct example of and illustration to his ideas. In order to facilitate a deeper understanding of Orhan Pamuk as an author, and the 183

specificity of his position – a Turkish author hailed internationally but faced with death threats at home – the introductory section to the chapter provides an overview of Pamuk’s inspirations and the traditions he grew up in, as well as those he chose to make his own, also offering a brief survey of modern Turkish literature and Pamuk’s place within it. Apart from investigating the ties which, according to Pamuk, link novels and museums, The Museum of Innocence is approached here from three angles – as a story of a misalliance and a study of an obsession; as a portrayal of a society in transition; and as an experimental post-(post)modern exercise testing the boundaries of author’s intervention and involvement in the world he creates. Despite Pamuk’s reliance on a range of postmodern strategies both on the level of the text and beyond, in the concrete space of the museum he founds, for some formal resolutions he also resorts to compositional prescriptions ordained by Edgar Allan Poe in 1846. In an effort to ‘resurrect’ women museumised by Pamuk, what follows is a re/vocalization and/or ‘de-petrification’ of women, specifically women who for a range of reasons and out of various motivations form attachments drawing them to Turkey. While assuming different shapes, these attachments derive from a shared impulse, i.e. the desire to travel. The beginning of Chapter Three discusses women travellers who make Turkey their destination, and the analyses that follow are propelled by the drive to explore what it means for women to gain access to travel, “this defining area of agency in the West”411. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters occupy centre stage in Chapter Three, serving, too, as a springboard to further discussions of interactions along the East/West axis, the leitmotif of the chapter. Following an exploration of what Lady Mary found out during the time she spent in Turkey, the analysis expands to include intertextual perspectives and voices resonant of Lady Mary’s eye-witness experiences. Edmondo De Amicis, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Daniel Chodowiecki, and finally, Mozart, are each called on to investigate patterns of dialogizing the arts, negotiated by each artist in their own distinct manner, through text, image and music, which eventually come together in Die Entführung aus dem Serail as an example of an art form synthesizing other genres into an all-round, complex and interconnected structure. The two interviews included in the Appendices section, with Erdem Erdoğan and Elijah Moshinsky respectively, offer additional insights into the investigated issues, enriching the analysis with original approaches to the operatic work, seen from the different 411 Euben, 134.

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perspectives of opera singer and opera director, both involved in re-enacting The Abduction through means available to them thanks to their talent, imagination and sensitivity. Chapters Two and Three taken together offer a multidimensional and interdisciplinary study of East/West encounters, presented from a more East-focused stance and narrated jointly by both Eastern and Western voices. They also respond to and mediate with Chapter One, in an effort to reveal and explicate, even if only tentatively, the temptation, the promise and the threat endemic to contacts and relationships between the constructs of the Orient and the Occident.

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Post-Scriptum: Of Promises and New Beginnings It has been my intention to supply each chapter of the present study with a distinct and comprehensive conclusion restating the major investigated issues and summing up the outcomes their analyses have yielded. In order to avoid repetition, here I make an attempt at gathering together the findings arrived at in the course of the project’s development, with a view to presenting future directions towards which further research could lead, including also both the academic and non-academic significance of my work, as well as the possible applications of the results of my study. The present volume has been conceived of as a work which follows some hitherto unpursued paths, extending beyond the standard frameworks of postcolonial and ethnic literature studies, and thus signalling tempting and innovative perspectives or approaches, as well as vantage points for further research. Significantly, though it has drawn on and emerged from a solid foundation of literary theories, post/colonial, ethnic, and racial discourses, and a broadly understood humanist basis, the study’s preoccupations may not, and should not, be limited to abstract theoretical exercises without any bearing on the immediate contemporary reality and perceptions of it, or our functioning within the systems it has generated. There can be little doubt that events such as the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the ensuing aggravation of ‘Eastern’/‘Western’ relations have made their mark as cornerstones of post-(post)modern realities; having found their reflection in a plethora of intellectual and creative responses, they exist at the murky interstices between life, art, culture, and politics. On a similar, though less militant note, Orhan Pamuk’s “Museum of Innocence” Project, too, functions at the border between realms not parallel, but rather contiguous, and in constant interaction with one another, which it has been one of the chief aims of the present volume to elucidate. A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual is divided into three chapters. The research areas explored in each part are bound to one another through the leitmotif of East/West relations, and the mis/ representations, mis/conceptions and mis/appropriations responsible for their making. Chapter One, “Of Mutual Threats: 9/11 Re/considered,” concentrates on the re/workings through the trauma of 9/11 effected in literature, thus approaching the problematic of East/West encounters from a more West-centred perspective, as experienced by a wide cross-section of American, as well as international, 187

communities and individuals. Through analyses of three novels – Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – this part of the volume has explored issues of trauma, grief, guilt and responsibility, trying to evade, though, the pitfalls of taking sides or passing judgments. Instead, the chapter concludes on a more speculative note, posing the question of what, if any, lessons can be learnt from having gone through the experience of 9/11. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City has been taken as an illustration of attempts to fill the void, both literal and metaphorical, caused by the attacks, which marred the opening of a new millennium. Over a decade after the trauma of 9/11, many of the conflicts remain unsolved or suspended in a state of indeterminacy, while the National September 11 Memorial, since its official opening for the general public on September 12, 2011, operates on a tight scheme of online reservations for thirty-minute visits, but is free of charge; the Museum, in turn, which opened on May 21st, 2014, fully booked for the first day of its functioning well in advance, also relies on an internet-booking system, with a regular admission priced at 24 dollars. In this way, the museum (both as a concrete site and a more theoretical construct) continues to exist as a ‘staple’ in everyday reality. Orhan Pamuk only further probes and complicates this awareness, exploring the particular junctions at which the real and the immediate, the imagined and the indirect, collide, effectively blurring the borders between various aspects of mediated and raw experience. At this point it should be observed that whereas the problematics of the East/ West relations have been generally well covered by research dealing with specific regions of the post/colonial world, notably India and England, or Africa and England, studies focused on the interface of the Ottoman Empire and England, or, more broadly, Europe, or, finally, more broadly still – the West, are still few and far between. The same goes for the impact of European women travellers to these regions, and the two relatively unexplored fields are closely intertwined with one another. Naturally, neither South Asia, Africa, nor the Middle East can any longer be thought of as terrae incognitae (and it is now a good two centuries since they ceased to be considered unmapped and potentially un-mappable), and the histories of their exploration and exploitation have been recounted in innumerable volumes recording the “spermatic journeys” (R. Euben) of adventurers and daredevils, scientists, scholars, artists, and writers, not to mention civil servants, engineers, and entrepreneurs, who have all ‘been there, done that.’ Apart from eyewitness testimonies written by the travellers themselves – with some earliest noteworthy examples including Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative 188

of Travels to the Equinoctical Regions of the New Continent412, and the meticulously edited Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition413 – a distinct branch of biography has emerged to provide accounts of the lives of the male sojourners, expatriates, or exiles, with one of the most covered, researched, described and analysed being perhaps T. E. Lawrence, with the original account provided by Lawrence himself in Seven Pillars of Wisdom414, and then re-recorded in countless independent studies, such as B. H. Liddel Hart’s Lawrence of Arabia415, John E. Mack’s A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence416, Lawrence James’s The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia417, and Michael Asher’s Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia.418 By comparison, and in stark contrast, travelling women have received little attention. The literary profiles of, for instance, Hester Stanhope, Florence Baker, Mary Slessor, Mary Kingsley, Daisy Bates, Rebecca West, Gertrude Bell, and Freya Stark (and the list is far from complete) – whose travels were in many cases as extensive and strenuous as those undertaken by men, and frequently much more outrageous – remain woefully low and often second-rate. Naturally, the women’s journeys by necessity differed substantially from the men’s expeditions, often subdued by cultural and societal reservations, more than once halted by obstacles of a nature much more mundane than, e.g., insurmountable geographical divides and natural disasters, as was often the case with men’s travels. Moreover, women – apart from all the dangers encountered commonly by travellers – were also faced with threats of an altogether different order, as their constitutions could much more easily land them at the hands of oppressors, and rape, assault, and murder loomed not as the stuff of travellers’ legends but rather, real possibilities. All these impediments, however, only render the female 412 Humboldt, Alexander von, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctal Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804 by Alexander de Humboldt and Aime Bonpland; with maps, plans & c., written in French by Alexander de Humboldt, and translated into English by Helen Maria Williams, London: Longman, 1822. 413 Moulton, Gary E., ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. 414 Lawrence, T. E., Seven Pillars of Wisdom. 415 Liddel Hart, B. H., Lawrence of Arabia, New York: Da Capo Press, 1989. 416 Mack, John E., A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence, Harvard: Harvard UP, 1998. 417 James, Lawrence, The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia, London: Abacus, 1995. 418 Asher, Michael, Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

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‘on-the-move’ experiences more interesting and attractive from a scholarly point of view, as they enrich and further complicate the entire field of study. The imbalance in research attention and popularity persists, despite modern advances in spheres perceived so basic today as human rights, travel safety and convenience, as well as the accessibility of many formerly secluded spots. Although they have managed to forge their mark for good on maps and cartographic grid, women continue to operate in a somewhat sub-standard manner, and their pursuits, when they get recorded and noted in the first place, usually suffer from overly sensationalist coverages, which only strengthen the sensation of notoriety, traditionally (still) associated with women’s going out into the world. There is of course also the other side to the situation: whereas when men retrace more or less mythologized routes or re-enact the adventures of colonial ‘heroes’ and then share their experiences in book or essay format they often meet with literary success and recognition, women are perceived as more fit to recount stories of their victimization and ensuing rescue by a bunch of courageous and unabashed male protectors, with the means, both innate and physical, and societal and conventional, to defeat the women’s captors, towards whom the women themselves have no other option but to assume a position of inferiority and weakness. Here, the list of titles of bestsellers and blockbuster films apparently has no end, but again, history makes a vicious circle and frequently it is not the women themselves who profit but their rescuers, their agents, lawyers and representatives, roles still all too often performed for women by men. Of course, there are women who break the habit and embark on journeys others had gone on earlier, in the way that Sarah LeFanu in 2013 re-enacted the travels of the indomitable Rose Macaulay, but then, the aim of the journey was not material gain and fame but a more intimate, less marketable, search for the person behind the voluminous work she produced – LeFanu is the foremost authority on Rose Macaulay and so far her only biographer419. Throughout the present volume, efforts have been taken to accentuate the significance of perceiving complex post/colonial phenomena in the broader context of how they dialogize with other discourses, creating resonances, perhaps at times dissonances, too, between various arts and disciplines, with the view to illuminating the organic nature of both inter- and intra-cultural relationships. To this end, apart from ethnic and feminist studies also contemporary museuology, musicology (in particular opera studies), and visual arts and discourses have been called

419 See: LeFanu, Sarah, Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal, Bristol: SilverWood Books, 2013; ead., Rose Macaulay, London: Virago, 2003.

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on to build a global vision which at the same time closely attends to the local, too. The rationale behind such an orientation in research and methodology has not been to arrive at a final eclectic perspective, but rather, to promote a consolidated approach towards the ‘Other’ which will yield more comprehensive outcomes if it is as broad and diverse as possible. Rather than ending the discussion, the intention of the present brief conclusion has been to unlock the imaginary door to further dialogue and engagement, with the hope that more knowledge and understanding will lead away from requirements to museumise events such as 9/11, granting instead greater intellectual joy in freely and extensively interacting with shared cultural phenomena that Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence invites and encourages us to support.

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Appendices Interviews with Erdem Erdoğan and Elijah Moshinsky on Die Entführung aus dem Serail “No Longer the Ottomans They Used to Be”: on Turkish opera, Sultan Selim III, composers and personal plans with Erdem Erdoğan Julia Szołtysek: Dear Mr. Erdoğan, you are one of Turkey’s leading tenors. Since 2007 you’ve been living in Izmir, performing on a regular-basis at the Izmir State Opera and Ballet House, as well as concerting internationally. Haven’t you considered staying abroad and starting a permanent cooperation with some of the opera houses you have already appeared at? Erdem Erdoğan: First of all, after a certain age, it is somewhat difficult to start working and living abroad. In order to pull this off, one has to take part in a lot of international auditions and stay abroad for considerable stretches of time. As I have a lot of performances in Turkey, unfortunately I don’t really have time for this. But an international career is absolutely one of my chief ambitions. JSz: Ever since its foundation in 2010, you have been appearing annually at the International Istanbul Opera Festival, cast in leading tenor roles of major operas. Do you have any favourite roles, or favourite composers, that you particularly like to perform? Is Belmonte from Die Entführung aus dem Serail one of these? EE: Belmonte is of course one of my favourite characters. I really like to sing and act in this role. Actually, I love to perform in all Mozart’s operas. Besides Mozart, Italian operas, especially Puccini’s, are ones that I greatly enjoy and can relate to. JSz: What would you say are the main differences of a festival performance at the Topkapı Sarayi and a ‘regular’ opera production? For example, which do you find more challenging – preparing for Belmonte for the Festival or for a regular opera night? Why do you think it is so? What do you think is the most important and/ or interesting aspect of the Istanbul Summer Opera Festival? EE: It is absolutely more difficult and challenging to sing in an open-air place such as Topkapı because the acoustic conditions are not as professional as they are in an opera house, which is a problem not only for the singers, but for the 193

orchestra, too. It is not that easy to achieve a good vocal and musical balance in that setting. Plus, though one might think the opposite, during a festival you have very limited time to rehearse. Jsz: Die Entführung aus dem Serail is annually one of the highlights of the Festival; would you say this opera is of special significance for Turkey? What are the ‘standard’ audience reactions towards this work? Do these reactions differ depending on whether there are more foreigners among the audience or whether the public is more homogenously Turkish? EE: Die Entführung aus dem Serail is definitely one of the highlights, exactly because we are performing it in its actual setting. I think this is what particularly attracts foreign audiences. The protagonists of the opera are also quite important here – we believe that Selim Pasha is Sultan Selim III who spent all of his life in Topkapı Palace. Since Turkish people are no longer the Ottomans they used to be – and not that conservative any more – the reactions of the Turkish opera audience do not really differ from those of the foreign public. JSz: Thank you very much for the interview. Erdem Erdoğan (born 1976, Zonguldak) is one of Turkey’s leading tenors. He started his musical education at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul. Erdoğan further studied at the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg, under the supervision of Prof. Patricia Wise, Prof. Lilian Sukis, and Prof. Richard Miller, and in Wien at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, where he was tutored by Prof. Ralf Döring. While still a student, he began appearing at the Istanbul State Opera and Ballet House, making his stage debut as Tamino in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in 2002. Since 2007 Erdem Erdoğan has been performing as solo artist at the Izmir State Opera and Ballet House, as well as concerting abroad, with his signature roles including Belmonte from Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Rodolfo from Puccini’s La Boheme, and Romeo from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. Apart from opera and fine arts in general, Erdem Erdoğan enjoys sports activities, football in particular, and is a keen supporter of the Istanbul-based Fenerbahçe Spor Kulübü.

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“New musical bounds of affirmation”: with Elijah Moshinsky on Mozart and the Enlightenment, stereotyping, and humanism in Die Entführung aus dem Serail Julia Szołtysek: Doctor Moshinsky, could you go back for a while to your opera/documentary project from 2000, the film Mozart in Turkey – was there any particular impulse that sparked you off on this endeavour? How did you come round the decision to shoot The Abduction on scene, on the grounds of the Topkapı Palace? Was it out of a desire to confront the plot as it is rendered in the libretto, with the setting customarily associated with the location where the story might have actually taken place? Elijah Moshinsky: The idea of the film came about after I had produced the opera at the Royal Opera House with George Solti. I wanted to investigate its particular treatment of the Enlightenment and the clash with Turkey. It so happened that the BBC were also interested in taking it further and the then Head of Covent Garden John Tooley made a connection with the Turkish Arts Minister who was keen to promote the Istanbul Festival where Entführung was performed regularly in the Topkapı Palace. JSz: Apart from having to confront challenges and overcome obstacles, such an endeavour, I imagine, provides also opportunities which are otherwise hard to get when working within the confines of an opera house, with a frequently complex but limited nonetheless devices for scenographic solutions. Was that perhaps the case with Die Entführung? EM: I think I give a fairly good account of the themes I was interested in in the film. The overriding theme was the Enlightenment approach to justice and morality, as well as the nature of love and the idea that you could look at European values from a non-European perspective. This last idea was not new, and derived from writers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, as well as strains from the popular culture of its day. The originality of the piece lay in its use of a German libretto and Mozart’s humanistic gaze. I think inside the love complications of the piece he was working out issues of his own relationship with his own Konstanze. It is not a didactic work, but a comedy which is fuelled by interesting philosophical ideas. JSz: Now, about the artists performing the roles of Konstanze, Belmonte, Pasha Selim, Pedrillo and Osmin – you assembled quite an international cast for these characters, with the only Turkish singer being the soprano Yelda Kodalli. Was 195

this a purely technical decision made upon their vocal and acting suitability for the roles, or were there perhaps some other factors involved? I’m thinking of the opera’s libretto and the peculiar ‘dangers’ it holds in stock for modern performances in terms of negotiating racial and gender stereotypes that could effectively hinder the credibility and, say, ‘appropriacy’ of not just Die Entführung but actually many ‘exotic’ operas. For instance – the character of Osmin, who in the opera wields the burden of being the embodiment of the stereotypical “lustful Turk,” violent, impulsive, possessive, and prone to acts of abuse towards women. Osmin is also a hypocrite, indulging in the pleasures of wine, forbidden by Islam, and his representations usually assume a rather ‘light’ take on these idiosyncrasies to a rather comical and semi-serious overall effect – or, quite the contrary, like in Calixto Bieito’s production for the Komische Oper Berlin, they over-accentuate them, showing the truly nasty side of Osmin, thus in a way sending a particular message to the audiences. Would you say that it is an exaggeration or an unnecessary politicization to pay attention to such issues in opera in general? EM: The casting of the opera does not carry any burden of meaning beyond trying to get the best possible cast together under the best Mozart conductor of the day. Sir Charles Mackerras was in the midst of recording the main Mozart operas for Sony with his Scottish musicians and became involved with the project so that the film would be supported by a complete recording of the opera. There is no nationalistic significance to the cast apart from being the people we wanted. It is an irony that the Konstanze is Turkish, but nothing more. JSz: Do you think the artist’s identity, background, nationality etc. have any bearing on the reception of such ‘loaded’ works? For example, watching Die Entführung at the Izmir State Opera and Ballet House – and bursting out laughing at Tuncay Kurtoğlu’s wonderfully barbaric Osmin, like the rest of a rather homogenously Turkish audience – I was wondering how far such mimicry and self-ridicule match the sense of humour of Turkish nationals, and whether the apparent enjoyment of the role, both for the artist and the public, would become somehow checked, compromised, if the audience consisted of foreigners predominantly. Or whether the fun would be yet greater – a thought which calls to mind Stephen Greenblatt’s “Balinese dancers.” EM: I am worried when you get onto the notion of racial and gender stereotypes. They may be important, but not the way you mention them. This is a classical comedy with the use of stereotypical characters to further the plot. Osmin seems now to be taken much too seriously and vehemently out of the context 196

of the opera where he performs the function of the choleric anti-comedy figure that you also find in Shakespeare, for instance Malvolio or Jaques. The extreme explosiveness of his outbursts is underscored by the most wonderful and funny use of bassoons and Turkish instruments. Also, he is comically meek in the presence of the English maid. There is charm in this character. Stereotyping is given a light touch by Mozart, playful rather than ideological – everything channelled to creating a humanism to operatic character. As with all anti-comic figures, he is left out of the formal resolution of the plot at the end. But I think he needs to be played with some sense of humour. JSz: The Pasha Selim stands in stark opposition to Osmin, as he eventually turns out to be a noble and magnanimous ‘Turkish’ ruler – but then, his ‘Oriental’ roots come in for questioning, since he is revealed to have been a Western convert to Islam. Would you say this is another expression, albeit a more cryptic one, of Mozart’s conviction of the West’s apparent superiority to Oriental belief systems and ideologies? Or is Mozart perhaps only trying to venerate his own ruler and employer, Emperor Joseph II, which would also provide an explanation to Pasha Selim’s muteness throughout the opera – Joseph II never really proved a great music lover and art expert, after all. EM: The spoken part of the Pasha is very significant. His enlightened “judgment” looks forward to the all-encompassing idea of freedom in Beethoven’s Fidelio. That it is spoken, not sung, puts it beyond musical stereotype. He is the prose Sarastro. I do not find it useful or accurate to read into him the idea of a cryptic message about the West’s superiority. The guiding principle of the Enlightenment which he expresses is derived from an idea of universal goodness and the free choice in love. I had no idea that he was a Western convert to Islam, in fact I don’t recall him being religious in any way. Have I missed something? I am a bit confused by your terminology of ethnic, racial and gender issues which lay well outside the consciousness of the piece itself. JSz: To focus on the women, in turn. Would you agree with the view espoused by some feminist critics that, despite the apparent authority of Konstanze in particular, who staunchly and impressively performs the virtue advocated by her name and opposes the Pasha’s advances, Mozart and Stephanie are not really empowering her, because no real heroic action is available to her? Rather, they model her to represent the ideals of a gentlewoman’s honour, strictly confined to the social roles open to her and shaped entirely by the gender ideology of the times? 197

EM: The issue of whether Konstanze is allowed to be empowered or whether she is bound by the gender ideology of the time is to take modern critical language and use it in an irrelevant way to the piece. Konstanze is a deeply characterised woman who agonises about betrayal. She has great joy in love and it is this inner conflict that gives her individual music. She is after all the lead soprano in an entertainment and her expressive means are stretched to the end degree by her coloratura attack. The question I wished to pose in the film was, could she also be in love with her captor and, as much as resisting him, recognise his enlightened character? Mozart indeed has empowered her by her music and she is the remarkable focus of Mozart’s expression about female character. Not any character but someone like his own wife, with the same name, who is also a coloratura soprano. This is not gender politics, it is the exploration of the comic idea that two opposing men are in love with Konstanze. If you look at the great range of Mozart’s female characters in other operas, the extraordinary thing is the extent of his ability to empathise with them and give them individual voices, and not be concerned with the ideology of their position. The genius of Mozart was his ability to create living individual characters that inhabit his world of opera. Konstanze resists the Pasha, flees the Seraglio and faces death with her beloved. There is very little limitation in her adventures in relation to her gender, compared, say, to the operation of a character by Jane Austen. She is empowered in her music. Konstanze’s aria of defiance to the Pasha, I think, is one of the most vehement, self-expressive, soulfully driven, extreme statements of feminine individuality in all of literature. The very statement of it breaks new musical bounds of affirmation. Heroic action in a soprano under pressure can only be expressed by music. This is not gender limitation of choice here. It is full on. “Torture me! Kill me!” What in that is not self empowered? She refuses to play victim. JSz: On a final note, is there a full opera film of the production? EM: There wasn’t enough money to produce a full film of the opera, so we hit on the idea of the “false” documentary which would allow us to explore some of the elements of Turkish and Ottoman reality, as well as to present parts of the opera in a way that would bring to the fore several important themes in the piece. JSz: Thank you very much for the interview. Elijah Moshinsky (born 8 January 1946) is an Australian opera, theatre, and television director, who has worked at the Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan 198

Opera, Opera Australia, the Royal National Theatre, BBC Television and numerous other venues. In 1975, Moshinsky made his operatic debut at the Royal Opera House with a production of Peter Grimes which won enormous popular and critical success. Subsequent productions there include Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, The Rake’s Progress, Macbeth, Samson et Dalila, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Otello, Attila, Simon Boccanegra and Stiffelio. At the Metropolitan Opera, he has directed Otello, Samson et Dalila, Un ballo in maschera, Ariadne auf Naxos, The Queen of Spades, The Makropulos Affair, Nabucco and Luisa Miller. At English National Opera in 1982, he directed the British premiere of Le Grand Macabre as well as Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and The Bartered Bride. His other engagements have included Wozzeck for the Adelaide Festival, A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Opera Australia and productions in Paris, Geneva and Florence. Moshinsky has made a number of television films, mostly of operas. Non-operatic works, mainly for the BBC, include a number of Shakespeare’s plays, televised between 1980 and 1985: All’s Well That Ends Well, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Coriolanus and Love’s Labour’s Lost. He also directed a three-part serial version of Kingsley Amis’ novel The Green Man (1990).

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Index A 9/11  19, 20, 22, 27, 29, 32–51, 54, 56, 57, 61–63, 65, 70, 73–79, 83, 86, 88–90, 92, 93, 130, 187, 188, 191, 201–207 9/11 literature  36, 37, 42–45, 47, 48, 57, 73 Anderson, Benedict  25, 108, 201 Imagined Communities  25, 201 Anıtkabir (Atatürk’s Memorial Centre in Ankara)  125, 126 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal  103, 122, 125, 126, 144, 146, 202 B Barthes, Roland  75, 102, 201 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography  75, 201 Baudrillard, Jean  34, 35, 107, 111, 113, 201 Simulacra and Simulation  107, 201 The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers  34, 201 “The System of Collecting”  111, 113, 201 Berlin Wall, the  93 Bush, George W.  27, 37, 39, 40 C Çukurcuma Caddesi (Istanbul)  101, 118, 127 Cheng, Anne Anlin  27, 45, 46, 70, 202 The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief  27, 70, 202 Chodowiecki, Daniel  13, 19, 21, 162–164, 168, 183, 184

Collecting  99, 100, 111, 113, 115, 118, 122, 123, 125, 201 D Daldry, Stephen (film director)  89, 202 de Amicis, Edmondo  13, 21, 152–158, 165, 167, 168, 175, 183, 184, 202 Constantinople  21, 152, 165, 167, 202 DeLillo, Don  13, 19, 42–44, 46, 48, 50–52, 57–63, 73, 75, 88, 188, 201, 202 Falling Man  13, 19, 43, 46, 48, 49, 57–60, 62, 73, 75, 88, 188, 202 Devi, Mahasweta  27, 70, 202 Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi  27, 70, 202 “Disaster industry”  93 E East/West relations  17, 19–21, 184, 185, 187, 188 Erdoğan, Erdem  11, 21, 173, 179, 180, 184, 193, 194 Exoticism  21, 23, 134, 168, 169, 205 In literature  21, 23 In music (opera)  21, 23, 169, 205 In visual arts (painting)  21, 134, 168 F Falling Man (photograph by Richard Drew)  54–58, 75 Faludi, Susan  22, 37–40, 59, 202 The Terror Dream  22, 37–40, 59, 202 209

Foer Safran, Jonathan  19, 43, 45, 47, 73–90, 188, 202, 204 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close  19, 43, 73–90, 202 Fundamentalism  28, 64, 65 G Ground Zero  91, 92, 202 H Hamid, Mohsin  13, 19, 43, 46, 62–69, 71–73, 188, 203 The Reluctant Fundamentalist  13, 19, 43, 46, 62, 63, 65–69, 71–73, 188, 203 Hamam (Turkish baths)  147, 152, 156, 157, 162–164 Harem  13, 19, 20, 133, 134, 141, 143, 144, 146–150, 154, 156, 158, 160, 165–170, 175, 179, 183, 201, 202, 204–208 I Ingres, Jean-Auguste Dominique  13, 19, 21, 134, 158–168, 183, 184, 202 Le Bain Turc  21, 134, 158, 159, 161–163, 165, 167, 202 Le Grande Odalisque  21, 134, 165–168 The Valpinçon Bather  134, 162 Istanbul  9, 13, 18, 20, 24, 65, 66, 100, 101, 103, 105, 108, 109, 114–117, 119, 120, 127, 138, 146, 152, 178, 193–195 Istanbul Summer Opera Festival  178, 193–195 K Kaplan, E. Ann  22, 35, 36, 45, 92, 204 Trauma Culture  35, 36, 92, 204 210

L Libeskind, Daniel  91, 92, 202 Liotard, Jean-Étienne  10, 16, 17, 19, 23 M Macaulay, Rose  143, 152, 190, 204 The Towers of Trebizond  152 Melancholia  20, 36, 46–49, 62, 64, 71, 100, 111, 114 Middle East  28, 29, 33, 139, 188, 205 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary  13, 16, 18, 21–23, 132, 134–136, 138– 140, 142, 143, 145–148, 150–152, 155, 157, 159, 160, 163–167, 184, 203, 206, 208 The Turkish Embassy Letters  18, 21, 132, 135,136, 138–140, 142, 143, 145–148, 150–152, 155, 157, 159, 163, 164, 184, 208 Moshinsky, Elijah  10, 11, 21, 174, 178, 180, 181, 184, 193, 195, 198, 199, 205 Mozart in Turkey  10, 178, 181, 195, 205 Mourning  28, 46–48, 73, 74, 79, 88, 90, 93, 203 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  10, 19, 21, 23, 134, 169–173, 175–181, 183, 184, 193–198, 201, 203, 205–207 Die Entführung aus dem Serail  10, 19, 21, 134, 170, 171, 177–179, 181, 184, 193–195, 199, 205, 206 Multiculturalism  30, 31 Museums  17, 19, 20, 92, 95, 97–99, 105–108, 115, 121–125, 127, 128, 183, 184 Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, the  18, 20, 101, 106, 108, 116, 118–120, 127, 184, 187, 191

Museum studies  20, 107, 124, 125, 128, 205, 207 N Nachträglichkeit  47, 73–75, 80, 203 National September 11 Memorial and Museum  18, 19, 56, 92, 93, 95, 188 New York  18, 19, 24, 36, 41, 51, 56, 60, 61, 71, 73, 77, 80, 81, 83, 86, 88, 90, 91, 187, 188 O Occident  21, 24, 131, 185, 187 Odalisque, the figure of  149, 162, 166–168 Opera  11, 18, 21, 99, 129, 134, 169–171, 173–182, 185, 190, 193–199 Opera studies  190 Orga, Irfan 103, 206 Portrait of a Turkish Family  103, 206 Orient  21, 24, 131, 149, 150, 159, 160, 168, 185, 187, 201 Orientalism  21, 23, 28, 29, 33, 108, 120, 134, 203, 205 In literature  23, 29, 108, 120 In music  21, 23, 134 Orientalist painting  18, 23, 163, 168, 203, 204, 206, 207 Ottoman Republic  16, 132, 137, 139, 141, 144, 146, 188 P Pamuk, Orhan  18, 20, 23, 89, 97, 100–113, 115–130, 144, 183, 184, 187, 188, 191, 203, 206 The Black Book  101, 206 The Innocence of Objects  100, 101, 121–127, 206

The Museum of Innocence  20, 89, 100, 107–113, 115–117, 119, 121–123, 129, 183, 184, 206 The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist  105–107, 118, 206 Snow  101, 116, 206 Patriotism  28, 64, 70 Poe, Edgar Allan  20, 129, 183, 184, 206 The Royal Baths Museum in Warsaw  10, 16, 17 S Smith, Jane  31–33, 51, 207 Islam in America  31–33, 51, 207 Sontag, Susan  75, 78, 207 On Photography  75, 207 Szymborska, Wisława  56, 57, 77, 207 T Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi  103, 104, 207 A Mind at Peace  103, 207 Terror  32, 37, 41–43, 51, 52, 63, 93, 202, 204–206 Terrorism  43, 49, 92, 201, 207 Terrorist, the figure of the  45, 48, 49, 51, 54, 62, 64, 65, 71, 72, 78, 201 Tourism  130, 132, 204 Trauma  19, 33, 40–43, 45, 47, 60, 62, 65, 70, 73–76, 78–80, 83, 84, 87–89, 187, 188, 203, 204, 207, 208 Trauma studies  19, 33, 35, 42, 45 Travel  18, 21, 23, 99, 130–132, 134, 135, 137, 147, 150, 152, 160, 184, 190, 205–207 Travellers  18, 131, 132, 136–138, 141, 146, 151, 152, 160, 168, 184, 188, 189

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Travelling  67, 130–132, 137, 157, 189 Twain, Mark  28 Innocents Abroad  28 U UNESCO World Heritage  98 V Vaka Brown, Demetra  141–146, 201 Haremlik  141–144, 146, 201

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W World Trade Center  35, 38, 40, 41, 51, 56, 57, 60, 90–92 Z Žižek, Slavoj  34, 35, 208 Welcome to the Desert of the Real  34, 208