Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study 9781472542656, 9781441112699

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For my mother, Janet Saadé

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Acknowledgments*

Many incredibly smart, loving, and inspiring people encouraged and guided this project. I thank my editor at Continuum, Haaris Naqvi, who enthusiastically supported the publication of this book. I have been extremely lucky to have teachers, friends, and colleagues who generously offered invaluable advice and thoughtful commentary on earlier versions and parts of the manuscript. I am eternally grateful to Finn Fordham, Caroline Rooney, Dominic Head, Julie Sanders, John Nash, Anne Fogarty, and May Maalouf. I thank my family and friends for the immense doses of love with which they have nurtured me for years. My huge thanks go to Janet, Nabil (Père Pierre), Jean, Mansur, Rawida, Rawad, Manal, Rita, David, Assmaa, Aida, Mireille, Yann, and Josiane. Without Luca Crispi, the better pieces of this work would not have been written with as much gusto, and this journey would have lacked the passion, joy, and intellectual energy that make every achievement worthwhile. This work is dedicated to my wonderfully brave and brilliant mother, Janet Saadé, and to the memory of my uncle Paul Saadé, who taught how me to write with love and courage that know no boundaries.

* Earlier versions of parts of Chapters 2 and 5 have been published in Dublin James Joyce Journal, vol. 3 (2010) and British Journal of Middle-Eastern Studies, vol. 38.2 (2011), respectively.

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Abbreviations

BB

Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book , trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber, 2006).

CW

James Joyce, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1959).

D

James Joyce, Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, eds Robert Scholes and A.Walton Litz (New York: Penguin, 1976).

DMK

Rashid al-Daif, Dear Mr Kawabata, trans. Paul Starkey (London: Quartet, 1999).

E

James Joyce, Exiles (New York: Penguin, 1973).

FW

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1939).

JJII

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Letters II

James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 2, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1964).

MI

Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage, 2009).

Temple

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion , trans. Ivan Morris (London: Vintage, 2001).

U

James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986).

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Chapter 1

Reading Monumental Space at the Crossroads of Disciplines

Six North Africans were playing boule beneath Flaubert’s statue. Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand dispatched a silver globe. It landed, hopped heavily, and curved in a slow scatter of hard dust. The thrower remained a stylish, temporary statue: knees not quite unbent, and the right hand ecstatically spread. . . . Let me start with the statue: the one above, the permanent, unstylish one, the one crying cupreous tears, the floppy-tied, square-waistcoated, baggy-trousered, stragglemoustached, wary, aloof bequeathed image of the man. Flaubert doesn’t return the gaze. He stares south from the place des Carmes towards the Cathedral, out over the city he despised, and which in turn has largely ignored him. The head is defensively high: only the pigeons can see the full extent of the writer’s baldness.1 At Rouen, in the place des Carmes, he is structurally sound, confident in his alloy of 93 per cent copper and 7 per cent tin; but he still continues to streak. Each year he seems to cry a couple more cupreous tears, which brightly vein his neck. This isn’t inappropriate: Flaubert was a great weeper. The tears continue on down his body, giving him a fancy waistcoat and putting thin side-stripes on his legs, as if he were wearing dress-trousers. This too isn’t inappropriate: it’s a reminder that he enjoyed salon life as well as his Croisset retreat.2

Readers of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot may view these passages within the framework of the complex game of fact and fiction that the novel creates, maybe noting a tour de force in the dramatic portrayal of Flaubert’s statue but not necessarily engaging with what the description implies in terms of a spatial/political perspective on monumentalization. Thus to suggest that these passages are important instances of fictional representation of monumentalization in a post-imperial context may initially appear far-fetched. Yet the geopolitically performative agency of “Six North Africans” beneath the statue reinforced by the image of “a brown hand [that] dispatched a silver

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globe” should have alerted us to this possibility. Here Flaubert’s monument is the site of an improvised performance that seems to reorganize the relations between “the wretched of the earth” and the fallen French empire. And the statue, while typically triumphal and monumentally arrogant in the head’s high posture, seems disturbingly alive as it sheds cupreous tears. Julian Barnes’s own fallen empire encompasses several monumental spaces that have been recurrently represented in twentieth-century British and international fiction. Arguably the most important of these spaces is Trafalgar Square, which in the post-imperial era forms a contested site of political intervention through visual art and different kinds of performance events but also through its representation in novels as varied as those of George Orwell and Zadie Smith. In Staging the UK, Jen Harvie discusses the changing spatial politics of Trafalgar Square after the end of imperialism, arguing that “precisely because of its state-sanctioned design and signification—it has long and repeatedly been co-opted ‘as a site of political demonstration and protest,’ a site where state power has been challenged, rejected, mocked, and disregarded.”3 Harvie underlines the continued role of the square as a site for demonstrations against imperial and neoimperial powers throughout the twentieth century: Louder protest in Trafalgar Square has campaigned for women’s suffrage, work and fair wages, the right to freedom of assembly and speech, withdrawal from the Suez in 1956, and nuclear disarmament, among many other things.. . . [T]he Square has also been the site of various anti-colonial protests for such things as the release of Irish prisoners in the 1920s, Indian independence in the 1940s, and, more recently, the abolition of apartheid in South Africa. It has also been the site of protests against neo-imperialism, most notably as the destination of the 20 November 2003 anti-war march that specifically protested against George W. Bush’s state visit to the UK and concluded with the toppling of a five-metre effigy of the President, in ironic reference to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad on 9 April 2003.4 Like Trafalgar Square, monumental spaces across the world have been theaters of official pageantry, protests, revolutions and counter-revolutions that were marked by cycles of violence: from Palace Square in Leningrad (St Petersburg), Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and Church Square in Pretoria to, most recently, Tahrir “Liberation” Square in Cairo, Pearl Square in Manama, and Mohammad Bouazizi Square in Tunis. The latter site was known as November 7 Square until February 2011 when it was renamed after the man, Mohammad Bouazizi, who set himself on fire thus triggering

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the uprising that overthrew Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia and inspired the protests that toppled Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. Throughout the early months of 2011, Cairo’s Tahrir Square was the stage of dynamic protests that comprised carnivalesque performances, violent clashes with security forces, and changing political and social demands as the prodemocracy movement faced new challenges after the shift of power from Mubarak’s dictatorship to the military council’s rule through an interim government. Mark Allen Petersen writes that [t]he power of Tahrir Square was that it brought all these elements together in a single place and time. One protester compared it to Brechtian theatre: singing, poetry recitals, philosophical discussions of human rights and the dignity of man(kind) and political arguments about how best to move forward, all happening simultaneously, commenting on one another to create a meaningful cacophony.5 In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these lieux de mémoire (in the sense described by Pierre Nora, to whom I refer later) were and are still the stage on which major and minor events have anticipated the end of certain empires and dictatorships—and the uncertain rise of fledgling democracies. This study examines the roles of monumental spaces in the political landscapes of post-imperialism and stakes its originality on four major contributions: (1) looking beyond the site of the monument to the different acts of monumentalization and countermonumentalization that occur phenomenologically and discursively across a range of macro- and microhistories; (2) reading these acts in twentieth-century fiction wherein the monument may appear textually marginal but can be shown to be an anchor for the negotiation of the politics of a specific novel and its contexts;6 (3) selecting atypical post-imperial contexts that allow a reconsideration of twentieth-century geopolitics and their fictional renderings; and, most importantly, (4) setting up a methodological crossroad that traverses disciplines in a way that highlights both the supplementing and distinctive roles of literature, specifically the novel, in the performative acts of reading and writing monumental space. The fact of the proliferation of studies of monuments and their histories and of theoretical positions that shed light on aspects of their meanings highlights a great degree of discursive multiplicity. However, just as monuments mark their territory by attempting to ensure the existence of boundaries on symbolical, geographical, historical, and narrative levels, so these discourses taken altogether set a boundary between their authority as platforms on which the interpretation of monumental space occurs and the

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different authority of the novel in this respect. This is a boundary I hope to cross in the present study by means of dynamic analytical movements between certain novels, on the one hand, and theory, history, and cultural geography on the other. The twentieth-century novels selected for this study are: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Rashid al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata, and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Snow. Primarily, these novels combine a certain fascination with urban space, including monumental space, with the disruptive psychodynamics and representational dynamics of fantasy and experimental form. Moreover, these novels present a fluid historical dynamic and a multiplicity of overdetermined geopolitical and literary textures that, in their atypicality and specificity, contest the critical categorizations of the modern, the postcolonial, the postwar, and the postmodern while revealing the ways in which the ends of empires, emergent nationalisms, world wars, as well as civil wars and their combined violent impact on material and human spaces complicate readings of the multilayered twentieth-century geopolitical landscape. On this basis, my choice of novels subjects theory and history to a rigorous test in which text and context supply significant nuances. The connections across the chapters relate a multiplicity of geopolitical and cultural spaces thus making the present study a kind of “public memorial space,” wherein my activity of reading is also a practice of cognitively engaging with a variety of traditions beyond the boundaries of private heritage, rigid categories, and generic descriptions.7 Furthermore, the four writers and their respective oeuvres have contributed, in various ways, to the revaluation of the relation of literature to politics, and they have consequently figured as polemical figures on their national scenes while being more or less exemplary in the arena of world literature. From this perspective, a study of monumental space in relation to the performance(s) of twentieth-century history in these works is a necessity, a challenge, and hopefully a model for further interdisciplinary research. *** Every title of a work of art or criticism conceals a fantasy of betrayal and a return to origins. Therefore it is apt to begin with what the title of the present study erases in terms of the founding text to which it owes its original impulse: the primal theoretical impulse that at first may seem only marginally related to a study of monumental space and even less significant with respect to post-imperialism and the novel. I am referring to Lefebvre’s ideas on monuments in The Production of Space. In the context of his seminal study in which he refers to monumental space only a few times, Lefebvre writes:

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I am not saying that the monument is not the outcome of a signifying practice, or of a particular way of proposing a meaning, but merely that it can be reduced neither to a language or discourse nor to the categories and concepts developed for the study of language. A spatial work (monument or architectural project) attains a complexity fundamentally different from the complexity of a text, whether prose or poetry.. . . [W]hat we are concerned with here is not texts but texture. We already know that a texture is made up of a usually rather large space covered by networks or webs; monuments constitute the strong points, nexuses or anchors of such webs. The actions of social practice are expressible but not explicable through discourse; they are, precisely, acted—and not read. A monumental work, like a musical one, does not have a “signified” (or “signifieds”); rather, it has a horizon of meaning: a specific or indefinite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore, by means of—and for the sake of—a particular action. To the degree that there are traces of violence and death, negativity and aggressiveness in social practice, the monumental work erases them and replaces them with a tranquil power and certitude which can encompass violence and terror.8 This is perhaps the most succinctly insightful discussion of the structure and politics of monumental space: its relationship to discourse, the notion of texture, the multiplicity of meanings that are concretely realized in this space especially through social practice as performance, and the interface of historical violence and tranquil monumentality. Primarily, Lefebvre’s insights can be deployed as a corrective for readings of memorial spaces as merely texts that can be read in terms of a historical semiotics. For instance, exploring the relationships of memorials, literary texts—namely Joyce’s Ulysses—and history, Nicholas Andrew Miller contends that [r]egardless of differences in aesthetic or ideological vocabulary, all memorials are, at the most basic level, textual markers: sites for the reading of history. Indexical signifiers of the past, memorials bring past objects or events into their discursive presence as history, a presence in which they are resolved and identified in the form of legible texts.9 Interestingly, other critics view the monument in terms of the stability of textuality and use this essentially as the basis on which they distinguish it from the memorial. Nonetheless, the fact that the two elements of this presumed duality are recurrently and easily reshuffled justifies, in my opinion, a relinquishing of the opposition between memorials and monuments. Strangely,

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this opposition emerges even in brilliant recent work on monuments as in D. J. Hopkins and Shelley Orr’s “Memory/Memorial/Performance” in which they argue that, unlike memorials, “monuments do not require our participation: their static meaning precedes the visitor.”10 Yet Hopkins and Orr’s essay’s more important contribution, as part of this significant volume, is an invitation, like the one implicitly made by Lefebvre, to reconsider monuments as sites of performance rather than simply as texts. Before moving on, I must highlight that, throughout this study, the term performance is employed according to a broad definition that encompasses not only public performances that are addressed to an audience with the aim of being formally perceived as such but also everyday acts that occur spontaneously or strategically, in public space but with a more or less public nature, and that may or may not be performative as such. In addition, I look at imagined or imaginary performances by monuments, a topic that I develop extensively later in this chapter. Richard Schechner writes: “Performance is an extremely difficult concept to define. From one point of view—clearly stated by Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)—performing is a mode of behavior that may characterize any activity. Thus performance is a ‘quality’ that can occur in any situation rather than a fenced-off genre. . . . Or, as John Cage has argued, simply framing an activity ‘as’ performance—viewing it as such—makes it into a performance.”11 Lefebvre’s revisioning of the monument from the perspective of the production of space by means of performative actions unsettles the relationship between monuments and textual legibility. Still, beyond Lefebvre, it seems that an effective means for using the textual paradigm to speak of monuments is to think of them as a spatial reconfiguration of Roland Barthes’s “writerly text” that resists stasis by inviting active participation in unraveling its codes and releasing its flux. But by conceiving of the monument in relation to text and against text, Lefebvre’s ideas can be the basis for a reflection on the literary representation of monumental space as an overdetermined texture across which social practice and signifying practice act together and wherein different discourses contribute to the monument’s “horizon of meaning.” A reading of specifically the novelistic representation of monumental space requires a critical methodology based in interdisciplinarity to unravel this overdetermined texture. The interdisciplinary synergy, which is implied in the title and activated throughout the book, brings together literature, political and cultural history, historical and cultural geography, memory studies, social and spatial theory, performance studies, phenomenology, art history, and political psychology. The aim is to show that the

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novelistic representation supplements or allows levels of analysis that are not available in theoretical and/or historical and geographical studies, yet this representation cannot fully perform its role of supplementarity without interacting with the theoretical, historical, and geographical material. In this context, I am moving from cultural geographical work on monumental space back to the body of theory (spatial, political, and culturalhistorical) that has directly or indirectly informed such work. My purpose is to examine what certain literary texts, namely the novels I have selected as the focus of this study, can contribute in terms of not only supplementing theory but also initiating a two-way interpretive approach between literature and theory in the exploration of the “horizons of meaning” that emerge through actual and imagined performance and performativity in and around monumental space. The most obvious basis of this two-way approach is the recognition of the literary text as representation, interpretation, and discourse and, therefore, as capable of being prescriptive and proscriptive if read merely as an antidote to theory and to other forms of discourse rather than in dialogue with these. Accordingly, my reading of the novelistic representation of the physical and imaginative experiences of this space acknowledges the impossibility and irrelevance of recovering an authentic experience behind the representation and the reading. This brings us back to the question that Robert J. C. Young has posed in relation to the role of the intellectual: “[I]s not ‘experience’ itself always experienced, analysed and given meaning through forms of knowledge that will themselves be already ideological?”12 Therefore, throughout this study, despite the focus on literature as a gateway to very specific and unique insights into monumental space, the methodology and rationale are based on a continuing dialogue and interaction among disciplines and discourses. While methodologically interdisciplinary, this study involves bringing together uneasily defined physical, historical, and literary spaces: monumental space, the post-imperial, and literature. Tracing the multiple conceptual trajectories within and between these spaces, this introductory chapter sets the stage for the multiple readings of monumental space in five novels situated in various post-imperial eras and sites in the twentieth century. These readings do not amount to a totality that constitutes a conclusive perspective or a canonical history of monumental space in the post-imperial novel. Rather, the aim is to examine atypical instances that highlight both the paradoxically central marginality of these representations in these novels and the expansive category of the post-imperial that they help unfold. ***

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In this study monumental space is used as a broad conceptual category that comprises three dimensions: the monument as a physical object that is produced in order to create and occupy a space across political and architectural matrices, the shifting location of the fixed monument in lived and imagined spatialities, and the various processes of monumentalization that may occur through both discursive and spatial practices. Although they do so in different ways, the particular focus of art historical, architectural, historical, and cultural geographical studies of monumental space is on the first dimension, the monument as object. These fields only partially approach the second dimension when discussing, for example, significant moments in the life of a monument—its erection and destruction—in relation to the life of a community. At the heart of the argument here is the proposition that some twentieth-century novels are key to an understanding of the third dimension since they reveal, perform, and disrupt processes of monumentalization at the intersection of social and spatial practices in ways that no other perspective on monumental space is intended to tackle. But to be able to analyze the latter dimension in these novels, it is necessary to look briefly at the first two dimensions through both theory and literature. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines monument as “a statue, building or other structure erected to commemorate a notable person or event”; “a statue or other structure placed over a grave in memory of the dead”; “a building, structure, or site that is of historical importance or interest”; or “an enduring and memorable example of something.” The OED traces the origin of the word monument to the Latin monere meaning “remind.” The latter definition signals the active role of the material object that seems to come alive through its interpellation of an audience: passers-by, local citizens, or tourists. In his influential essay “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” the art historian Alois Riegl points out indirectly the double character of the monument as both object and subject: “A monument in its oldest and most original sense is a human creation, erected for the specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events (or a combination thereof) alive in the minds of future generations.”13 Given their active function in selective memorialization and historicization, a reading of monuments almost always includes references to the following categories: memory, history, and forgetting. In literature we can find myriad examples of the representation of monumental space that includes almost every aspect of the definitions mentioned above. One example is Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne,” in which the monument functions as a sign and a symptom of a discursive dialogue between speaker and addressee, textual and architectural space and structure, past and present, memory and

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history. But the predominance of the ekphrastic element in Baudelaire’s poem, and also, for example, in such poems as Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” foregrounds the textual dimension at the expense of revealing how memory and history are channeled through the performances that occur around the monument. The use of visual art as a key subject in poetry, into the twenty-first century, has made the ekphrastic tradition a primary motivation for art history’s crucial role in the field of reading literary representations of works of art, including monuments. In Museum of Words, James A. W. Heffernan explores the ekphrastic tradition from Homer to John Ashbery and identifies the following common points throughout: “[T]he conversion of fixed pose and gesture into narrative, the prosopopeial envoicing of the silent image, the sense of representational friction between signifying medium and subject signified, and overall the struggle for power—the paragon—between the image and the word.”14 The aim of this study is to relocate the methodological tools to read the literary representation of the monument, specifically, in the novel rather than poetry and within an interdisciplinary framework that encompasses art history but is not simply restricted to it. Nevertheless, the significant ideas of transforming stasis into dynamic narrative, “the envoicing of the silent image,” and the tension between signifying object and signified subject are conceptually crucial to this approach. Engaging with the theme of the vulnerability of monumental structures, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” engages similar dynamics as those in “Le Cygne” in regard to image and word, memory and history, but also implies that the activity of reading a monument comprises a performance. It is worth revisiting the poem here: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

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Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.”15

Shelley’s poem, like Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, affords us an unusual glimpse of the post-imperial geopolitics of monumentalization and of the performances that mark its horizon of meaning. There is a tension between the physical destruction of the monument, here a remnant of pharaonic Egypt, and the implicit destabilization of its meaning in the overlayered processes of reading the inscription on it. Shelley’s traveler is an early, still not fully determined example of the tourist or passer-by whose activities create stories across the historical matrix that is literally and metaphorically inscribed on the monument. Flaubert’s Parrot and “Ozymandias” thus allow us a range of interpretive possibilities that we will explore, in a more focused and developed manner, with respect to twentieth-century acts of monumentalization and countermonumentalization and their renderings in select novels. Notably, these texts were chosen because they redirect attention from poetic ekphrasis to novelistic representations of monumental space and also translate specific post-imperial situations that are dealt with in the critical literature less frequently than British and French postimperialisms and, more recently, American neocolonialism. Obviously, the politics of monumentalization in the post–September 11 United States is an important context to consider when we examine the ways in which discourse and performance are involved in renderings of memory and history in monumental landscapes. Responding to a comment made by Daniel Libeskind, the “Master Planner” of the World Trade Centre site, that “Architecture is built memory. Like Books,” D. J. Hopkins and Shelley Orr argue that “books need to be read, and buildings alone remember nothing. Into Libeskind’s formulation must be factored the performance of the individual subject in the activation of the memorial function of architecture and the production of memory.”16 We will now turn our attention to the critically tempestuous relations of memory and history and the intertwined roles of monuments, performance, and literature in tempering or fueling these upheavals. *** As others have noted, the relationship between memory and history has been a mutually degrading but deeply incestuous affair in the development of theory. The privileging of either memory or history in the binary opposition in which they are often set depends on the epistemological or critical

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framework within which they are conceived. The rare instances when a dynamic interaction replaces this binary relation in the critical discourse deserve attention precisely because in the novels studied here monumental space becomes the stage for intimate and complex interplay among multifarious forms of memory, history, and forgetting. Therefore, it is useful, first, to examine how this triad is affirmed or denied both in individual studies of monuments and in larger projects on the conceptual and physical spaces of memory and history and their relations to fiction in order to delineate the workings of the novelistic representation in this respect. M. Christine Boyer’s “City of Collective Memory” proposes an architectural, memorial, or monumental space where memory is a protean and vital force that undermines a fixed and finalized history.17 Similarly, studying the iconography of the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome, David Atkinson and Denis Cosgrove suggest that memory and history are simultaneously opposed and inseparable. They note that recent work on memorial landscapes reveals that “history, in the sense of a single, official, and superordinate narrative, articulated by privileged elites and capable of univocal articulation in specific spaces or monuments, cannot be dissociated from more popular and widely shared ‘memories’ and myths that are fluid, contested and plural.”18 What these statements overlook is the specificity of the form of memory or history, its synchronic and diachronic contexts, agents, and spaces of production and consumption, and the possible complicity of either memory or history in enabling hegemonic strategies and monolithic representations. Nevertheless, the alternative possibility which is an interpretation that blurs the boundaries between memory and history and overlooks their discursive and material differences risks homogenizing an epistemological field that is characterized instead by heterogeneity, individual specificity, and comparative possibilities.19 Karen E. Till’s notion of the role of “social memory” in memorial spaces functions as a corrective to approaches that emphasize the opposition of memory to history. Although Till’s perspective is not unique among “new” cultural and historical geographers, it deserves particular attention. Till considers the roles of specific agencies, collectivities, and individuals, hence of different forms of memory and history, in creating the experiences of these spaces. For instance, she describes the multivalency of the experiences of monumental spaces in national capitals “by international visitors, by national citizens from various regions and social groups, and by residents living in that city.”20 Till’s distinction between different experiences of monumental spaces invites further comparative investigation of various possible encounters with specific sites by particular individuals or collectivities as they filter, project, and negotiate certain texts and textures

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of memory or history. An exemplary case is the comparison/contrast of the oftentimes highly structured experience of monumental spaces by tourists to the either intensely personal or significantly banal experience of these spaces by local residents in the context of everyday life. One example would be the comparison/contrast of reactions by Iraqis and non-Iraqis to the demolition of Saddam Hussein’s statue in 2003 as witnessed in Baghdad and reported in the media. What is remarkable in this respect is that very few studies look at the intersection of politics and everyday life in the dynamics of tourism in monumental space. Jonathan Huener’s “Antifascist Pilgrimage and Rehabilitation at Auschwitz” examines the activist and politicized type of tourism practiced by two West German organizations, Aktion Sühnezeichen and Sozialistiche Jugend, in the 1960s at the memorial site of Auschwitz. He touches on a number of practices that break with state-controlled ritualized commemoration and that emphasize grassroots, personal, and quotidian forms of expiation and reconciliation.21 Twentieth-century postconflict contexts, including South Africa, former Yugoslavia, Palestine-Israel, and others have figured in novels that explore the junctures between war tourism and everyday life and that deconstruct the opposition of tourism to political involvement. Examining the performances that occur in monumental space through this lens comprises a reading of the memories and histories that circulate in this space beyond the duality of elite and subaltern perspectives. This study looks at two such instances. The first is contemporary Beirut and its amalgam of postindependence idealism and postwar ruin that confound both the tourist and the local citizen in al-Daif’s novel. The other consists of Pamuk’s The Black Book in which the superimposition of the psychotic flaneur and the tourist creates a double subjectivity that encounters and attempts to read the Turkish republic’s monumental landscape. In both cases, the tension among personal memory, learned official history and pseudohistory (channeled through the media and tourists’ guidebooks), communal forms of remembrance and forgetting, and the multifarious vicissitudes of everyday life complicate the experience of visiting or traversing monumental space. Nuala C. Johnson is one of a few new cultural geographers who reject the memory-history duality. Instead, she investigates specificity, multiplicity, and continued change in relation to material and imaginative experiences of monumental space. Johnson argues that [b]y treating memory as having a dialectical relationship with history, in constant dialogue with the past, we begin to see how the dualistic thinking underwriting the division of history and memory becomes more

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problematic. This is particularly the case in relation to the spatiality of history and memory. . . . [The secularization of spaces] destabilizes the rigid lines of demarcation drawn between objective/subjective narration; emotional/abstract sources of evidence; local/universal ways of knowing. . . . Nation-building exercises; colonial expansion of the non-European world; regional, ethnic and class identity formation; all embrace an imaginative and material geography made sacred in the spaces of remembrance and continuously remade, contested, revised and transmuted as fresh layers of meaning attend to them.22 Perhaps her approach idealizes the drive to proliferation and makes the transformations of memorial spaces and the production of meaning in them seem almost unending and unconditional. However, it has several advantages over other approaches. Johnson’s work identifies nationalist, colonialist, regional, ethnic, and class particulars and suggests the importance of a multidisciplinary approach that includes “[g]eographers, historians, anthropologists and cultural theorists.”23 She thus highlights the potential usefulness of a synergy among various disciplines and scales in the reading of monumental space. What is striking, though, is that neither Johnson nor other cultural geographers have really delved into the role of literature in this respect. The subsequent chapters transfer this interdisciplinary synergy delineating the specificities and multiplicities of memories and histories. More specifically, this study investigates the ways they are orchestrated in the dramatization of monumental space in the selected novels at the intersection— as Johnson puts it—of “an imaginative and material geography.” Memories and histories associated with monumental spaces and those who traverse them thus emerge at the interstices that bind the interpenetrating layers of textual space, private space (psychological and physical), and public space. The latter is understood in terms of what John Bodnar calls “public memory” signifying “the intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions” in a social domain.24 *** The works of Pierre Nora and Paul Ricoeur are a necessary gateway to reading the interplay of memory, history, commemorative spaces, and fiction. Nora enunciates the forceful relation of memory and history conditioning his conception of lieux de mémoire that “are created by a play of memory and history, an interaction of two factors that results in their reciprocal overdetermination.”25 Nora’s wide category of lieux de mémoire relates to

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monumental space in addition to events and material objects linked to this space, “to the archives as well as to the tricolor; to the libraries, dictionaries, and museums as well as to commemorations, celebrations, the Pantheon, and the Arc de Triomphe; to the Dictionnaire Larousse as well as to the Wall of the Fédérés. . . .”26 This fluid conceptualization of lieux de mémoire provides the groundwork on the basis of which I approach, in the present study, a multiplicity of memory sites including not only various monumental spaces but also such memory sites as Glasnevin Cemetery in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Yukio Mishima’s novel, the commemorative celebration of Lebanese Independence Day in al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata, and architectural remains of Armenian presence in Turkey in Pamuk’s Snow. This is part of reading monumentalization as a process that occurs both within and beyond the monument as such. My approach to representations of monumental space in literature emerges in some respects from the two fundamental critical standpoints in Nora’s work on lieux de mémoire. These two elements are an understanding of the intricate connections between memory and history in creating memory spaces and an attention to both the specificities that distinguish monumental space and the characteristics that affiliate it with other spaces and other realms of memory. More importantly for this study, Nora concludes his essay with a highly useful, though partially contestable, perspective on memory, history, and literature: In fact, memory has never known more than two forms of legitimacy: historical and literary. These have run parallel to each other but until now always separately. At present the boundary between the two is blurring; following closely upon the successive deaths of memory-history and memoryfiction, a new kind of history has been born, which owes its prestige and legitimacy to the new relation it maintains to the past. History has become our replaceable imagination—hence the last stand of faltering fiction in the renaissance of the historical novel, the vogue for personalized documents, the literary revitalization of historical drama, the success of the oral historical tale. Our interest in these lieux de mémoire that anchor, condense, and express the exhausted capital of our collective memory derives from this new sensibility. History has become the deep reference of a period that has been wrenched from its depths, a realistic novel in a period in which there are no real novels. Memory has been promoted to the center of history: such is the spectacular bereavement of literature.27 Undoubtedly, Nora’s assumptions that we are “in a period in which there are no real novels” and that novels bereave their displacement by memory

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is an overgeneralization. It overlooks the extent to which novels help shape the promotion of memory to the center and the ways in which this process defines some of the experimental narrative dynamics of twentieth-century fiction. Nonetheless, Nora hints at a more general insight into the evolving nature of the novel as this genre becomes more profoundly influenced by not only the transformed epistemological relations of memory and history but also, and more importantly, by the changing understandings of the role of the imagination in the discourses of both memory and history as well as the transformative role of the latter two with respect to the novel as a lieu de mémoire where different acts of monumentalization and countermonumentalization occur. The epistemological aporia and theoretical proliferation that have marked the twentieth century have contributed to a shift from the nineteenth-century “naturalist and realist tradition” to more experimental forms. Nevertheless, experimentation has not led to a dead end in the genre and has not deprived the novel of historical, sociocultural, and political relevance. On the contrary, experimentation and the complex aesthetic network of modernism have provided the twentieth-century novel with an internal generic hybridity and with a multiplicity of modes of narration and representation, especially with respect to time and space. In the five novels that I examine in this study, experimentation varies along a continuum that extends from realist to nonrealist techniques and that articulates itself in the styles of narrating, representing, or writing monumental space. These techniques and styles comprise: expanding its narrative space for the details of lived experience, carnivalizing it or highlighting its interruption by the carnivalesque, relating it narratively to other discursive and material spaces, repeating it with a difference, limiting or marginalizing its textual space, relocating it onto the spaces of the ordinary, and disturbing the fixity or homogeneity of monumental space through temporal dynamism. The heterogeneity that characterizes the techniques of writing monumental space in the novels is exemplified in the combination of linear and nonlinear temporality and of surrealist and realist modes of representing the everyday and the exceptional. These hybrid modes preclude the classification of the novels as either realist or antirealist. In fact, they suggest imaginative dimensions that extend the significance and relevance of monumental space beyond the confines of a systematically apprehended reality. In these twentieth-century novels, the representation of monumental space functions as a matrix for negotiating this complex reality that encompasses political, historical, and sociocultural trajectories. Paul Ricoeur is another philosopher-historian who reads memory and history in terms of a flexible relation of reciprocity and supplementation

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rather than opposition and substitution, with respect to the abuses perpetrated in the name of commemoration. He engages even more elaborately than Nora with the vibrant relation of memory and history to literature. Ricoeur contests the simple answers that have been put forward in philosophical, phenomenological, metaphysical, psychological, and historiographical theses concerning the relation of memory to the imagination and of history to fiction. The primary argument about the first level of the relation is that “[t]o be sure, we have stated repeatedly that imagination and memory have as a common trait the presence of the absent and as a differential trait, on the one hand, the bracketing of any positing of reality and the vision of something unreal and, on the other, the positing of an earlier reality.”28 Therefore memory and the imagination seem to collude and collide as forms of assessing and representing reality through a dynamic of present absence. According to Ricoeur, the association of memory and imagination becomes problematic as a result of “the hallucinatory seduction of the imaginary,” a process that may also affect the writing of history.29 In many ways, the representation of monumental space in literature is an exemplary manifestation of these acts of collusion and collision. This is because within the framework of these representations, writers render several or all of the following: remembrance, commemoration, real and imagined present/absent events, and imaginary reconstructions that may border on the hallucinatory edges of the surreal. In this context, the idea of a monument coming alive exemplifies the intersection of memory, history, and the imagination. Reading the monument itself as an agent in its space of performance requires a distinction between human and nonhuman agency but also invites an envisioning of materiality that is invested with intention and desire as it partakes in a human space of lived experience. Landscape studies, art and environmental history, and phenomenology have made important contributions in forming the contours of this concept. Simon Schama writes that “it seems right to acknowledge that it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape.”30 He explains that, particularly in the United States, some environmental historians “have accomplished the feat of making inanimate topography into historical agents in their own right. Restoring to the land and climate the kind of creative unpredictability conventionally reserved for human actors, these writers have created histories in which man is not the be-all and end-all of the story.”31 A useful way to begin to conceptualize the coming to life of a monument and its agency (beyond mere anthropomorphism) is to look at contemporary phenomenological scholarship that contends that “[t]hings, places and landscapes influence us, alter our consciousness, constitute us beyond

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ourselves. In this sense they are not radically divorced from us.”32 George L. Hersey analyzes this phenomenon specifically in the history of making and engaging with statues: “One can define any art that represents living things, such as human beings, as a form of artificial life. . . . They often seem to move; sometimes they do move or even speak. . . . In the past, statues were seriously thought to possess artificial life. Indeed, in some cultures, that is still so. And our own culture, believingly or unbelievingly, has constantly reproposed the idea.”33 Hersey takes the idea of the living/dead object further. He argues that “no sooner is artificial life kicked out as superstition or kicked out as fictive, than it reenters as real or proposed hard-core reality.”34 It is this key question of the imagined (fictional or straightforwardly hallucinatory) aspects and historically real implications of this phenomenon that must be reemphasized in cultural-historical and psychological readings of human engagements with monuments. There have been some thoughts on the imaginative and imaginary transformations of monumental spaces and even on the surreal or magical agency of monuments. The art historian W. J. T. Mitchell contends that the monument “may become the object of imaginary renderings” that would include “fantasies.”35 Here man is still more or less the main actor in the fantastical drama. While Mitchell does not fully develop the idea of the monument coming alive in the imagination of its audience, James E. Young’s reflection on the vital potential of monumental space seems more pertinent to reading the agency of the monument. Young states that [l]ike other forms of art, the monument is most benign when static: there when you face it, gone when you turn your back. But when it begins to come to life, to grow, shrink, or change form, the monument [here, Young’s notion of the counter-monument] may become threatening. No longer at the mercy of the viewer’s will, it seems to have a will of its own, to beckon us at inopportune moments.36 Young is here speaking of the countermonument that he defines as an artistic form that “undermines its own authority by inviting and then incorporating the authority of passersby.”37 The late twentieth century witnessed a countermonumental trend especially in the memorialization of the Holocaust: Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism, War, and Violence—and for Peace and Human Rights in Hamburg, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. The designers of these countermonuments expressed their intention to build structures that invite their visitors to participate and reflect on the processes of memorialization that they

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embody. Perhaps the most famous site of monumentalization and countermonumentalization in the last decade has been Ground Zero. September 11 marked a turning point in international politics as the monumental Twin Towers that have been associated with myriad meanings including globalization, American neoimperialism, economic strength, and national pride fell in a brutal terrorist attack. After September 11, proposals for a World Trade Center memorial showed “instantations of fluidity and evanescence trumping the solidity of traditional monumental form”38 and in that sense could be called countermonumental. Despite the “wars” that have marked the negotiations to integrate Michael Arad’s controversial winning design for the memorial into Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the site, the countermonumental energies of the space overflow in the face of the political, corporate, and even architectural forces that seek to restrict its scope and significance. Young’s comments on the countermonument as a dynamic object are an indirect outgrowth of cultural imaginings that dream and fear vibrant life in any monument, and not exclusively the late twentieth-century countermonument per se. Notwithstanding their extremely important statements concerning the fantastical dimension of monuments, neither art history nor cultural geography and related interpretive frameworks can fully accommodate and elaborate such a vision because it requires an extended imaginative scope beyond the confines of systematic rational analysis. Literature articulates such a vision of nonhuman agency due to its essential imaginative qualities, its narrative exploration of the magical and the surreal, and its consequent reliance on a readerly suspension of disbelief. This form of representation is also possible in film in which scenes of statues coming alive are not uncommon (e.g. Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète and Sergey Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle). Film employs audiovisual effects that enable the audience to experience nonhuman speech and movement more directly than in literature. Nonetheless, the representational content in both artistic media is written text that, in this study, will be investigated only through the novelistic genre. The fantastical transformation of statues into living, moving, and speaking bodies has featured in literature from Homer’s Iliad and Euripides’ Alcestis until this day. Throughout literary history, arguably the most famous and repeatedly revived tale of living statues is that of Pygmalion. The fifteenth-century Italian prose romance Hypnerotomachia by Francesco Colonna presents a series of adventures around animated statues much like Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken. Similarly, the twentieth-century play The Old Lady Says “No!” by Denis Johnston makes the speaking statue of Henry Grattan the center of

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an Irish political drama. Reading this literary phenomenon in relation to surrealist literature, Sergiusz Michalski astutely notes its multiple facets in the enchanted dreamscapes of André Breton’s Nadja, Philippe Soupault’s Les Dernières Nuits de Paris, and Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris.39 The surrealist representation of monuments coming alive continues into the latter part of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. Robert Majzels’s City of Forgetting presents an enlivened Montreal monumental landscape where spaces of remembrance are occupied by the forgotten bodies of the homeless. Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel comprises the first substantial study of the image of living statues in a range of twentieth-century novels. The phenomenologically and historically significant idea of monuments coming alive within landscapes of oppression will be at the heart of my work on the surreal drama in the Circe episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, the paradoxical imperishability of the Golden Pavilion in Mishima’s novel, and the apocalyptic dynamism of Atatürk statues in Pamuk’s The Black Book. In these novels, there are movements whereby the historical and fantastical can come to contain each other. *** Jacques Derrida’s work on memory, history, and fiction beyond the logic of binary oppositions and in relation to presence and absence has influenced many of the aforementioned approaches. From this perspective, the rationale behind memory/history coincides with that behind speech/writing. Reflecting on Ferdinand de Saussure and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Derrida seeks to deconstruct a “tradition” whereby “[w]riting, a mnemotechnic means, supplanting good memory, spontaneous memory, signifies forgetfulness.”40 Taking Derrida’s thought further, Ricoeur’s monumental work Memory, History, Forgetting delves extensively into the significance of forgetting in destabilizing the opposition between memory and history. Forgetting is, paradoxically, the common denominator of memory and history, since both exist by virtue of a certain amount of either abusive or constructive forgetting. Like Ricoeur, Roger Luckhurst forcefully sums up the supplementing relationship between memory and forgetting: But memory and forgetting are not opposing things; rather, they are an interplay of the same process. It was the peculiarities of what an individual forgets and the invention of a new pathology of amnesia, after all, that led the Victorian psychologists to privilege memory as the locus of identity. Then again, for memory to work at all, forgetting is intrinsic

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Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel to its function, for to remember everything would be to overwhelm the present with the past. . . . Memory can tyrannically bind you and impose a determining identity you might wish to resist; active forgetting can be a liberation from the dead weight of memorial history. . . . To recover memory, then, is not always an act of resistance against a culture of forgetting.41

Excessive memory can be a burden on psychological and political levels. Like Nora and Ricoeur, Luckhurst also suggests deep organic links in the expression “memorial history” and emphasizes the inalienable role of forgetting in moderating the relationship. In twentieth-century literature, this dialectic of memory, history, and forgetting is most eloquently articulated in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Funes the Memorious” where the all-encompassing memory, that disavows forgetting, becomes diseased: “He told me: ‘I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably since the world has been the world.’ And again: ‘My dreams are like you people’s waking hours.’ And again, towards dawn: ‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.’”42 As we will see, such labyrinthine negotiations of memory, history, and forgetting appear in different ways in the context of all five novels discussed here: in nightmarish dreamscapes, fractured psychological landscapes, destroyed architectural remains, and spaces of excessive monumentalization or radical countermonumentalization. The problem of too much memory that is the equivalent of Borges’s metaphorical “garbage heap” is central to Ricoeur’s study. There, forgetting becomes a necessary remedy or a sanitizing agent against excessive memory especially on the collective level. Similarly, in Theatres of Memory, Raphael Samuel deflates the memory-history opposition, that he reads in the works of such thinkers as Maurice Halbwachs and Jacques LeGoff. Samuel argues that memory is an “active, shaping force” both in “what it remembers” and in “what it contrives symptomatically to forget.”43 Forgiveness is the final expression of the relations of memory, history, and forgetting in Ricoeur’s text: “Forgiveness—if it has a sense, and if it exists—constitutes the horizon common to memory, history, and forgetting.”44 Trauma studies have also contributed to further transforming the memory/history opposition into the triad memory-history-forgetting. In this context, there have been different, even divergent, evaluations of the meanings of silence in its complex relationship to traumatic memory, particularly since it cannot be dissociated from the realities and repercussions of “colonialism, totalitarianisms and wars, and their sites within and outside Europe” and also from “many personal aspects, involving the bodies and minds of individuals in times of peace.”45 As Cathy Caruth’s edited

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collection Trauma reveals, silence and forgetfulness are closely linked to testimony and memorialization during and after conflictual situations.46 The significance of traumatic memory and silence has been more often than not approached from a psychoanalytical—especially Freudian— perspective. There has been little attention to the roles of traumatic memory, amnesia, and silence in the material space of commemoration, whether that corresponds to the construction and unveiling of monuments or to collective and individual performances in monumental space. Exceptions of course emerge now and then as in Edna Longley’s suggestion, in the context of the twenty-sixth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, “that we [Northern Irish] should build a monument to Amnesia and forget where we put it.”47 Longley’s suggestion reveals both dissatisfaction with the practice of monument making and an imaginative twist of the relation between memory and forgetting in order to come to terms with the traumatic experience of Bloody Sunday. The dialectic of memory, forgetting, and silence is at the center of Pat Barker’s novel Another World in which interrupted storytelling renders the difficulties of translating personal and historical traumas in World War I memorial spaces and 1990s domestic spaces. Pamuk’s novel Snow is equally challenging in this respect since it mimics trauma in the texture of the narrative itself as it incisively represents the erasure of the traumatic and tabooed Armenian massacres and their violent dislocation from Turkey’s memorial architectural and discursive spaces. Snow implicitly reflects on the politics and ethics of the duty of memory and forgetfulness and on their relations to justice and forgiveness. In the present study, an important topic to investigate with respect to the application of a malleable and multifaceted interpretive model in relation to memory, history, forgetting, monuments, and the novel is the interplay between the erection and destruction of monuments; the production and abolition of historical documents, especially with respect to war crimes and genocide; the reconfiguration of memory through trauma, amnesia, and other forms of forgetfulness; and the erasures, silences or reinscriptions that the literary text suggests or embodies. In Heinrich Böll’s Billiards at Half Past Nine, Robert Faehmel, the architect who blows up the fictional Saint Anthony’s Abbey three days before the end of World War II, says that he had waited during five years of war for that moment, the moment when the Abbey would lie there like a gift of God and be his prey; he had wanted to create a monument of dust and rubble for those who had not been historical monuments and whom no one had been made

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Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel to spare; Edith, killed by a piece of shrapnel; Ferdi, a would-be assassin condemned by the law; the lad who had pushed the tiny slips of paper with his messages on them into the letter-box; Schrella’s father, who had disappeared; Schrella himself, who had to live so far away from the land where Hölderlin had lived. . . .48

That Robert destroys the monument his father had built in 1908 and his son will rebuild after the war signifies a cycle of monumental and countermonumental violence entangled in traumatic personal and national histories. Similar dynamics emerge in Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion where post-imperial and postwar malaise underwrite the Buddhist acolyte’s act of contemplating then carrying out the burning of the national monument. Yet, just as in Böll’s novel, personal grievances and psychological issues greatly affect the arsonist’s decision. *** The act of destroying monuments has been the locus for productive discussions on memory and forgetfulness in relation to politics. Robert Bevan contends that the destruction of a group’s architectural structures is an intentional erasure of this group’s collective memory. According to Bevan, removing material embodiments of a certain collectivity and its memory is equivalent to genocide or “cultural cleansing.”49 In contrast, Adrian Forty argues that the material destruction of memorials contributes to the establishment of certain memories and the eradication of others.50 But in addition to performing eradication or replacement, acts of destroying monuments comprise other more common processes, namely supplementation. In his study of the politics of the recarved image in the act of damnatio memoriae in ancient Roman public art, Jaś Elsner suggests this sense of supplementation that he finds lacking in relation to modern public monuments.51 Elsner does not address cases of monuments in modernity wherein, instead of simply substituting one monolithic landscape for another, the process of destruction, relocation, and replacement invokes this sense of supplementation. This perspective can be inferred from Lefebvre’s statement that “from time immemorial conquerors and revolutionaries eager to destroy a society [. . .] often have sought to do so by burning or razing that society’s monuments. Sometimes, it is true, they contrive to redirect them to their own advantage. Here too, use goes further and deeper than the codes of exchange.”52 Liminality and hybridity may be conspicuously evident in the material composition and symbolic codes of successive monumental landscapes while they can become a mere façade or a far-fetched ideal in others. That

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is why supplementation seems to be a more adequate term. Till explains that “[a]lthough new regimes may add symbols, alter the physical context, or relocate monuments to articulate power relations, they also incorporate imagery and features from previous regimes or states to make their ‘new’ memorials.”53 Moreover, the reconfiguration of a memorial space by revolutionary groups can quickly become a tool of control rather than liberation as these groups acquire the dominant position in power politics—a process that is recurrently evoked in the representations of monumental space in the novels studied here. In these texts, the violence of an event commemorated in a monument that violently erases the victims is, in turn, resisted through violent actions against the monument. These questions are at the heart of W. J. T. Mitchell’s essay “The Violence of Public Art,” which reveals the increasing openness of art-historical studies to political concerns. Mitchell discusses three principal manifestations of violence in the images of public art: (1) the image as an act or object of violence, itself doing violence to beholders, or “suffering” violence as the target of vandalism, disfigurement, or demolition; (2) the image as a weapon of violence, a device for attack, coercion, incitement, or more subtle ‘dislocations’ of public spaces; (3) the image as a representation of violence, whether a realistic imitation of a violent act, or a monument, trophy, memorial, or other trace of past violence.54 Mitchell’s schema is useful for revisiting monuments not as static artistic or historical objects but rather as agents in the dynamic historical process comprising acts of violence and reactions to them. Moreover, what Mitchell’s analysis indirectly points out is the imbrication of the history of monument making with that of monument destruction instead of what cultural historians and geographers have set as a historical continuum that begins with “statuomania” from the middle of the nineteenth century to World War I and ends with “statuophobia” after 1918. Reading novels like Heinrich Böll’s Billiards at Half-Past Nine, Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Pamuk’s The New Life, The Black Book, and Snow, one can clearly see the intertwining of statuomania and statuophobia and their underlying taboos. There is also the interpenetration of a violent political impulse for excessive monumentalization and a subversive instinct to disable and kill this impulse and its embodiment. Significantly, the intertwining of statuomania and statuophobia in the twentieth century reveals the embeddedness of post-imperial dynamics in a matrix of monumental and countermonumental excesses.

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In this respect, Böll’s novel offers a powerful rendering of symbolic and physical violence as it is effected through monumentalization as well as against it, from the perspective of post-imperial and postwar Germany. In this novel, Robert Faehmel explains his act of destroying the fictional Saint Anthony’s Abbey, because he saw it as a symbol of the complicity of the Church with the Nazis, as an act of countermonumentalization that allows forms of alternative memorialization whereby justice and violence paradoxically coincide: “[D]ynamite and formulae, such were his only means of creating monuments.”55 In negotiating trauma and taboo with respect to the erasure of traces of aggression from monumental space, Böll’s novel anticipates such texts as Ismail Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone (that is about the violent ends of successive empires in wartime and postwar Albania), Pamuk’s Snow (the Kurdish and Armenian issues in Turkey) and The Black Book (the 1980 coup in Istanbul), and Hong Ying’s Summer of Betrayal, and Beijing Comrade’s Lan Yu (the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre). Presenting the effects of monumentalization on Muslim communities, Kadare’s and Pamuk’s novels are comparable. The first reflects the taboos connected to a form of statuophobia that is embedded in Islamic prohibitions, and the other presents statuomania as part of the revolutionary reforms that Atatürk imposed as he established the Turkish republic after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Kadare’s narrator describes the people’s unease toward the first and only statue to be erected in the main square: A metal man? Was such a novelty really necessary? Might it not cause trouble? At night, when everyone was sleeping as God had ordained, the statue would be out there standing erect. . . . The sculptor who came from Tirana to inspect the proposed site of the pedestal barely escaped the blows. A bitter polemic raged in the city newspaper. At last the majority of the population resigned itself to having the statue. It arrived in a huge lorry with a tarpaulin over the back. It was winter. They set it up at night in the main square. To avoid trouble there was no unveiling ceremony. People stood and stared in wonder at the bronze warrior with his hand on his pistol, who gazed severely down into the square as if asking, “Why didn’t you want me?”56 This passage reveals monumentalization as a process that involves psychological, material, phenomenological, cultural, and political elements wherein the body of the monument is both literally and metaphorically associated with the human bodies that circulate around it, enliven it, and attack it. As has become clear, to read this complex process requires bringing the literary representation in dialogue with various approaches to

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monumental space based in different disciplines. But to elaborate further on the usefulness of such interdisciplinary work, it is necessary to focus on a key discipline in this respect, what is now known as new cultural geography, its contributions to fresh engagements with monumental space, its appropriation of the art-historical iconographic approach, its growing but still not fully fledged investment in the idea of performance in monumental space, and the role of literature, specifically the twentieth-century postimperial novel, at this interdisciplinary crossroads. *** New cultural geography has established an approach that is mainly influenced by cultural history and cultural studies. It moved beyond the principles of the Berkeley School of cultural geography that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century by Carl Sauer and focused on the perceived landscape phenomena. The new cultural geography adopts the contemporary interdisciplinary perspective on culture, and its theoretical background comprises cultural studies, ethnography, anthropology, literary theory, semiology, history, philosophy, Marxism and post-Marxism, feminism and postfeminism, poststructuralism, critical race theory, postcolonialism, postmodernism, and other related theories.57 Richard H. Schein describes this approach as “[c]ontemporary as well as historical (but always contextual and theoretically informed); social as well as spatial (but not confined exclusively to narrowly-defined landscape issues); urban as well as rural; and interested in the contingent nature of culture, in dominant ideologies and in forms of resistance to them.”58 The work of new cultural geographers, which has particularly flourished since the 1990s, engages with cultural and political concerns “such as ideologies of race, the role of language and discourse in producing cultural spaces, the development and maintenance of subcultures, issues of gender, sexuality, and identity, and the way in which landscapes and places are more than just congeries of material artefacts or empty containers awaiting social action.”59 As such, new cultural geography perceives the cultural landscape as “a social and cultural production which both represents and is constitutive of past, present and future political ideologies and power relationships.”60 Cultural geography has contributed to expanding and enriching postcolonial research.61 In this context, Whelan discusses the role of the cultural landscape in general and monuments in particular “in representing the discourses of colonialism, imperialism, and forms of nationalism.”62 From this perspective, reading monumental space in the novels selected for this study is a way of engaging with the ongoing theoretical and critical interest in

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monumental landscapes as the spatial matrices across which many important features of this century’s post-imperial politics have been enacted. Iconography, developed by Erwin Panofsky of the Warburg school of art history and later adopted by cultural geographers, plays an important role in analyzing the elements of the cultural landscape, monuments. There are three primary ways in which the cultural geographical appropriation of the art-historical iconographic method is significant. First, it has contributed to the elaboration of a multidisciplinary approach to landscape as it is exemplified in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels’s edited collection The Iconography of Landscape. This work attests to the value of the collaboration of thinkers and critics from “geography, fine art, literature, social history and anthropology”63 but still needs to be more fully developed into a critical model. Secondly, the iconographic approach entails an interpretation of landscape as a text that is subject to the activity of reading.64 Thirdly, and most importantly, as an appropriation of art-historical iconography from a dynamic cultural-political perspective, “geographical iconography accepts that landscape meanings are unstable, contested and highly political.”65 In this respect, the deciphering of the politics encoded in the iconography of monuments has stretched into such important areas as gender politics. For instance, in studying the Statue of Liberty in New York, the cultural historian Marina Warner argues that “[i]conography, rooted in rhetoric, which is itself bound by the laws of grammar, generated a semantic contrast affecting significance from the almost meaningless contrasts of linguistic gender.”66 Jane Urquhart’s novel The Stone Carvers, in which plot, character, theme, and symbol revolve almost entirely around a single monument (the Vimy Memorial in France), is one of the rare works of fiction that focus on the details of the relationship among the sculptor, the individual carvers, and the sculpture, tracing their gender-marked physical and conceptual encounters around the memorial and its iconography.67 In these encounters, it is easy to identify a performance dimension that transcends the textual or discursive matter that the iconographic approach allows us to decipher. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the iconographic approach is that it allows a reading of the monumental landscape as a text. On one level, I aim to show that one of the significant contributions of new cultural geographers in the last two decades is a gradual awareness of the limitations of such a perspective and the need for a reading of landscape, generally, and monumental landscape in particular, as a theater or a stage for official and unofficial performance. In this respect, Anderson et al. point out the pitfalls of a strictly “discursive” approach to the landscape—an approach that

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relies particularly on techniques appropriated from literary criticism and art history—since such an approach may overlook “the very real material conditions of landscape production.”68 Similarly, W. J. T. Mitchell, in his introduction to Landscape and Power, specifies that the aim of the study is to begin to rethink “landscape, not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.”69 For Tim Cresswell, performance and event as the contours of social practice destabilize a fixed and finalized narrative or definitive being of place from a phenomenological perspective: “Place provides the conditions of possibility for creative social practice. Place in this sense becomes an event rather than a secure ontological thing rooted in notions of the authentic. Place as an event is marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence.”70 This approach to monumental space as a process, an event, a space of performance, or a theater appears frequently among the implicit or explicit aims of recent cultural geographical studies; for example, Atkinson and Cosgrove’s study of the Vittoriano approaches it as “a single memory theater.”71 In this context, Nuala C. Johnson elucidates the ways in which a reading of landscape as a theater can amend the gaps that exist in the reading of landscape as a text: While offering a more nuanced understanding of the act of reading any landscape and the possibility of decoding the messages within any space, the text metaphor may overemphasise the power to subvert the meaning of landscape through its reading, without necessarily providing a space in which to change the landscape itself. Hegemonic and subaltern readings, in other words, may take precedence over hegemonic and subaltern productions.72 Instead, Johnson contends that the theater or stage metaphor extends interpretive horizons since it implies that “life gets played out as social action and social practice.”73 She develops Denis Cosgrove’s concept of landscape as a “stage” or “theatre set” to argue that the landscape-as-stage forms not merely the framework for the performance but also an inalienable and fundamental part of the performance. She even states that landscape is “the performance itself,”74 though she does not fully elaborate on the implications of this statement. The most effective revaluation of the absence of critical investment in the performance dimension of place, space, and landscape has come not from cultural geography but rather from recent interdisciplinary interventions in the field of performance studies. In their introduction to an excellent

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collection of essays on Performance and the City, Kim Solga, D. J. Hopkins and Shelley Orr incisively note that the broadest and deepest implications of the weave between the theatrical and the urban continue to lack sustained exploration in performance studies, urban studies, and human geography. This lack can be accounted for by the investment these disciplines have historically made, and continue to make, in “the text of the city”, their metaphor of choice for describing both the official city and the impact of grassroots work on, and against, official civic culture.75 The editors thus emphasize the crucial argument that “textuality and performativity must be understood as linked cultural practices that work together to shape the body of phenomenal, intellectual, psychic, and social encounters that frame a subject’s experience of the city.”76 The work of performance theorists and critics like Loren Kruger and Mike Pearson has contributed original outlooks on the constructedness of place, landscape, and monumental space through performance and performative events. For instance, tracing a “performance archeology” within public commemorative and commercial spaces in Chicago, Kruger examines the multimedia production “Lost Buildings” that she sees as exemplifying “in both plot and location the drama of urban renewal and destruction, and the ongoing conflict over the form and the function of the city and its landmarks.”77 It is impossible to list here the numerous, though not always exceptional, analyses of multimedia performance in relation to monumental landmarks. Dan Bacalzo, for example, discusses the performativity of Tseng Kwong Chi’s self-photographs in which he brings the Western touristic (monumental) site into conflict with what looks like a Mao suit he wears for these occasions. Bacalzo argues that “The cliché-ridden banality of the tourist photograph is given an ironic, political potency through the depiction of the site as a space where multiple narratives co-exist.”78 In the same article, Bacalzo considers “SlutForArt,” a homage solo performance piece by Tseng’s sister, and views it as a multidimensional commemorative practice since it uses the photographs as backdrop. The performance contends with the performativity of the photographs thus complicating the relationship between the politics of Tseng’s art, a deconstruction of the alienating strategies against Asians in American landscapes, and his life as an artist who died of AIDS. What is particularly interesting here is the overlayered nature of the project: Tseng’s photographs are themselves performative commemorations of instances of social practice in monumental

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space, and his sister’s performance adds an extra layer of performativity in this respect. Performance studies focuses attention on the intersections of the personal and the political in the contemporary cultural landscape that comprises new forms of engagement with monumentalization. Studies of the postmodern trend of countermonumental (especially Holocaust) memorials have extended the implications of the new reading of the monument as a performance space involving multiple subjects thus destabilizing the static/dynamic and object/subject relations that presumably distinguish the monument from its audience. As Paul Allain and Jen Harvie remind us, “[p]ostmodern culture has not stopped producing memorials but has attempted to make them possess other responsibilities and presumptions that acknowledge the radical mutability of memory; . . . that provoke audiences to take responsibility for preventing past horrors from being repeated; and continue to question if, how and when it is even possible to represent traumatic memories.”79 In these theaters of memory, audiences are performers and their participation is potentially performative because it continually changes the conceptual and/or physical textures of these spaces: what they mean, speak, and do. The idea of audiences’ performative participation in monumental space has recently influenced scholars in various disciplines. Working at the intersection of art-historical and cultural geographical concerns, Michael North explores the idea of the “public as sculpture” whereby “[t]he sculpture is no longer an object installed in the center of a public space; public space has instead become the subject, and thus the centerpiece, of the sculpture.”80 North examines a number of sculptures that have become conspicuous public monuments by virtue of entering both a public space and an open debate with the public while producing “both possibilities, community solidarity on the one hand and autocracy on the other.”81 These sculptures include Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks, a number of sculptures in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, and Hans Haacke’s Und Ihr Habt Doch Gesiegt in Graz. Likewise, Brian S. Osborne examines the specific case of the George-Etienne Cartier monument in Montreal to generally explore the alteration of forms of participation, performance, and spectatorship in monumental space in the twentieth century, specifically the transition from “public sculpture-asviewed object to public-as-sculpted masses.”82 Obviously, there has been a momentous shift in the construction and interpretation of monumental space as inclusive of its audience and interactive with it and, on this basis, an attention to the fluidity and mutability of agency and community across this space. This phenomenon has important

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ramifications that still need to be elaborated as part of the interdisciplinary interpretive model suggested here. Specifically, in order to reconceptualize the monumental site as a performance space with multiple countermonumental potentialities, we must revisit Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, along with the concept of “inoperative community,” post-Bakhtinian thoughts on the carnivalesque, and the evolving idea and practice of walking in the city.83 *** Clearly, new cultural geographers have introduced the suggestive metaphor of the (monumental) landscape as a theater but have not fully investigated its physical and imaginative scope mainly because they focused most of their studies on unveiling ceremonies and commemorative events. We find this restricted perspective, which ultimately sets exceptional Event in opposition to everyday event in Lefebvre who writes: “Buildings are to monuments as everyday life is to festival, products to works, lived experience to the merely perceived, concrete to stone, and so on.”84 Cultural geography and, to a certain degree, performance studies have paid limited attention to the other significant range of events surrounding monuments including countermonumental performances that range from peaceful protests to violent attacks and everyday life practices that reflect either intense involvement or indifference to the oftentimes conspicuous spatial positions of monuments. The following chapters will show how the selected novels upset these binaries by revealing the embeddedness of the monument in a lived spatiality that is dynamically activated in the performance of the everyday rather than merely its interruption through festival. Although considerations of locality, ethnicity, race, gender or socioeconomic conditions are embedded in the argument of many recent studies of monumental space (for instance, Atkinson and Cosgrove, Bodnar, Gillis, Jarman, Laqueur, Osborne, Savage, Sherman, and Till) or form the major thread of the argument (as in the case of David Harvey for class politics, Kirk Savage for racial relations, and Janice Monk and Marina Warner for gender politics), they often relate to the monument’s iconography and construction history in terms of a conflict between clearly defined groups or communities rather than overdetermined subjectivities that surpass simple binary oppositions.85 According to John R. Gillis, commemorative practices and spaces such as monuments, holidays, cemeteries, museums, and archives are highly operative in the context of “providing many people with a sense of common identity no matter how dispersed they may be by class, region, gender, religion, or race.”86 The communal function thus appears

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as one of the principal goals of monument making that, in Osborne’s words, partakes of the project of “memorialization as an attempted agency of legitimization of authority and social cohesion.”87 There are at least three aspects that these studies neglect with respect to the kinds of community formations that are formed and deconstructed in this context: the multiple references of communal belonging, marginality as a major constituent of community, and the occasional character of communal bonds occurring in monumental space. For instance, it would be futile to consider the communal formations that momentarily occupy the Parisian monumental space, with carnivalesque and often subversive consequences, in Zola’s L’Assommoir and La Débâcle without considering various interrelated elements on class, gender, political, and personal levels. The multiple, often marginal, communities to which a person who traverses monumental space may simultaneously belong could be as varied as residents of a neighborhood, a minority ethnic group, a transsexual club, a religious sect, dissident members of a political party, an association of workers in a particular company, gang members, a group of environmental activists, a musical band, a group of college students, a company of actors, members of a chatroom in cyberspace, former political prisoners, a group of tourists, members of a literary society, and numerous other circumstantially or pragmatically defined collectivities. Still it is important to remember that even if performers in monumental space belong to several of these groups and if subversion motivates the politics of any one of the groups, these factors do not necessarily make the performance itself subversive, particularly due to the ambivalent performativity of overdetermined subjectivity in everyday life practice and the occasional nature of communal bonding in memorial spaces. The uprisings across the Arab world in 2011 provide a suitable platform to revisit the overdetermined nature of the occasional communities of protesters in monumental space across religious, ethnic, political, class, gender, and various local scales of belonging. What is needed then is a reconsideration of the distinctive and therefore atypical character of agency and performance in monumental space in order to determine its role in the negotiation of communal and noncommunal formations and their relative countermonumental potentials. The momentary gathering of disparate groups and distinct individuals with multiple affinities in the performance space of the monument, both in the case of mass events like unveiling ceremonies or protests and more private or small group gatherings, is an atypical community. To theorize this group, I appropriate Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of “inoperative community” that Gillian Rose has adapted to performance contexts. Although he implicitly dissociates “inoperative community” from such products of

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“work” as statues—he mentions “the plaster busts of Marianne,”88—Nancy astutely relates community to the experience of the other’s death: “Death is indissociable from community, for it is through death that the community reveals itself—and reciprocally.”89 Nancy conceptualizes community in terms of “resistance to immanence” that is, “resistance to the communion of everyone or to the exclusive passion of one or several . . .” while it “acknowledges and inscribes—this is its peculiar gesture—the impossibility of community.”90 Beyond the philosophical niceties of Nancy’s theory, his concept of “inoperative community” is important to the present study because it transcends totalizing and totalitarian perspectives on community. Furthermore, it is important because it argues that “[a] community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth”91 and hence indirectly invites us to reflect on the role of spaces of death and spaces of commemoration in forging—both creating and counterfeiting—an imagined community that is necessarily “impossible” beyond its circumstantial boundaries. Elaborating Nancy’s concept, Rose underlines the occasional nature of “inoperative community” and its embeddedness in performance. According to Rose, inoperative community occupies a space not only multiple, composite, heterogeneous, indeterminate and plural, as some geographers have imagined the spatiality of intersecting communities or groups of identity. It is a space the dimensions of which cannot completely be described, defined, discoursed. This other space constantly unworks the certainties of representable spaces and the certainties of identity given form by them. Inoperative community, then, in its doubleness of discourse and surplus, articulates an inoperative space at once representable and obscure.92 The concept of “inoperative community” is hence suitable for an analysis of the empowering possibilities and also the limitations of resistance in the performance space of the monument. Rose explains that “[t]he spatiality of inoperative community then is a spatiality of both absence—mortality—and presence—performance.”93 From this perspective, the “inoperative community” concept can be extended to comprise the complementary features of performance in monumental space: absence and presence, death and performance, representation and practice. Basically, the community that occasionally and momentarily emerges in monumental space, especially in commemorative ceremonies, is characterized by this sense of delayed presence. Moreover, its narrative representation, being a sign and a discursive structure, is also a postponement of fixed and finalized presence.

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Besides this sense of present absence, another disturbing characteristic of the inoperative community in monumental space is that its members do not necessarily commune and, if they commune, do not sustain their communal interaction beyond the spatial and temporal framework of the occasion. It is also an inoperative community in the sense that the forms of resistance that it may incorporate are not always effectual because they are sometimes limited by the nature of the performance as spectacle and by the disciplinary protocols that may condition performativity in monumental space. However, what is even more noticeable in historical and cultural geographical studies is that there is hardly any consideration of private actions that revise the definition of both performance and noncommunal formations. Such a consideration would reveal dispersion and individuality while neither implying absolute fragmentation nor positing an individual subject that is dissociated from institutions and discourses that inflect and direct his or her agency and from hegemonic, imagined, or occasional communities in which he or she may be situated. Primarily, reading the politics of performance in monumental space requires an attention to ambivalent forms of resistance, appropriation, and negotiation that occur outside the context of official events: attacking, insulting, ignoring, and carnivalizing monumental space (both physically and discursively). In this context, the 1989 six-week protests in Tiananmen Square are a striking example of both the subversive power of carnivalesque performance in monumental space—the defiling of Mao Ze-Dong’s portrait with black paint and the dynamic parade of a homemade statue of a “Goddess of Freedom and Democracy”—and the violent repression of carnivalesque performativity by official authorities. In this context, the novelistic renderings of individual resistant action in the context of the 1989 events in Hong Ying’s Summer of Betrayal and Beijing Comrade’s Lan Yu allow us to revise the subversive politics of carnivalesque violence in public space and the interpenetration of the personal and political aspects of lieux de mémoire. From this perspective, it is possible to chart great critical possibilities with respect to the double question relating, on the one hand, to what Bakhtinian and post-Bakhtinian interpretations of the carnivalesque as a historically mutable motif of transgression can add to an understanding of performance in monumental spaces and, on the other, to what an understanding of the novelistic rendering of performance in these particular sites can contribute to the reassessment of Bakhtin’s work on carnival in different historical contexts. Beneath a façade exhibiting the lack of verbal and physical restraint, the proliferation of pleasure, the spectacle of democracy, and the temporary subversion of hierarchies, carnivalesque performances often conceal

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the commodification of exchange or the persistence of power in the marketplace of autocratic politics (protests in the monumental spaces of both dictatorships and unequally developed democracies) or the marketplace of pleasure (the brothel or the media). As a result, the carnivalesque often exposes the interrelation rather than the disjunction of such apparently opposed spaces as a monumental space and a red light district that more often than not occupy adjacent positions in the city. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue, while a reading of the carnivalesque “as an instance of a wider phenomenon of transgression” enables a movement “beyond the rather unproductive debate over whether carnivals are politically progressive or conservative, it reveals that the underlying structural features of carnival operate far beyond the strict confines of popular festivity . . ..”94 This revisioning of the carnivalesque also demands an attention to the historical specificities and politics of the spaces in which it is manifested—beyond the marketplace and sensual spaces of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to which Bakhtin’s carnival basically refers. As I have written elsewhere, “carnivalesque elements may be embodied in various forms and spaces: in a popular protest or a narrative, in a red-light district or a memorial square.”95 *** Lucy R. Lippard reads “place” as “a layered location replete with human stories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there.”96 Although cultural geographers have approached landscape issues from a holistic perspective, they have seldom looked at monumental spaces in relation to adjacent sites. As the following chapters show, novelistic forays into monumental space allow narrative journeys across monumental space and its surroundings. To read monumental space as a layered location is to consider not only its depth but also its extension into other spaces that surround it, refract it, or threaten it. And reading the deep and extensive location of the monument as it is represented in fictional narrative also reveals the effects of textual space on the ontology and epistemology of monumental space. To decipher this multidimensional double spatiality, Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia is immensely useful. In his seminal essay “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault describes heterotopia as spaces “which are linked with all the others, [and] which however contradict all the other sites.”97 Foucault’s concept of heterotopias is ideal for interpreting monumental space as an integral part of a cultural-spatial mosaic that signifies through the association of its parts. He looks at the changing role of heterotopia throughout evolving social contexts, and his

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cultural-historical study can be the starting point for looking at the various heterotopic possibilities in and around monumental space. Foucault mentions the transformation of cemeteries in the nineteenth century when they no longer functioned as “the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but ‘the other city,’ where each family possesses its dark resting place.”98 In this respect, the “Hades” episode in Ulysses stages a complex mirroring relation between the Sackville Street monumental space and the heterotopia of Glasnevin Cemetery while in Pamuk’s İstanbul, the other city of cemeteries is an organic part of the official city of the living and of the dead who are commemorated in its monumental spaces. Foucault distinguishes between two roles that heterotopia can have. A heterotopia can function as either a space of “illusion” or a space of “compensation.” I suggest a reading of monumental space as an example of a heterotopia of compensation since its function is “to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.”99 Foucault cites the brothel as an example of a heterotopia of “illusion,” as it “exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory.”100 Joyce’s Ulysses and al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata reconfigure the relation between the heterotopia of illusion and that of compensation by means of a discursive heterotopia that is the surrealistic text. In both texts, the characters’ journeys in and around monumental spaces are potentially subversive. They insinuate a personal itinerary into ordered, official spaces that they replace, through instances of cognitive mapping and physical trespassing, into a wider space enclosing socially dangerous zones like the red light district. At the same time, they disrupt or at least disregard the trajectories of more official forms of mobility in monumental space, as in the case of processions and parades. As such, walking as a practice of everyday life is a tactical maneuver that displaces and replaces the centrality of monumental space by manipulating, omitting, repeating, or marginalizing the location of this space along its trajectories. Tilley perfectly expresses the phenomenological implications of traversing adjacent spaces when he writes that “[p]laces and landscapes are created and experienced through mobility as much as stasis, through the manner and sequence in which they are explored and sensed, approached and left. In a fundamental way that which a place is bound up in its relations with other places that I encounter.”101 In this context, Michel de Certeau’s work on the everyday life practice of pedestrianism in his famous essay “Walking in the City” has triggered wide-ranging scholarship on the subversive implications of this practice.102 Nevertheless, it would be reductive to view the tactical practice of urban walking as an absolute form of resistance. Rather, taking into consideration that

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“it is the nature of these [counter-official] acts’ articulation to social formations and sites that finally determines their social effects”103 and hence that different forms and instances of urban walking fit into different models of power dynamics across everyday life practice allows a reinterpretation of de Certeau’s work beyond the essentializing paradigms and simplistic dualities of oppression and resistance. In this respect, it is useful to return to Walter Benjamin’s essays on the flaneur if only to emphasize the social place of the urban walker in a crowd of people and commodities that condition to a large extent the impact of his or her flanerie on social and political spaces. Rather than having a fixed identity, the urban walker takes on what may be described as temporary subjectivities. As Rebecca Solnit argues, tourists who walk a city can be, at other times, protesters or pilgrims.104 And as John Le Carré reminds us in his novel The Little Drummer Girl, tourists can also be real or imagined radical militants or terrorists planning their next subversive move. In the following chapters, I explore the politics of walking and generally moving in and around monumental spaces namely through an examination of city walkers in novels by Joyce, al-Daif, and Pamuk. As such, I aim at determining the extent to which their urban movements can be read as forms of resistance and as examples of flanerie on the basis of de Certeau’s and Benjamin’s theorizations and how we could move beyond them. In Joyce’s Ulysses and more elaborately in Pamuk’s The Black Book, I explore the tactics of urban walkers whose relationships to monumental space either complicate or subvert the tourist/flaneur opposition. In Ulysses, I show that tactical movement around monumental space encompasses not only flanerie but also the juxtaposed practices of moving through monumental space in a funeral procession and of walking through the space of the cemetery. In al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata, I examine the movement of a group of students in the urban jungle between the monumental space of the Beirut Martyrs’ Square and the red light district. And it is through these movements across different embodiments of utopian and heterotopic imaginings that I explore the intersections of the stories of these spaces and the people who traverse them with histories of monumentalization and countermonumentalization. Tilley writes that “[m]ovement between places involves their sequential experience, in their description the production of a narrative, linking the body to place and events in place.”105 And the narratives that are produced in the process are not easily comparable itineraries because their imprints on the ideological grounds of the spatial imagination are different and their trajectories within everyday life practice are only apparently convergent. The way of a local passer-by who is indifferent to the monumental landscape she crosses every day can phenomenologically and ideologically diverge from that of the tourist who stops to take

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photographs or the militant who walks around the monument to plan its destruction. Therefore, wayfinding around the monument creates different performative adaptations of the city: “The fictional text of the city is adapted, appropriated, improvised upon, innovated, and/or disregarded through pedestrian performance in much the way that a dramatic text is treated in theatrical performance: not as simply an iteration of a text, but as in and of itself productive of new meaning.”106 *** The following chapters indirectly gesture to the achievements and the limitations of historical and new cultural geographical research in developing a reading of monumental space as a theater, a space of agency and performance. In this context, I argue that some twentieth-century novels contribute to a multilevel phenomenology of monumental space as a stage for the micro- and macrodynamics of history. From this perspective, I explore the complex signifying relations that emerge between the textures of monumental space and those of literary space as a result of embedding the multilayered monumental landscape in the overdetermined textuality of the novelistic representation. The prerequisite for such an exploration is the acknowledgment of material differences between landscapes, on the one hand, and literary texts, on the other. Thus, on the basis of distinctions, it becomes possible to construe connection and interaction. The symbolic form of the novel makes it appropriately comparable to the memorial as a textual marker that occupies space, though differently. In a suggestive article on literature and cultural memory, Ann Rigney examines “the way in which literary texts work alongside other memorial forms.”107 Rigney looks at the age-old tradition of comparing literary texts to monuments and identifies a significant difference between the two: There is a crucial difference between texts and other sorts of memorials, however, regarding location: whereas stone monuments are fixed in a particular site (which becomes literally a lieu de mémoire), texts are not, and hence they may be recycled among various groups of readers living in different parts of the globe and at different historical moments. In this sense, texts are ‘portable’ monuments, which can be carried over into new situations. . . . Reactivated at a later point in time through the medium of such texts, memories can enter into new combinations.108 While Rigney’s analysis points out that texts are more readily iterable than monuments, we must remember that both monumental space and textual

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space are mobile in the sense that they create new situations. Rigney’s understanding of the literary text as a “portable monument” is noteworthy because it highlights the critical role of readers, from various geopolitical backgrounds and within different historical frameworks, to negotiate the memorial trajectories of this “portable monument.” Elucidating the importance of the literary text as a monument circulating in a network of readership, Rigney emphasizes the potential value of the portable aspect as a means of “arousing interest in histories which are not one’s own, in the history of groups with which one has hitherto not identified.”109 She concludes that “[t]his suggests the importance of seeing literary texts not just as channels for perpetuating certain memorial traditions but also as the source of new traditions and the means for broadening the horizons of what one considers one’s own heritage.”110 The literary text thus initiates reading practices that expand the reader’s memorial and sociocultural scope. Peter Middleton and Tim Woods reformulate this idea in a way that brings the literary text even closer to monumental space. They argue that “reading itself is a practice of memory, because texts [specifically literary texts] are forms of prosthetic social memory by which readers increase and correct their own limited cognitive strengths and participate in a public memorial space.”111 From this perspective, literary texts, which are usually intended for private consumption, enable an amount of public communion that is the attribute of memorial space wherein participation can function within or beyond one’s private heritage. In the novels considered here, monumental spaces signify not only in relation to the memories and histories of the past events that they are meant to represent but also through the narrated actions and words of various characters and narrators who traverse these spaces, perform in them, and speak about them. At the same time, an essential dimension of the meaning of monumental space in these novels results from the novelist’s textual games in representing this space: erasing it, replacing it, repeating it with a difference, highlighting its juxtapositions with other spaces, and intervening to make it meaningful or meaningless in multiple ways. These three dimensions of meaning correspond to three related levels of interpretation affecting the representation of monumental space in the novels. Across these three levels, the novels awaken the textual potential in and around monumental space. There is a fourth level, which paradoxically encapsulates and penetrates the other levels. It results from the intervention of the readers or critics who affect the overdetermined space of significance that the monument occupies in the novel. This occurs not only as a result of these critics’ or readers’ varying political and sociocultural back-

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grounds, as Rigney suggests, but also through the different critical theories that influence their readings. In the following four chapters, I approach the textures of monumental space as they are highlighted, erased, repeated with a difference, unraveled in their material, phenomenological, and fantastical complexity at the heart of political history, everyday life, imagination, and performative textuality. I show that the novelistic representation of monumental space functions as a literary combination of the cultural/archeological concepts of “lifeworld” that is “the totality of a person’s direct involvement with the places and environments experienced in everyday life” and “deep map,” which “attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of a location—juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the discursive and the sensual.”112 The novelistic representation of monumental space goes beyond the limits of the geographical lifeworld and deep map by revealing and creating multiple levels of real and imagined dynamism at the intersection of human and material phenomenology, physical and textual spaces. In addition to Michael Shanks and Mike Pearson who have theorized these two critical terms, Tilley is another archaeologist who engages with the multilayered experience of landscape and elucidates its phenomenology. Tilley’s perspective is more striking because it is the closest to suggesting the crucial role of literature in this respect: In a text all we can hope to do is to evoke the sensuous qualities of place and landscape in a multisensorial way though our choice and use of words and the types of narrative structures employed, and this is the task of a richly textured carnal phenomenological “thick” description in which we truly attempt to reflect on the character of our experience, as opposed to a thin and sensorily impoverished “analytical” account.113 For Tilley, neither technicist archaeological studies that “are based on abstracted Cartesian conceptions of space and time” nor the greater part of social and cultural geographical scholarship have provided this kind of “thick description.” He emphasizes that “[n]o adequate understanding of the social and cultural geography of a place can be achieved without considering its relationship with others and experiencing its situation in the landscape at a human scale requiring moving and walking through and exploring its surroundings.”114 The readings of novelistic engagements with monumental space in the next four chapters show that what is involved there is not only a thick description that extends widely and deeply in physical,

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psychological, and discursive space-times but also a performative textuality that reconfigures the significance of the monument. Thus the readings will introduce a two-way interpretive process whereby historical and cultural geographical work and various theoretical positions illuminate the significance of monumental space in the selected novels while being, in turn, supplemented and challenged by the novelistic representations. Whether the monument occupies a central or marginal position in each selected novel, it has a major role in negotiating its signifying practice especially with respect to the nuances and multiple dimensions of the post-imperial contexts covered in this study. Across these novels, cycles of monumentalization and countermonumentalization trace the continued burgeoning of nationalist programs and the apocalyptic fall of empires: histories of violence and stories of the everyday.

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Chapter 2

“broken pillars”: Countermonumental Tactics in James Joyce’s Ulysses

ROBERT, agreeably: Once I made a little epigram about statues. All statues are of two kinds. He folds his arms across his chest. The statue which says: “How shall I get down?” and the other kind (he unfolds his arms and extends his right arm, averting his head) the statue which says: “In my time the dunghill was so high” (E 42–3). He crossed under Tommy Moore’s roguish finger. They did right to put him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters (U 8.414–15). But enough now of stupid monuments (Letters II 146).1

James Joyce often expressed ironic views of monuments in both art and life, as the three quotes reveal. Richard Ellmann cites an incident in Paris in 1920 when “Valery Larbaud said to him as they drove in a taxi past the Arc de Triomphe with its eternal fire, ‘How long do you think that will burn?’ Joyce answered, ‘Until the Unknown Soldier gets up in disgust and blows it out’” (JJII 486). Accordingly, one might be tempted to say that Joyce was superciliously dismissive of the whole monument making business.2 Yet a closer reading of Joyce’s attitude invites a consideration of his ingenious representation of a countermonumental dynamic that operates across spatial and literary axes. Joyce’s works signal an atypical iconoclastic vision of the monument as a living body resisting its paradoxical ontology of dead materiality and epistemology of nonperformative immortality. In this respect, the quotations above articulate a countermonumental impulse in the monument’s imagined awakening from a static and sanitized perpetual past into the material and mobile fluidity of everyday life. This complex understanding of monumentalization is evident not only in the printed text of Ulysses but also in the entire creative process

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preceding its publication. An exemplary instance appears in the “Hades” episode through Bloom’s reflection on decorations placed on funerary monuments: “Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses nothing. Immortelles” (U 6.945–8). Bloom’s thoughts hint at the tensions between the dynamic of mortality embedded in everyday life and the utopian fantasy of immortality embodied in the monument. Significantly Joyce added “Immortelles” to the typescript for the printers of Ulysses in the summer of 1921, almost five years after he wrote most of the rest of the scene (it is useful to note that most of the references to death and monuments in “Hades” were added late to the typescript). In different ways, Ulysses expresses such a complex conceptualization of monumentalization as the one contributed by Joyce’s addition to the typescript in as much as it exhibits a deep sense of the impulses that resist monumentalization physically, psychologically, and discursively. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical-literary approach, this chapter offers a fresh perspective on Joyce’s representations of monuments, what I refer to as Joyce against monuments. My aim is to explore the ways in which Joyce’s texts expand, qualify, and supplement the historical, cultural geographical, and theoretical studies in relation to this countermonumental dynamic. This chapter is one example of this approach, though here I am limiting the study to only certain monuments, in particular Nelson’s Pillar, as it is represented in Ulysses.3 In complementary ways this chapter is both a revisioning of Henri Lefebvre’s thoughts on monuments through Ulysses and a reconsideration of monumental space in Ulysses in light of and in response to these thoughts. Furthermore, it engages a theoretical and critical matrix comprising the ideas and perspectives of Maurice Blanchot, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, Pierre Nora, W. J. T. Mitchell, James E. Young, and historical and cultural geographers.4 My argument is twofold. On the one hand, historical, cultural geographical, and theoretical works on monumental space allow an understanding of the texture of this space in Ulysses. More importantly, these studies are also in many ways contested by the novel’s signifying practice and the nuances of the social activity it unravels around this space. Lefebvre contends that the life of a monument is largely determined by the ideological purposes that underwrite it: “Only through the monument, through the intervention of the architect as demiurge, can the space of death be negated, transfigured into a living space which is an extension of the body; this is a transformation, however, which serves what religion, (political) power, and knowledge have in common.”5 This focus on the

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ideological mainly at the expense of the everyday, on the production of space rather than its continuous consumption on physical and imaginative grounds, is the theoretical basis of much cultural geographical work as in Yvonne Whelan’s writings on Nelson’s Pillar, which is central to this chapter. Yet what is highly important in Lefebvre’s statement above is the suggestive comment on the transformation of the monument into “a living space which is an extension of the body,” and this can be the basis for a complex reading of monumental space in Ulysses through but also beyond Lefebvre. At the center of this reading is a space of embodied mobility where the monument acts together with the multiple bodies that—by means of thought, speech, or action—are able to enliven, break, or destroy it along with or against the aims of religion, political power, and knowledge in their various forms. In Ulysses, Nelson’s Pillar becomes the nexus at which countermonumental possibilities emerge by subverting the paradoxical ontology and epistemology of monumentalization as a process that reproduces an image of a living body that is however static: either surrealistically awakening the dead object or burying it amid the liveliness of everyday life. These countermonumental tactics, though apparently marginal in the text, are central to the political history to which Ulysses responds and are thus imbricated in a web of historical particulars that encompass violence and terror—creating a literary counterpoint to Lefebvre and Mitchell. *** Nelson’s Pillar was unveiled in the center of Dublin on Sackville Street— now O’Connell Street—in 1809 (the foundation stone was placed in 1808) to commemorate the British vice admiral Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson. It was meant to memorialize, in particular, his triumph over the French and Spanish fleets in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar in which he lost his life. The pillar consisted of a 13 foot statue of Lord Nelson set on a 134 foot Doric column. The Nelson monument dominated the Dublin skyline and triggered a heated public debate that persisted in Ireland for almost a century and a half. After its erection, Nelson’s Pillar was the target of a barrage of criticism that attacked it on political, practical, and aesthetic grounds. The monument was described in local publications as a repulsive sight and an urban encumbrance. These comments, emerging particularly in proposals by the Dublin Corporation and relying sometimes on arguments of artistic value and urban planning, were frequently underwritten by a nationalist or a Home Rule agenda. In the second half of the nineteenth century, members of the Dublin Corporation, largely nationalist at the time, and Irish

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nationalist members of the British House of Commons sought the removal of the Nelson monument to a less prominent location in the city.6 Nationalist calls to change the location of Nelson’s Pillar increased after the declaration of the Irish Free State in 1922. However, suggestions to peacefully remove or replace Nelson’s Pillar were dismissed even in the postindependence era for practical reasons. All attempts to legally remove the monument were mainly blocked by the Trustees of Nelson’s Pillar. In 1966, Nelson’s Pillar was seriously damaged by an explosion believed to have been set by former members of the IRA code-named Operation Humpty Dumpty. Soon afterward, the Irish government authorized the destruction of the remainder of Nelson’s Pillar. The haste and chaos that marked the latter phase of the destruction by the army was heavily criticized especially for the loss of what was considered “the finest known example of Regency lettering” on a column that many people considered as apolitical, unlike Nelson’s statue itself.7 In 2003, the Spire of Dublin or the Monument of Light was erected on the site where Nelson’s Pillar used to stand.8 (Figure 2.1) Before the erection of the Spire, there were several attempts to fill the former site of Nelson’s Pillar with an alternative monument. Named after Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake, a short-lived and contentious

Figure 2.1 O’Connell Street with the Spire in the distance, Dublin [2011]

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sculpture titled Anna Livia was placed near the pillar’s site for some years. In 1988, the same year that Anna Livia was erected, the Pillar Project invited artists and architects to suggest an alternative structure to the Nelson monument. Interestingly, Joyce’s literary legacy was in many ways part of the collective imaginative impulse behind the replacement of the pillar. One of the participating artists, Michael O’Sullivan, conceptualized a new monument or countermonument: “The hod: Finnegans Wake; Joyce; a symbol for building, for the city, underground, Finnegan in the coffin. The crane: unfinished, work in progress. Stairs within the column, observation above.”9 If this proposal exemplifies the dissemination of monumentalization across literary and urban spaces and reflects Joyce’s imaginative influence on Dublin’s performative urban textuality, Joyce’s Ulysses invites us to examine how much this text anticipates twentieth-century perspectives of artists and urban planners on the need for a monument to combine abstract concepts with the reality of everyday life—thoughts that Joyce may have continued to develop further after Ulysses, prompted particularly by his friendship with the architectural historian Siegfried Giedion. Nuala C. Johnson states that “[n]ot all monuments have the iconic status of Paris’s chief visual symbol [the Eiffel Tower], but the role of public sculpture and monumental architecture in framing the geographies of everyday life and anchoring our collective social memory cannot be underestimated.”10 Nelson’s Pillar possessed an iconic status in 1904 Dublin since it had a central position in the space of the main thoroughfare and its summit provided a bird’s-eye view—comparable but not identical to the Eiffel Tower due to the large difference in height—of the main features of the city. Yvonne Whelan ends her cultural geographical study of the history of the pillar by noting how its role shifted from constituting the center of Dublin’s political life to assuming the core of the spatial fabric of Dubliners’ everyday lives. Whelan states that, after being critiqued as a colonial monument and an urban encumbrance, Nelson’s Pillar “became a popular meeting-place and viewing-point, the terminus of the tramway system and a symbol of the city centre that effectively transcended any political connotations.”11 The subsequent discussion will show that Ulysses renders simultaneity and interdependence rather than a shift in the role of Nelson’s Pillar in relation to politics and the everyday. We will see how the episodes “Hades,” “Aeolus,” “Wandering Rocks,” and “Circe” unravel the multilayered texture in which the living space of the monument is situated. They illustrate the different textual and narrative techniques by which Ulysses performs, disrupts, or deconstructs instances of monumentalization. ***

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Nelson’s Pillar first appears in “Hades” as one monument in a series of statues passed by a funeral procession of Dublin men on their way to Glasnevin Cemetery to attend the funeral of Paddy Dignam. Mr Power’s choked laugh burst quietly in the carriage. Nelson’s pillar. — Eight plums a penny! Eight for a penny! — We had better look a little serious, Martin Cunningham said. (U 6.292–5) The body of the text may seem to highlight the hegemonic character of Nelson’s Pillar by having it textually occupy an entire sentence in the same way that, as a material object, it dominated Sackville Street. However, it is equally possible to see the text as performing a marginalization of Nelson’s Pillar, which is reduced to a name in the text. Thereby its spatial prominence and underlying official discourse of imperial triumph are undermined by the restriction of the narrative space dedicated to it. Instead, the narrative is dominated by personal lighthearted conversation and stories about the lives and deaths of ordinary individuals. The dead materiality of Nelson’s Pillar is thus registered in the text as it is lost among the chaotic sounds of the everyday and its socioeconomic rhythms: laughter, gossip, and plums. This invites a revisioning of Maurice Blanchot’s conceptualization of the phenomenological fluidity of the everyday especially with respect to such potentially subversive behavior as indifference that can elude or destabilize the interpellative demands of the dominant order.12 In “Hades,” indifference to Nelson’s Pillar seems a paradoxical everyday performance that actively responds to the monument by remembering to forget it in the conversation, but the phenomenological-topographical stream nonetheless registers the monument in the text: “[C]hoked laugh . . . Nelson’s pillar” (U 6.292–3) The sense of riotous dynamism toward the imperial monument exceeds the body of the text and overflows in implicit narrative detail specifically through what we may overhear in Mr. Power’s laughter. As Finn Fordham argues in relation to Finnegans Wake, “The power of laughter does not necessarily undo power itself, but it reminds us of the vulnerability and mortality of all forms that are made to embody power. Joyce suggests that power can morph into any form, in which case all forms are targets.”13 Similarly, Andrew Gibson speaks of the “Nietzschean” laughter in “Circe” as a social and textual form that “at one and the same time, accepts and challenges historical circumstance, and triumphs over it, at least, in decisively transforming its proportions.”14 In this respect, “Hades” seems to be even more striking than other episodes in Ulysses because in this case laughter is directed specifically against material representations of politically

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motivated fictions of immortality. The “Nietzschean” laughter in “Hades” is threatening precisely because it is inscrutable and elusive in terms of gravity and target. It may be mocking the weight of historical circumstance and the propriety of spaces that are politically or socially consecrated as inviolable territories. But it remains tentatively subversive since Joyce’s playful narrative structure makes the object of Mr. Power’s choked laughter (whether the story of Reuben J. Dodd and his son or Nelson’s Pillar) and hence the extent of phenomenological indifference and resistance ambiguous. Mr. Power’s association with colonial administration through his work in the Royal Irish Constabulary and his dubious links with Dublin Castle, another monumental representation of the British Empire, reminds us that his laughter echoes the noise of power rather than disturbs it. Likewise, Martin Cunningham, who also has links with the castle, appeals to the group of men to “look serious” thus also performing an interpellation on behalf of official power to reestablish the threatened respectability of the Nelson figure. Cunningham’s admonition is conservative and authoritarian much like the pillar itself. Still, though not radically subversive, the laughter is disruptive of the supposed tranquility and inviolability of both the monumental space that the funeral procession is traversing and the space of the cemetery to which it is proceeding. Since monumentalization essentially perpetuates an illusion of invincibility and immortality, the laughter that imaginatively shakes it by mocking it can momentarily break this illusion. Immediately before passing Nelson’s Pillar, we read: “Mr Power, collapsing in laughter, shaded his face from the window as the carriage passed Gray’s statue” (U 6.257–8). Sir John Gray’s monument was unveiled in 1879 on Sackville Street to commemorate this moderate nationalist member of Parliament (MP) who was particularly remembered for his effective role in providing Dublin and its suburbs with a water supply.15 Just as they pass Gray’s statue, Bloom and Martin Cunningham compete to tell the story of the near drowning of Reuben J. Dodd’s son. Water is at the heart of the narrative but, instead of the heroic history of the public figure who saved Dublin by giving it a water supply, we get the private but equally heroic story of the man who saved Dodd’s son from the water and who ironically got rewarded not with a monument but with a florin. Thus, in Ulysses, gossip about ordinary life supplants official history. An anecdote about the Dubliners’ everyday lives replaces the memorial of the official hero. Hence, the foregrounding of the banal and the humorous in the narrative occurs at the expense of both the statue of the moderate nationalist MP, Sir John Gray, and the imperial monument, Nelson’s Pillar, all of which provides a critique of the politics of the construction of monuments by the dominant and emergent powers that competed to define Dublin’s landscape in

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the nineteenth century. This impetus also reflects the unravelling role of coincidence in urban space: It highlights the effect of the monument as a centripetal force that is, however, challenged by the indifference of the passers-by and by the ordinariness of everyday life that gravitates around this space yet threatens its continuing relevance. In this way, Joyce’s textual tactics participate in a form of cultural memory that exposes and subverts the process of forgetting that regularly affects the numerous nonmemorialized heroes of everyday life (Figure 2.2). In “Hades,” Nelson’s Pillar and Gray’s statue are not the only sites of cultural memory and forgetting; the other monuments the men pass in Sackville Street are also problematized: the statues of William Smith O’Brien, Daniel O’Connell and Father Theobald Mathew and the foundation stone for Parnell’s monument. The reduction of both the imperial/colonial and nationalist monuments to residual signs or traces may have encouraged Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf to emphasize a discursive trauma that disables representation in Ulysses. She argues that Joyce’s oeuvre is a “ghost story”: the location of the presence of that something not-expressed or inexpressible, that sense of loss transcending

Figure 2.2 Sackville Street, Dublin [between 1880 and 1900]. Courtesy of the National Photographic Archive (NPA), National Library of Ireland [LROY 4815]

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articulation, incarnated in his texts as the informative effect of a transcendent presence of absence, a matrix of negativity, a chora of loss. The black hole of muted history.16 The representation of monumental space in “Hades” is another example of the Joycean motif of present absence. This figure encapsulates the double texture of the narrative that underlines the status of the monuments as landmarks and textual markers while controlling their discursive exigencies and marking them as phenomenological absences. However, instead of merely reproducing trauma or materializing a ghost story, I suggest that Joyce performs in “Hades” an active and subversive narrative engagement with the material and symbolic geography of Dublin’s monumental landscape. “Plasto’s. Sir Philip Crampton’s memorial fountain bust. Who was he?” (U 6.191) is the first mention of a monument in “Hades.” Crampton’s is the only statue that the funeral procession passes before they cross that most monumental of Dublin thoroughfares, Sackville Street. Crampton was a surgeon general and a naturalist, and his statue, erected in 1862, was one of a few monuments that “commemorated ‘neutral’ figures that were honored not for any overt political reasons but as a testament to their benevolence or particular achievements.”17 Hence, the fact that Bloom reacts to the Crampton statue with a curiously unknowing “Who was he?” acts as a counterpoint to the rationale of monument making that is intended to sustain memory and particular knowledge about the commemorated figure or event. Moreover, his reaction reflects an important aspect of the 1904 Dubliners’ lived experience of their monumental landscape. In a heavily politicized and conflictual monumental landscape, a nonpolitical figure is almost anonymous and irrelevant. His importance is, however, marked by a narrative space that is equal to that allotted to the politically relevant figures. The first politically significant monument encountered along the journey is the Smith O’Brien statue in its earlier location at the intersection of D’Olier Street and Westmoreland Street. Bloom tries to explain the presence of the bunch of flowers on the monument and says that it should be the hero’s deathday. His explanation is historically correct for Smith O’Brien died on June 16, 1864. As such, Joyce’s June 16, 1904, would be indirectly performing its own narrative commemoration of the nationalist hero. However, this is ironic because the narrative neither celebrates the physical force of nationalism that Smith O’Brien embodies nor does it explicitly celebrate the hero himself. Furthermore, the sarcastic remark “For many happy returns” and the suggestive description of “their unresisting knees” undercut the seriousness and efficacy of the gesture. If we are to judge the magnitude of this commemorative gesture by the textual space given to the hero, it would be safe to say that “Hades” also

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commemorates Thomas Farrell, the sculptor who designed and produced the statue. The textual inscription “Farrell’s statue” hence amounts to a radical gesture in its own right by displacing the official object of commemoration from the memorial texture and replacing him with the artisan. This gesture is repeated a few pages later when the carriage passes the “stonecutter’s yard” and the text marks “Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and sculptor” (U 6.462). Joyce also foregrounds the architect or artisan as an agent in the material history of the monument in Finnegans Wake when HCE commands the architects to proceed in building his monumental city: “[A] ll truanttrulls made I comepull, all rubbeling gnomes I pushed, gowgow: Cassels, Redmond, Gandon, Deane, Shepperd, Smyth, Neville, Heaton, Stoney, Foley, Farrell [. . .]” (FW 552.10–12). Here HCE appears as a capitalist master ordering the sculptors and artists—and the list includes some of the designers of famous Dublin monuments—to produce the monument as a commodity in the political marketplace. The parody of monument making as an essential part of hegemonic politics and socioeconomic injustice recurs in Ulysses. In “Lestrygonians,” Bloom thinks about “[p]yramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers” (U 8.489–91). From a metahistorical and transhistorical perspective, Bloom sees different forms of exploitation in various instances of monumentalization that have marked consecutive imperial worlds. In “Hades” and more radically in Finnegans Wake, Joyce remembers the individuals and crowds who concretely realize monumental visions but are marginalized in the subsequent lives of monuments, whether imperialist, nationalist, or otherwise. After the Smith O’Brien statue and the elliptical memory of the artisan, the next statue that the funeral procession encounters was the most significant nationalist monument in 1904 Dublin. The O’Connell monument, which commemorates Daniel O’Connell for his role in the passage of the Act of Catholic Emancipation, was unveiled in 1882 after almost four decades of disagreements and delays that were exacerbated by the death of the commissioned artist John H. Foley.18 In “Hades,” we read that the men in the carriage “passed under the hugecloaked Liberator’s form” (U 6.249). The succinct statement is significant historically if only because it records a controversial issue that reemerged in the two decades it took for the monument to be designed and erected. The Report of the O’Connell Monument Committee notes that there was “a suggestion, made at a meeting of the Committee in September and October, 1875, that the statue of the Liberator should be erected without a cloak” and that this suggestion was the culmination of several similar debates in the preceding years.19 The reference to the “hugecloaked [. . .] form” thus partakes in the controversy itself and signals

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a mild dissatisfaction with the sculptural representation of monumental triumphalism. Significantly, there is a further twist to the connection between monument making and triumphalism since Foley once stated: “I wish the O’Connell Monument to be regarded as my own monument.”20 “Hades” does not record any reaction by the men to the O’Connell monument. Joyce seems to underline the neutralization that becomes part of the meaning of monuments and the familiarity or indifference that becomes associated with the experience of traversing monumental space as an everyday life practice. In this respect, realism dictates an important degree of inattentiveness to an urban space that cannot monopolize spectators’ attention and to monuments that, despite their ubiquity, simply become part of an exceedingly familiar landscape. In his essay on the George-Étienne Cartier Monument in Montreal, Brian Osborne points out this disparity between the aim of monument making—visually translating an ideology and enforcing an official version of memory—and the indifference with which the monuments might be subsequently regarded.21 Thus, as they pass by O’Connell’s statue, we find Martin Cunningham and Mr. Power inattentive to the monument and instead busy with their sardonic comments on Reuben J. Dodd. As local passers-by, the men in the carriage seem to have become too familiar with this monument to comment on it or even to name the represented figure, Daniel O’Connell. In contrast, Joyce’s text registers and remembers the O’Connell monument in its own space. After the story about Dodd and some comments on Dignam’s death, the men have already passed Gray’s and Nelson’s monuments and they are at once proceeding toward the end of Sackville Street. Bloom thinks: Dead side of the street this. Dull business by day, land agents, temperance hotel, Falconer’s railway guide, civil service college, Gill’s, catholic club, the industrious blind. Why? Some reason. Sun or wind. At night too. Chummies and slaveys. Under the patronage of the late Father Mathew. Foundation stone for Parnell. Breakdown. Heart. (U 6.316–20) The statue of Father Theobald Mathew was unveiled on Sackville Street in 1893 to commemorate the “Apostle of Temperance.”22 Instead of an idealized industrious city reaping the fruits of temperance, Bloom’s thoughts and observations ironically present “the industrious blind” and “chummies and slaveys” enjoying the “patronage of Father Mathew.” “Hades” sheds an ironic light on Dublin after the departure of its Apostle of Temperance since the city seems to be overpopulated by living and dead drunkards. Interestingly, as reported in The Irish Times, it is said that the model chosen by the statue’s sculptor, Mary Redmond, was a homeless alcoholic who,

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Figure 2.3 Statue of Father Theobald Mathew, Dublin [2009]

after being sent away because he got literally “plastered,” took his revenge by vandalizing his sculpted representation.23 The passage from “Hades” thus highlights, in a different way, the embeddedness of Father Mathew’s monument in a living space deeply marked by the social problem he attempted to eradicate “[s]o that Father Matt Hughes looked taytotally threbled” (FW 330.5-6) (Figure 2.3). While it began with the monument of a major figure of physical force nationalism, the journey through Sackville Street ends with the present absence of a monument of the principal figure of constitutional nationalism. The monument commemorating Charles Stewart Parnell has a checkered history. While its foundation stone was laid in 1899, the Parnell monument was unveiled in 1911 after more than a decade of severe nationalist conflicts and divisions following the Katharine O’Shea scandal and the subsequent defamation of Parnell.24 Therefore, in 1904, the foundation stone stood as a signifier of a monument awaiting erection. With respect to the history of the Parnell monument, 1904 stands out not for any obvious political reasons but rather due to the fact that in that year a destructive fire ravaged the studio of the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens who

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remarked that “[m]ore than all the rest of my losses in the fire I regret, as an Irishman, the loss of the Parnell statue.”25 The fire was one of the reasons that delayed the completion of the Parnell monument. Bloom’s specific thoughts about the foundation stone are related to Joyce’s statement in the 1907 Mangan lecture: In logical and serious countries, it is customary to finish the monument in a decent manner, and have the sculptor, the city officials, orators, and a great crowd of people attend the unveiling. But in Ireland, a country destined by God to be the eternal caricature of the serious world, even when the monuments are for the most popular men, whose character is most amenable to the will of the people, they rarely get beyond the laying of the foundation stone. (CW 176) This is important for two reasons. On the one hand, it allows us to locate a sympathetic if not committed tone in the political subtext of the Parnellite present absence in Bloom’s cryptic comment. On the other hand, Joyce’s statement qualifies his often sardonic and cynical remarks on monument making—as in his letters and remarks—and eschews a categorical interpretation of Joyce’s views with respect to commemorative practices. Therefore, the Parnell passage in “Hades” registers this sense of troubling present absence in its specific reference to the foundation stone. However, instead of narrating the public history of Parnell’s achievements or of the breakdown of the Irish nationalist party, the narrative inscribes the stone with the private story of a man whose heart broke down—much like Paddy Dignam whose death Martin Cunningham explains also as “Breakdown . . . . Heart” (U 6.320). As such, the narrative registers not the abstract discourse underlying the monument but rather the lived experience of a Dubliner, a passer-by, whose thoughts capture the intimate story through which he chooses to remember Parnell. More importantly, Bloom’s thoughts set the liveliness of the mortal heart as a counterpoint to the inanimate but symbolically immortal stone. The complex dialectic arising here is further complicated by the ambiguous reference of the stand-alone “Breakdown” that, in a rhetorical flux, may be related to either the emotional collapse of a man or the material destruction of a monument. The life-and-death cycles underlying a monument are yet again uncovered. “Hades” cannot be seen as entirely deconstructive of the monumental and funerary structures of Sackville Street and Glasnevin Cemetery. Still it shows that the lived experience of spaces of death, whether in a cemetery or in a monumental space, to commemorate the drunkard Paddy Dignam or the Apostle of Temperance, Father Mathew, can be potentially democratic

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particularly because it involves the local citizens negotiating a set of discourses and practices that exceed the religious sermon of the priest at the funeral or the Lord Lieutenant’s speech at the unveiling ceremony for Nelson’s Pillar and that extend into the details of private thoughts, random observations, social interaction, imagination, and irrelevancy. These aspects of the life of the monument are frequently marginalized if not overlooked by historical and cultural geographers. In these possibilities of excess and, more specifically, in the way that they divert attention from the grand history inscribed in monumental spaces to the forgotten heroes of everyday life, the stories and performances of the everyday in public commemorative spaces may also become politically dangerous. Such radical possibilities are not based on a binary opposition between a demonized, hegemonic monumental landscape and a redemptive, resistant space in the cemetery. While Pierre Nora famously distinguishes the cemetery as one of the “natural, concretely experienced lieux de mémoire,”26 Joyce reveals the haunting familiarity of both monumental and funerary spaces and their shared burden of selective memorialization. For instance, in Glasnevin Cemetery, Bloom stops at the grave of a certain Robert Emery and thinks of Robert Emmet whose heroism as a nationalist a century earlier was not, at the time, commemorated with a monument in Dublin: “Who lives there? Are laid the remains of Robert Emery. Robert Emmet was buried here by torchlight, wasn’t he? Making his rounds” (U 6.977–8). Here, the memory of an ordinary individual who is forgotten competes for textual space with the memory of a nationalist hero who was not recognized in Dublin’s monumental landscape until 1967 when a statue was offered to the Irish Free State and was erected after a short time in St. Stephen’s Green. In Bloom’s reflection on Emery’s grave, the dialectic of memory and forgetting is thus communicated in terms of a haunting present absence that textually reclaims both heroes in a countermonumental rebellion against the exclusionary domains of history and monumental space. The textual juxtaposition “Robert Emery. Robert Emmet” travesties the juxtaposition of Nelson’s Pillar and the nationalist monuments in Sackville Street. Instead of the imperialist and nationalist control of the monumental landscape, Joyce’s text allows in its own space the imaginative monumentalization of the nationalist whose statue in 1904, like that of Wolfe Tone, “was not” (U 10.378) and the monumentalization of an ordinary man whose life would never have been marked by a memorial. From this perspective, the statement in “Hades” “This cemetery is a treacherous place” (U 6.657) becomes an implicit indictment of both the erasures and excesses in the national and nationalist practices of commemoration, especially since Glasnevin Cemetery was at the center of the republican

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heroic cult at the beginning of the twentieth century.27 The cemetery is also “treacherous” because, two centuries after his execution for the failed 1803 uprising, the final location of Emmet’s remains is still a matter of speculation and rumor. Moreover, this passage becomes even more significant in light of Bloom’s parodic performance of countermonumentalization at the end of “Sirens” when Robert Emmet’s final words are lost among the natural sounds of the human body: another rebellion of the everyday against the monumental and another twist of Lefebvre’s idea of the monument as an extension of the body. In this context, Joyce’s text blurs the boundaries between what Lefebvre interprets as the apparently tranquil space of monuments and what Foucault calls the heterotopic or other space of the cemetery.28 In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault describes the history of the heterotopia of the cemetery that, until the eighteenth century, occupied the center of the city and, beginning in the nineteenth century, started to be removed to the peripheries of cities. Foucault explains that “[i]n correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an ‘illness.’ . . . The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but ‘the other city,’ where each family possesses its dark resting place.”29 Joyce’s narrative shows the tensions and the organic links between the two spaces through its trajectory from the monumental space of Sackville Street to its margins, the heterotopia of Glasnevin Cemetery. While revealing a shift to a more marked familiarity as the funeral procession enters the cemetery, the narrative underlines the continuity of the spaces of death and undermines the boundaries that separate the private from the public, the official from the nonofficial, and the sanitized space of monuments from the “other space” of the cemetery (Figure 2.4). De Certeau writes: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in—and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon.”30 Although de Certeau’s statement can be easily refuted on materialist grounds, it expresses the idea of present absence that overwhelms “Hades” in particular and Ulysses in general. The passage through Joyce’s “Hades” awakens the spirits and stories that haunt Joyce’s Dublin. The uncanny atmosphere is permeated with an everyday familiarity as both spaces of death are enlivened by stories and sounds that introduce the banal, the jocular, the equivocal, and the personal as intrinsic to the structure of a lived spatial history. At the same time, the multiplicity of stories instils a sense of narrative jouissance across the matrix of dead spatiality.

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Figure 2.4 Charles Stewart Parnell’s grave, Glasnevin Cemetery Dublin. Courtesy of the NPA, National Library of Ireland [L CAB 06429]

Throughout these spaces, the talk, thoughts, and movements of the men in “Hades” create a rhetorical poem that expands on and qualifies de Certeau’s thoughts on what he calls “the long poem of walking” that “manipulates spatial organizations” and “creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors).”31 In this context, “Hades” juxtaposes a journey in a carriage (a different form of mobility from a walk) with a walk in the cemetery (a place both within and without the city). In its double texture and different movements, this rhetorical poem reorganizes the imaginative lived spatiality and channels the memorial flux of the city. As they negotiate communally and individually the significance of spaces of death, the men traversing Sackville Street and Glasnevin Cemetery realize a version of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls an “inoperative community” that he defines on the basis of “the presentation to its members of their mortal truth” as it “acknowledges and inscribes—this is its peculiar gesture—the impossibility of community,”32 and that Gillian Rose explains as “a spatiality of both absence—mortality—and presence—performance.”33 The rhetorical poem of “Hades” articulates an extension of the concept of “inoperative community” to communal performances in the domains of death where present absence is expressed as a lived spatiality haunted by the political figures of the past. This inoperative community is characteristic of the Dublin

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groups that occasionally undertake communal journeys that ultimately reveal solitary consciousnesses and uneasily converging routes, thus deflating the performance of bonding in the increasingly common funerary and commemorative processions from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century across Sackville Street. Near the end of “Hades,” Bloom incisively critiques the practice of commemoration in both monumental space and the cemetery: Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then lump them together to save time. (U 6.928–33) The down-to-earth and practical Bloom castigates the whole commemorative practice and deflates the hypocritical ideology and impaired financial policy underpinning it. At the end of an episode about the dead and the claims of the past with its imperial victories and nationalist aspirations, Bloom instead redirects attention to present economic concerns and to the rights of the living. *** “The Parable of the Plums” focuses on the rights and the plights of the living in a space dominated by memories and monuments of the dead. Behind the history of the monumental pillar, there is always the story of the plums—and the slums. The line from “Hades” “-Eight plums a penny! Eight for a penny!” (U 6.294) acts as a proleptic signal for a later narrative occurrence of Nelson’s Pillar in Ulysses. In “Aeolus,” Stephen’s vision of two vestals ascending the Nelson monument is relayed; lived experience contends with a variety of discourses that compete to define Nelson’s Pillar. The women’s ascent to the top of Nelson’s Pillar divests this space of its official purposes of either celebration or protest. Instead it sheds light on one of its principal functions within the everyday life of the Irish capital as the site of a municipally engineered leisure activity. This is an aspect that gets relatively neglected by historical and cultural geographical accounts of the pillar as a living space embedded in local social and economic history. Archaeologist Christopher Tilley argues that there is a close bond connecting the history of a place and the biographies and social identities of the people who inhabit or traverse it.34 Joyce’s or Stephen’s “The Parable of

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the Plums” reveals both an intimate connection and a tension between the spatiality of Nelson’s Pillar and the personal experiences and social backgrounds of the people who cross it. In this respect, the theme of a socioeconomic crisis overtaking Dublin is highlighted in the headlines that compete with the scrupulous description of material details in the parable and with Stephen’s comments on Fumbally’s Lane that hint at its dismal condition and the sense of despair in the slums. In her study of the social and economic history of Dublin between 1860 and 1914, Mary E. Daly explains that 1904 Dublin suffered from a disastrous increase in unemployment, which reflected “a growing sense of economic crisis from the middle of the first decade of the century.” Daly remarks that the “Board of Trade noted the years 1901-3 as a time of wage decline.” She discusses the high number of casual workers, harsh weather, drunkenness, housing problems, unemployment, and the inadequacy of workhouses and agencies in relieving the distress as factors in the spread of poverty in Dublin between 1860 and 1914. Throughout her study, Daly repeatedly singles out 1904 as a turning point both in the worsening conditions of the Dublin poor and in the official attention to this socioeconomic phenomenon.35 As such, the vestal’s story seems to disturb the socioeconomic texture of Sackville Street and its vicinity that earlier in the nineteenth century were occupied by the city mansions of the lords and gentry of Ireland. The headlines and the parable illustrate the specious spectacle of both journalism and monumentalization, whereby socioeconomic despair is reduced to the sensationalism of the declaration, “SOME COLUMN!” (U 7.1006) or the slogans of the nationalist press, “DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN” (U 7.921) and its emphasis on “LIFE ON THE RAW” (U 7.938). In her analysis of the “Aeolus” chapter, Karen R. Lawrence diagnoses a two-way subversive “interruption” of the text by newspaper headings and of newspaper discourse by the narrative of the ordinary since “Joyce shows that all of life is significant, that all things are, in a sense, ‘newsworthy’.”36 Mark Osteen also reads this subversive double movement in the “headlining [of] the most trivial incidents” in the chapter.37 Lawrence’s and Osteen’s comments are significant here, but the implications of the relation between the “newsworthy” and the “trivial incidents” become much more complex when we focus on the underlying dynamics of countermonumentalization and spectacularization. Analysing the dialectical relation of everyday life to newspaper discourse, Blanchot writes: The everyday is without event; in the newspaper this absence of event becomes the drama of the news item. . . . The street is not ostentatious, passers-by go unknown, visible-invisible, . . . Now in the newspaper,

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everything is announced, everything is denounced, everything becomes image.38 “Aeolus” complicates this relation by parodying the spectacularization of both the visible-invisible monument and the visible-invisible passers-by as ubiquitously exhibited and almost mechanically enlivened bodies and sexual scenes. A 1948 article in the Dublin Historical Record mentions that “[t]he Pillar figures prominently in the letter-columns of the newspapers from about the middle of the last century; to read through them would give a script-writer material for several humourous sketches.”39 The parody that is suggested across the diverse discourses of the “Aeolus” episode implicitly responds to this historically accurate theatricalization of the pillar at the intersection of the everyday and the different forms of storytelling and art that reimagine it. In this context, we are reminded of Lefebvre’s statement that “[m]onumental space permits a continual back-and-forth between the private speech of ordinary conversations and the public speech of discourses, lectures, sermons, rallying-cries, and all theatrical forms of utterance.”40 “Aeolus” is thus exemplary in the way that it orchestrates the sounds and also stages the drama of private and public events punctuating monumental space. The concept of the monument as a stage or a theater and hence a space for not only official pageantry but also countermonumental everyday performance, now evident in the work of some cultural geographers, is also central to at least one of the proposals in The Pillar Project. For instance, Dorothy Cross, Niall McCullough, and Valerie Mulvin presented a scheme that aspires to be spatially monumental without monumentality—it might last only a day or a week between showers of rain. It has all the illusory elements of the stage-set and some of the bravado of the travelling circus . . . an installation that contained its own elements—divisive, ambiguous, fantastic—all offering various options to the viewer and feeding on the real or imagined archeological layers of the site.41 Without alluding to Ulysses, this proposal is a reassemblage of key features of the theatricality surrounding Nelson’s Pillar in “Aeolus” and its fantastical transformations in “Circe.” The women in “The Parable of the Plums” appear as spectators viewing the performance of history, politics, and the everyday with a mixture of indifference and irony. There is a strong element of theatricality that oscillates between farcical comedy and understated tragedy as carnivalesque licentiousness and rabid mockery overtake Nelson’s Pillar. Nelson, the

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agent of an imperial history, is transformed in the context of the spectacle into an actor in a tragicomedy that features him as the “onehandled adulterer” (U 7.1018), a reinscription that illustrates the various interpretations of monumental space by the ordinary individuals who experience it. It is particularly ironic since it reverses the rationale of monumentalization by underlining the scandalous personal details, here Nelson’s adultery with Lady Emma Hamilton, rather than the feats of the commemorated imperial figure. It is also a textual or imaginative deconstruction of the elements of triumphalism and healthy male physicality that a monument is expected to embody. This is significant historically, both analeptically and proleptically, since the first page of the March 8, 1966, issue of the Irish Times (just after the destruction of the pillar) featured a column with the headline “One-Eyed Adulterer” noting that “[t]he assaults (verbal) began the year it was erected” and citing a number of such abuses.42 Interestingly, as the spring 2007 Dublin Review report on “‘The Statue Affair: Diplomatic Notes on the Reinternment of James Joyce” shows, Joyce’s own memorial statue in Zurich’s Fluntern Cemetery coincidentally shares certain aspects of the history of Nelson’s Pillar, given that it was unveiled in 1966 and was the target of many verbal abuses even before its erection. (Figure 2.5) Ironically,

Figure 2.5 James Joyce statue in Fluntern Cemetery, Zurich [2011]

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in 1987, when a proposal was put forward for the erection of Joyce’s statue on the traffic island at the apex of D’Olier Street and Westmoreland Street, the head of the committee, Senator David Norris, said that as a response to news that Nelson’s Pillar was to be rebuilt, many people suggested to him that Joyce’s statue should be put on top. Norris added that “[s]ince it looks as if the pillar won’t be rebuilt, a statue in the street is the best alternative.”43 In that same year, and commenting on the same controversy (which extended to suggestions that a statue of Bloom should be set up on top of the reconstructed pillar), Declan Kiberd made a most astute analysis of the contrast between the monumental Nelson and the countermonumental Joyce: Such a self-iconoclast would not wish to be embalmed or mummified in a statue. Come to think of it . . . nobody at ground level ever saw the old Nelson up at a great height on his pillar. This was probably why he was allowed to posture undisturbed through a revolution, a war, a civil war, and the early decades of an independent State. It was literally a case of “out of sight, out of mind.” For people are commemorated on statues only when they have lost their power to threaten or to disturb. Joyce, on the other hand, is still a living presence.44 Nevertheless, Joyce’s statue in Dublin stands on North Earl Street, which runs in the direction of the base of the Spire that now replaces Nelson’s Pillar. Reading it as a monument or countermonument may well depend on how we relate it to the writer, his work, and his stance on monument making (Figure 2.6). The abortive performance of seed spitting from the top of the pillar has further political resonances. The subtext of the narrative, as Robert Spoo has argued, hints at Parnell’s adultery and at failed Home Rule after his fall. According to Spoo, the implication of the fact “that the vestals fixate on the figure of Nelson is that the planned statue of Parnell, their true hero, is only a block of stone at this time. It is as if the seeds of home rule had been cast on the stony places of this disappointed memorial.. . .”45 However, one must remain skeptical about whether or not Parnell is the two vestals’ “true hero” since the narrative of “The Parable of the Plums” leaves much unsaid concerning such political questions. Nevertheless, Spoo’s interpretation becomes all the more convincing if one takes R. F. Foster’s comment that Joyce’s “literary Parnellism” is mediated through the image of “a prophet outcast with the Promised Land in sight,”46 an argument that

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Figure 2.6 James Joyce statue on North Earl Street, Dublin [2009]

becomes relevant in light of the parable’s other title “A Pisgah Sight of Palestine” (U 7.1057). Jeri Johnson notes that the expression “a Pisgah sight” refers to Mount Pisgah from which God allowed Moses the sight of the Promised Land and that it is quoted from the title of Thomas Fuller’s A Pisgah Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof with the History of the Old and New Testament Acted Thereon.47 The doubling of an unrealizable vision of Palestine and an unrealizable vision of Dublin multiplies the political implications of the narrative and complicates its negotiation of the politics of the monument. From the top of the monument commemorating a representative of British imperial power, the visions of a colonized Dublin and a colonized Palestine converge. The space shifts from Ireland to Palestine and the imperial figure represented by the monument shifts from Nelson to Arthur James Balfour.48 In a reading of Orientalism in Ulysses, Brian Caraher interprets the Balfour Declaration and its consequences in connection to colonial and postcolonial politics in Ireland. He notes the “unsettling parallels of immediate post-Great War diplomatic and political attitudes in Britain to the past, present and future of Palestine and Ireland. . . .”49 While Caraher reads these parallels as part

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of the Orientalist vision of Bloomusalem, it is also possible to address them in relation to Stephen’s narrative. From the top of Nelson’s Pillar, both the colonizer and the colonized project their political visions. Yet both visions are merely “Pisgah sight[s]” of peaceful and burgeoning geopolitical entities since they rely on monolithic and violent strategies as was the case with the birth of the independent Irish nation, the Unionist-Republican conflict and its repercussions in Northern Ireland, and the armed struggle between Palestinians and Israelis. It is therefore possible to interpret the politics of the representation of Nelson’s Pillar in Stephen’s narrative in terms of a concurrence of political contexts: British imperialism, Irish Home Rule, militant Irish nationalism, the British Mandate in Palestine, and Zionism and anti-Zionist armed struggle. In these comparable contexts, political seed spitting complements projects of excessive memorialization and abusive historical and spatial erasures. While there is a sense that the vestals seem to be spitting at the city that failed both in raising the monument to its hero and in removing the monument of the imperial power that dominates it, at the same time, from the 1918 perspective of the serialization of “Aeolus” in The Little Review, the seed spitting may have the positive implication of generation and accomplishment since the Parnell monument was finally unveiled in 1911. Still, the positive implication must be qualified because Aeolus appeared two years after the abortive Easter Rising and its spitting of human lives and a few years before the breakout of the Civil War that also led to the loss of more human lives in a half-fulfilled Irish nation. As for the image of the body, it is present in the parable not only through the “onehandled adulterer” and the phallic representation of “SOME COLUMN!” but also in the bodily weakness of the two vestals one of whom suffers from lumbago. In “Places of Memory,” Karen E. Till notes that “[h] istorical narratives and representations of empire, nation, and state were also naturalized through gender relations, in particular through the adulation of male, heroic, bodies in public spaces.”50 “The Parable of the Plums” upsets the narratives of empire and nation in monumental space as the women’s performance on Nelson’s Pillar exposes the erasure of individual women from the Sackville Street monumental landscape—except as universal generic representations of abstract ideals as in the O’Connell monument—and highlights disability (physical and metaphorical) as a major feature of both the iconic dead bodies and the living bodies circulating around them. Furthermore, looking at the “onehandled adulterer” from the perspective of the headline “HORATIO IS CYNOSURE THIS FAIR JUNE DAY” (U 7.1063), it becomes possible to revisit Lefebvre’s statement about the creation of a living space through the monument and the role of

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the architect as demiurge. “Aeolus” shows that death becomes a living space not through the monument itself but through the agency of the passers-by, the everyday readers and visionaries of urban topography, and the literary imagination that from the dead stone of Nelson’s Pillar awakens Horatio, the disabled but sensual body of the “onehandled adulterer.” Therefore, despite their inability to physically displace the material presence of the monument and to challenge the powerful groups that set it up and conserve it in Sackville Street, the reinscriptions of Nelson’s Pillar in “Aeolus” are capable of imaginatively replacing its official triumphal rhetoric and hence of rebelliously intervening in its political negotiation as part of a politics of everyday life. The countermonumental potential of the everyday is also expressed in the carnivalesque and licentious behavior of the women as “they pull up their skirts” (U 7.1013). However, what seems to undercut the subversive implications here is that the women “settle down” as they are “too tired to look up or down or to speak” (U 7.1017, 7.1023–4) and that the framing narrative conservatively represses their lively and defiant potential when one of the listeners to Stephen’s parable, Myles Crawford, interrupts him with “Easy all. . . . No poetic licence. We’re in the archdiocese here” (U 7.1015–16) thus echoing the political and religious authorities that censor rebellious behavior and protect unpopular pillars. This statement, along with the women’s eagerness to locate the domes of Dublin churches from the top of the imperial monument, exemplifies the paradoxical entanglement of iconoclasm and idolatry in Irish everyday life and the Irish national imaginings of the time. The women’s carnivalesque performance on the top of Nelson’s Pillar is reminiscent of the behavior of the wedding party in Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir, when the men and women explore the 1850s Paris monumental landscape. In an early scene of the novel, Gervaise Macquart, the heroine of L’Assommoir, bites into the plum as Coupeau proposes to her in the dram shop that will bring their ruin and her fall into near prostitution after a brief rise in fortune. Joyce’s parable carries many of the sexual implications of Zola’s plum episode. But what is especially relevant here is the wedding episode when the bride Gervaise raises her skirt at the foot of the statue of Louis XIV to tie her shoelace, an act that Colette Wilson interprets “as symbolic of the working-class Parisian’s and the Communard’s contempt for monarchy and authority in general.”51 Another relevant incident is the wedding party’s ascent of the Vendôme Column and their exchange of bawdy remarks and gestures as they climb this monument that is in many physical and historical respects comparable to Nelson’s Pillar. In both cases, there is not only a measure of defiant exhibitionism that functions provocatively on sexual and political levels but also a considerable degree of scandal that

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emerges, in L’Assommoir, when the wedding party mocks Gervaise’s gesture and, more explicitly, in Ulysses, when Myles Crawford makes that conservative comment. In both texts also, the naturalistic rendering of the banal details of everyday life apparently domesticates and trivializes the historical weight of the imperial monuments. What is remarkable in this respect is that the wedding party and the two vestals ignore the numerous political monuments that punctuate the cities below. In L’Assommoir, while the relatively cultured Monsieur Madinier furtively points out the prominent Parisian monuments, “les Invalides, le Panthéon, Notre-Dame, la tour SaintJacques, les buttes Montmartre,”52 the rest of the wedding party busily tries, for ten minutes, to locate the drinking den that will host the wedding dinner. However, a subtly expressed tendency to idealize the festive aspects of working-class life seems to mark Zola’s novel but not Joyce’s. In particular, Stephen’s parable reveals the tawdriness of an excursion into the symbolic spaces of a colonized city that does not possess the glamorous façade of an imperial capital like 1850s Paris.53

Figure 2.7 Newspaper seller at General Post Office, with the half-demolished Nelson’s Pillar in the background, Dublin [March 9, 1966]. Courtesy of the NPA, National Library of Ireland [WIL 18[12]]

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Besides these possibilities, like Zola’s L’Assommoir, Stephen’s narrative envisions a literal destruction of the monument since the two old vestals “are afraid the pillar will fall” (U 7.1010).54 Stephen’s vision, perhaps suggested earlier in Bloom’s thoughts about “broken pillars” (U 6.929), is a striking reminder of the constant attempts at removing the pillar in as much as it can be read as an imaginative anticipation of its eventual demolition (Figure 2.7). That the two old women fear that the monument may topple beneath their feet sheds an ironic light on the fate of the imperial structure and the possibility of it gradually disintegrating under the weight of the disempowered who felt insulted by its continuing presence. However, the irony is double-edged since the possibility of the monument’s collapse is kept within the boundaries of an imagined vision and an embedded narrative while the framing narrative reasserts the survival of the monument: J. J. O’Molloy sent a weary sidelong glance towards the statue and held his peace. —I see, the professor said. He halted on sir John Gray’s pavement island and peered aloft at Nelson through the meshes of his wry smile (U 7.1064–8). Despite the mocking humor and the fragile peace, Nelson’s Pillar did not fall at that moment of history. This reminds us that monuments are usually destroyed and that sociopolitical change occurs through acts of vandalism and violence rather than through peaceful resistance. These are levels of violence that are written out of Joyce’s positive estimation of the banal and the everyday that however envisions or anticipates revolution. In “Aeolus,” the Dubliners who traverse their local monumental space invest it with countermonumental possibilities that hint at forms of resistance that, in the late twentieth century, would become part of the process of making monuments, intentionally setting them in dialogue with an audience. This later phase in the history of monumentalization is embodied in the countermonument that James E. Young defines as a memorial that “undermines its own authority by inviting and then incorporating the authority of passersby.”55 Nelson’s Pillar is not the kind of artistic or architectural production that is constructed in such a way as to undermine its own authority. Rather it is threatened by the multiplicity of uninvited passers-by who observe it, ignore it, climb it, or break it. The opening newspaper discourse in “Aeolus” highlights the centrality of Nelson’s Pillar as a spatial fixture “IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS” (U 7.1–2). Stephen’s “The Parable of the Plums” seems to allow for the opposite phenomenon: a dynamic narrative that exceeds the

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discourse of the newspaper and that opens monumental space to the multiplicities of the everyday, exposing Nelson’s Pillar to a curious crowd of stories and fragments of stories, performances, renamings, and imagined countermonumental insurrections. The exuberant journalistic headlines in “Aeolus” contend with Stephen’s joyless narration of the parable, and the resulting tension is translated in the discursively equivocal “SLIGHTLY RAMBUNCTIOUS FEMALES” on top of “SOME COLUMN!” (U 7.1014, 7.1006) where the body (human, monumental, and textual) becomes the site of historical (im)possibilities. *** In “Wandering Rocks,” Nelson’s Pillar is again the target of another countermonumental discursive transformation, the core of which is the English nationalist song “The Death of Nelson,” which commemorates the hero’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. A “onelegged sailor” sings “The Death of Nelson” and then “growl[s] at the area of 14 Nelson street” (U 10.1063). There are two important and related points here: first, the relationship between “The Death of Nelson,” Nelson Street, and by implication Nelson’s Pillar; secondly, the one-legged sailor’s particular historical agency or voice that lends the song its character in this context. In his analysis of the relationships among “Allegory, History, and Irish Nationalism,” Luke Gibbons explains that “[u]nlike monuments, ballads were excluded from the public sphere, and hence carried on a fugitive existence in the margins between the personal and the political, charging a personal event or memory with the impact of a political catastrophe— and vice versa.”56 In “Wandering Rocks,” the song “The Death of Nelson” is paradoxically both marginal and central to the public sphere where it implicitly competes with Nelson’s Pillar at the crossroads of the text’s signifying practice and the social practice it narrates. The one-legged sailor who begs for money as he sings “The Death of Nelson” while crossing Nelson Street is indirectly appropriating a triumphal textual and material space and investing it with the story of personal tragedy. The original lyrics of the song celebrate the heroism of Nelson and the noble cause of serving the English nation.57 Just like the Nelson monuments in Dublin and London, the song erases the crucial role of the numerous unnamed sailors who contributed to Nelson’s naval triumphs and of the casualties on the French side. In “Trafalgar Square: Emblem of Empire,” Rodney Mace points out similar memorial erasures in London’s imperial monumental space that comprises Nelson’s Column: “Trafalgar Square and its several monuments, of course, speak the language of the ruling class. To the mass of ordinary

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people whose exploitation and death through nearly three centuries had enabled the ideal of Empire to be realised, the Square offers no bronze or granite memorial.”58 In Joyce’s literary reimagining of Dublin, the onelegged sailor is a living memorial commemorating the forgotten victims of imperial expansion. Joyce’s text thus anticipates the remembering of the British Empire in recent installation art and other artistic forms, as in Steve McQueen’s 2002 Carib’s Leap/Western Deep at the Lumière Cinema near Trafalgar Square. In a performative manner, McQueen’s installation “subtly reminded its audience, . . . that the metropolis is a hybrid, perhaps lacking built memorials to the end of empire, but providing a home for millions of people who are, in some ways, living memorials to the end of empire.”59 In “Wandering Rocks,” the ways in which the one-legged sailor occupies the city with his body and voice form a narrative equivalent to this kind of countermonumental art. Joyce makes the one-legged sailor and his fragmentary song a haunting and recurring presence in an episode that begins with the Reverend Conmee and ends with the viceregal cavalcade and that is punctuated by such historical spaces as St. Mary’s Abbey, Trinity College, Goldsmith’s statue, Grattan’s statue, and the Bank of Ireland. The one-legged sailor’s presence and story seem trivial to the onlookers, both Dubliners and tourists, who are more interested in the grand history that is embodied in the monumental landscape around them. Yet the tourists seem also oblivious to the violent colonial history behind the two monumental spaces that attract their attention: Trinity College, the cultural center of Protestantism in Dublin, and the Bank of Ireland building, which was relocated there when the Irish House of Parliament was dissolved through the Act of Union. In contrast, the narrative registers the colonial double bind that marks the local urban flaneur’s experience of his city’s spatial history when Stephen notes: “By the stern hand of Grattan, bidding halt, an Inchicore tram unloaded straggling Highland soldiers of a band” (U 10.352–3). The image of “the stern hand of Grattan, bidding halt” suggests dynamism buried in the history of the memorialized figure that epitomized Irish parliamentary politics before its abolition in the 1800 Act of Union and the relocation of the Bank of Ireland to the site of the former parliament. A similar representation of the imaginatively enlivened statue of James Larkin (unveiled in 1979 in O’Connell Street) occurs in Thomas Kinsella’s poem “To the Coffee Shop”: Under Larkin with his iron arms on high, conducting everybody in all directions, up off our knees.60

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Figure 2.8 Statue of Henry Grattan, Dublin [2011]

But, unlike Larkin’s image that highlights the power of the monument as it inspires a continued rebellious determination, Grattan’s image in Ulysses trivializes the monument that is awakened not in the full bloom of the political power of the past but rather in the deathly social paralysis and military degradation of the present (Figure 2.8). Still a more elaborate representation of the imagined awakening of Grattan’s statue emerges in Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says “No!,” in which Robert Emmet’s fanatical patriotism is set in opposition to Grattan’s parliamentary strategies. There, Grattan’s figure judges the Irish involvement in a culture of violence and death: “Death is the only voice that can be heard in this distressful land where no man’s word is taken, no man’s message heeded, no man’s prayer answered except it be his epitaph. Out into every quarter of the world we go, seeking for a service in which to die . . .”61 In both Joyce’s and Johnston’s texts, Grattan’s figure acts as a counterpoint to violent politics. Joyce juxtaposes the onelegged sailor and the band of Highland soldiers who attract Stephen’s attention and who are reduced to entertainers “smuggling implements of music through Trinity gates” (U 10.365–6). On the one hand, this creates

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a heightened sense of contrasting military might and military deterioration and, on the other, it underlines the general redundancy of human lives in military experience. The confluence of the image of the Highland soldiers with that of the one-legged sailor thus exacerbates the poignancy of the social and political critique. Joyce registers the one-legged sailor’s story ironically in the thoughts of the Reverend Conmee who “thought, but not for long, of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs, ending their days in some pauper ward . . .” (U 10.12–13). But in contrast to his marginal position on the Dublin streets, the one-legged sailor occupies an iconic status in the narrative of “Wandering Rocks” in which he refracts the figure of another disabled body, the “onehandled adulterer,” another sailor for whose monument funds were quickly secured. The official 1948 report published by the Nelson’s Pillar committee on subscriptions, funds, and expenditures notes that “[t]he Trustees had hopes to have made provision for one or two disabled seamen, and to have attached them to the Pillar; but adequate funds have not yet been placed in their hands: this object, however, they still keep in view.”62 In “Wandering Rocks,” Joyce seems to point out this important gap and perpetually delayed project in the design of Nelson’s Pillar and to textually perform an alternative form of monumentalization with respect to the nonmemorialized, disabled seamen. “Wandering Rocks” rebelliously erases the wholeness and solidity of Nelson’s Pillar from its imaginative reconstruction of physical space, replacing it instead with the fragments of a song that becomes, through the particular voice of the one-legged sailor, an indictment of monumental distortions and historical injustice. As he sings “The Death of Nelson” and roves uneasily through Dublin, the one-legged sailor becomes, symbolically, an alternative moving monument and a countermonumental spectacle of living memory. This is a countermonumentality that can be read again in relation to Lefebvre’s thoughts and against them. “The Death of Nelson” highlights the “traces of violence and death, negativity and aggressiveness” that, according to Lefebvre, the monument “erases,” and it does that through the body of the one-legged sailor who, in his microhistory, ironically hints at the multiple deaths that are buried in the macrohistorical life of the monument. As Margot Norris writes with respect to Joyce’s historical and historiographical practices: “Those philosophers able to encompass in their conceptualization the human activities whose cultural particularity traditional historiography ignores or elides—the everyday life of birth, death, childhood, marriage, earning a living, praying, eating, loving and playing—helped to legitimize Joyce’s novelistic and experimental designs.”63 In “Hades” and “Wandering Rocks” particularly, the articulation

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of a countermonumental rhetoric establishes an alternative historical discourse anchored in everyday life practice. *** In “Circe,” the victorious imperial history and the pillar that celebrates it become the objects of countermonumental rebellions in Bloom’s whirlpool of mental events and in Joyce’s textual animation and carnivalization of Dublin’s monumental landscape.64 As he first appears in “Circe,” Bloom sees his own image reflected and refracted in the images of Nelson, Gladstone, and Wellington. The statues of Nelson and Wellington were two of the most conspicuous landmarks of the British Empire, in their specifically military aspects, in 1904 Dublin. Proposals in the last years of the nineteenth century to erect a statue in Dublin commemorating Gladstone were blocked by popular opposition and by the refusal of the Dublin Corporation to commemorate an English figure before having properly honored Parnell’s memory.65 As such, imperial landmarks—even those that failed to materialize in stone—appear as present absences all over Dublin, even in the depths of the consciousnesses of Dubliners and at the threshold of Nighttown. As Daniel Ferrer argues, “[w]hether they are purely farcical . . . or darkly melodramatic” Circe’s ghosts are “deeply disturbing.”66 They become more disturbing when they are ghosts of monuments, objects that paradoxically freeze the deceased figure into lifeless immortality. Like the nationalist figures that mark the exit from Nighttown and that include Wolfe Tone whose statue “was not” (U 10.378) in addition to imaginary names of nonexistent nationalists, the shadows and ghosts of imperial figures seem to spread their panoptical gaze over Dublin’s landscapes and dreamscapes and to suggest an obsessive urge for always incomplete memorialization in these interior and exterior spaces. But “Circe” also allows the opposite phenomenon, for here Joyce subjects the monumental spaces to a form of textual surveillance through inversions that break the monuments into multiple surreal images, vanquished phantoms, and scattered figments of the victorious figures they represent. The carnivalization of the monumental images contributes to the ambivalent yet potentially subversive politics of the episode in which continual inversion of binary oppositions is the order of the day—or rather, the night. Binaries are constantly reshuffled and such reordering affects the brothel and the street, the mind and the outside world, interior and exterior events, private memory and public monuments. The novel has constructed itself initially on similar dualities. “Circe” undoes these dualities.

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In this context, the countermonumental dynamic neutralizes the basic duality (London/Dublin) underlying the geopolitics of the colonial relation. The apocalyptic vision of “Dublin’s burning! Dublin’s burning! On fire, on fire!” (U 15.4660) that reverses Bloom’s exclamation before he enters Nighttown--“London’s burning, London’s burning! On fire, on fire!” (U 15.172)67—implies a countermonumental impulse that uncovers, in a twist of W. J. T. Mitchell’s previously cited argument, both the violence of monumental space and the violence against it while revealing how imperial and nationalist memorials, though apparently opposed, refract one another as sites of discursive control and material oppression. As Steve Pile contends, “power can be mobilised through the reterritorialisation—the resymbolisation—of space, and this can be as oppressive as it can be subversive.”68 “Circe” imaginatively breaks and burns both the imperial monuments and the nationalist ones that fail to achieve their full potential in not only reterritorializing but also fully embedding Dublin’s space in a deeply resymbolized and hence positively revolutionized social and political structure. Bloomusalem, built on the debris of previous monuments, embodies this process of the incomplete resymbolization of space. In this respect, Bloom’s “golden city . . . the new Bloomusalem” is described as a monstrously “colossal edifice with crystal roof, built in the shape of a huge pork kidney” on the ruins of “several buildings and monuments” (U 15.1544, 1548–9) causing “instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies” (U 15.1566–7). The image of the monumental but also countermonumental “huge pork kidney” is a powerful parody of monumentality and of the beautifully sculpted human body. Perhaps the most disturbing feature of this parody of utopia, a surreal heterotopia, in “Circe” is the fact that it stages not only the human grotesque but also a circus that performs a carnivalesque inversion of the human and the nonhuman. Here is a political statement on a dehumanized humanity that has foundered while many of its monuments still stand. This image is highly reminiscent of Heinrich Böll’s novel Billiard’s at Half Past Nine, in which the architect Robert Faehmel sarcastically comments on the behaviors of the Allies as they entered defeated Third Reich Germany. He mentions “the Commanding Officer [who] would have agreed to postpone the advance for two or even three days, rather than harm the Abbey in any way” and “the British Commanding Officer came to apologise to [him], so to spreak [sic], for having bombed the Honorius Church and destroyed the twelfth-century crucifixion; he didn’t apologise for Edith [who was killed by shrapnel during the bombing], only for a twentieth-century crucifixion. ‘Sorry.’”69 Across this bleak doomsday panorama, apocalypse seems a recurrently incomplete, violent project reconfiguring despotic rule rather than suppressing it. Unlike Böll’s realistic depiction, the deconstruction of

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apocalyptic writing and messianism throughout the “Circe” episode occurs within textual frameworks punctuated by dematerialized signs of materially oppressive political power and in a violent atmosphere of spatial and psychological disintegration where utopia fantastically reveals its dystopic realities. Throughout “Circe,” we textually experience a geographical rupture in the symbolization of space. In this respect, Bella Cohen’s paradoxical utterance, “This isn’t a brothel” (U 15.4281), invites us to reconsider the space that “Circe” carnivalizes. Joyce’s Nighttown is, in terms of its spatial politics, a deconstruction of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque through the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia. “Circe” is thus a perfect model of the deconstructive possibilities afforded by interdisciplinary methodology. The mixture of carnivalesque events and nonevents in a space overdetermined with the power politics of sexual and hegemonic relations (colonial and nationalist) invites a contextualized rereading of carnival beyond such binary oppositions: either a “safety valve mechanism” or a radical oppositional strategy.70 Foucault identifies ancient brothels as heterotopias of “illusion” that reveal presumably real spaces as even more illusory,71 and we can read “Circe” from this perspective. Nighttown refracts monumental space as illusory and vice versa, thus unsettling the cultural-historical definition of both spaces. Bella Cohen’s statement underlines the illusory nature of carnivalesque freedom and extraterritoriality in the brothel as the latter is populated, realistically and fantastically, by a crowd of bodies and animated statues that, through the complex dynamics of objectification, fetishization, reification, disempowerment, and hypermnesia reveal the impossibility of a utopian “other” space. Instead of a utopian carnivalesque space, we encounter multiple manifestations of a dystopia engulfed in physical and psychological violence. In his study of carnival culture, Bakhtin’s presentation of verbal and physical abuse as ritual practices of communal renewal overlooks the real and devastating effects of violence on the individual and the group. In this respect, Ben Taylor contends that “debasement and abuse might equally enjoy a more negative, and more literal, signification” and adds that “Bakhtin concentrates on symbolic violence at the expense of physical violence.”72 Analyzing opposing carnivalesque events organized by the people and the ruling nobility in the French city of Romans in 1580, Le Roy Ladurie shows that carnivalesque inversions can operate either subversively or conservatively while carnivalesque violence has material effects that can be highly oppressive. The relationship that binds carnivalesque inversion to carnivalesque violence is important for a reading of monuments in “Circe,” especially in the context of contemporary historical events.

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Emer Nolan argues that “Circe” reveals the theatrical aspects of the 1916 Easter Rising and that the episode points out the futility of such a carnivalesque revolution that does not account for the socioeconomic conditions that it urgently needs to remedy.73 Obviously a carnivalesque political performance that has no clear perspective on socioeconomic reform is ultimately no more effective than a staged play. The ambivalent dramatization of fiction and reality in the Easter Rising allowed the 1916 revolutionaries to stage their Proclamation of the Irish Republic in front of a wide and attentive audience in Dublin and beyond. In this respect, James Moran notes that many of the 1916 revolutionaries took part in the activities of the Dublin theaters and used them to prepare the public for the revolution, that the rising occurred “near to, on top of, and inside these playhouses” and that most of those witnessing the rising mistook it for a play or a rehearsal for a play.74 However, the ambivalent confluence of the theatrical and the real did not help these revolutionaries in evading the real violence of the British administration. In this sense, the Easter Rising was tragically real after the first apparently surreal or “seriocomic” (U 15.447) hours. As M. Lane Bruner convincingly reveals through various examples, “the humorless state has a very difficult time dealing with absurdity, symbolic protest, and the curious blending of the fictive and the real . . . but it has much less trouble violently dealing with more ‘serious’ forms of protest.”75 In the context of the Easter Rising, violence engulfed not only the rebels but also the Dublin monumental landscape. Thus, from the 1904 perspective, we can read the vision of “shattered glass and toppling masonry” (U 15.4245) and that of “Dublin’s burning” as proleptic signals of the partial destruction of some important Dublin monuments during the Easter Rising, namely the General Post Office. The seriousness of violence in the context of the carnivalesque event is perhaps most obvious in the dispute between Stephen and the two British soldiers near the end of “Circe.” This event is particularly important here for two reasons: It occurs as a real event in the narrative, and it highlights the present absence of a monument. Bakhtin describes a character in Rabelais’s novel being “beaten and mocked, but the blows are gay, melodious, and festive. The abuses also follow this merry and creative pattern. The protagonist is adorned as a comic victim with bright ribbons. The images of the bodies rent apart are also important.”76 Bakhtin universalizes the meaning of physical violence and endows it with a symbolic relation to the carnivalesque pattern of crowning and uncrowning thus downplaying its concrete effects. In “Circe,” especially in the scene of the dispute near the end, violence is not a festive or comic

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gesture. Rather, the blow that Stephen receives in his face from Private Carr is a painful enactment of the violent relations between the British and the Irish in turn-of-the-century Dublin. Moreover, the presence of the two British soldiers and the two watchmen near the end of the episode consecrates the atmosphere of surveillance that overwhelms the Nighttown episode. The two watchmen represent the Dublin Metropolitan Police that performed an interpellative role in the city closely related to the colonial administration in Dublin Castle. Through its agents who were spread all over the city and even in Nighttown, the castle appears as a conspicuously present absent monumental space in “Circe.” It is mentioned once when a “dark mercurialised face” declares that “[t]he Castle is looking for him [Bloom]” (U 15.750). Furthermore, it is the appeal to “Police!” (U 15.4658) that brings about the tragic staging of “Dublin’s burning!” that I have previously read in relation to the Easter Rising and to the destruction of Dublin monuments. Moreover, the fear of an interpellative and repressive role of the police pervades the episode and the city. The bawd’s admonition “Don’t be all night before the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sixtyseven is a bitch” (U 15.370–1) suggests the doubling of police and city in Joyce’s—perhaps intentional—spelling mistake (“polis”) in as much as it may implicitly refer to the Clerkenwell Prison explosion by the Fenians in 1867.77 The Dublin Metropolitan Police also appears in one of the earlier phantasmagorical instances in the episode when Bloom self-defensively declares to the watch: “I fought with the colours for king and country in the absentminded war under General Gough in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was mentioned in dispatches. I did all a white man could” (U 15.794–7). Bloom’s statement is a representative instance of what Andrew Gibson describes as the “self-division, contradictions, and complicities” that reveal “that this specific colonized culture is partly a culture of imposture.”78 Though they point out his need to identify with the dominant powers, Bloom’s statements betray not simply a carnivalesque inversion that traduces a self-betraying complicity but also a contradictoriness that is extremely ironic from a political perspective. While the first key term, absentminded, deals a heavy blow to the glorification of war, specifically the Boer War, the suggestion that he did “all a white man could [do]” in an unjustified war and was disabled in it is highly sarcastic. The implied criticism of military violence and its human cost recalls the earlier discussion about Nelson and the one-legged sailor in “Wandering Rocks.”

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Figure 2.9 Lord Gough Statue, Phoenix Park, Dublin. Courtesy of the NPA, National Library of Ireland [L CAB 01843]

What is more significant here is the ambivalent meaning of Bloom’s statement in relation to General Gough. The specific location “in the park” deserves attention for two reasons. First, it becomes more probable that Bloom is referring to the statue of Field Marshal Viscount Gough that was erected in Phoenix Park in 1880 (and destroyed in 1957) than to the general himself (Figure 2.9). To mention “the park” specifically as the site where the statue was erected may, indirectly, signal the hidden history of Gough’s statue that was originally destined for Foster Place, then Carlisle Bridge (later O’Connell Bridge).79 Secondly, the ambivalent statement invites two possible interpretations: that Bloom fought under the leadership of General Gough or that he fought under the statue of General Gough in Phoenix Park. The second possibility has radical implications on a nationalist level since it hints at Bloom’s fantasized involvement in the Phoenix Park murders. The date of the erection of Gough’s equestrian statue, in 1880, two years before the Phoenix Park murders, seems to make the second possibility curiously plausible. Historical accounts note that Thomas Henry

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Burke and Lord Frederick Cavendish, the two victims of the murders, met near the Gough statue then moved toward the Phoenix Pillar before being attacked.80 As such, the “absentminded war under General Gough” may be a reference to what was then perceived as the counterproductive terrorism of the Phoenix Park murders. In this context, several instances in “Circe” point out Bloom’s violent—whether nationalist or anarchist—fantasies. He is accused of being an “Anarchist” (U 15.1156), a “wellknown dynamitard” (U 15.1158–9) and to be hiding a “bomb” or an “[i]nfernal machine with a time fuse” (U 15.1197, 1199). “Circe” hence represents the violence enacted against monuments and in monumental space through a series of images that are either fantastical or realistic: Dublin and London burning, Bloomusalem built on the debris of previous monuments, violence near the Gough statue, and Bloom’s imagined iconoclastic tendencies. The fact that, throughout the episode, the objects of violence are not restricted to one political side and that the reference to the Gough statue in Bloom’s selfdefensive posturing is highly ambivalent, emblematizes the divided loyalties of the Irish in as much as it further reveals the complex historical circumstances and multiple liabilities in the Irish-British struggle. As a result, it becomes impossible to endorse categorical statements about political terrorism and the amalgam of fear and propaganda that underwrites and exploits it. Yet, in “Circe” as in the rest of Ulysses, one monument is particularly the object of multifarious attacks that are discursive, material, and fantastical. Nelson’s Pillar appears as the most dominant monumental motif in “Circe” and is subjected to a series of textual interventions that expose it to both parodic performance and discursive sabotage: namely in the women’s martyrdom scene on the pillar after the declaration of “Bloomusalem” (U 15.1748), in Bloom’s acrobatic pantomime as he climbs the pillar (U 15.1842), and in the surreal drama of “coffin steel shark stone onehandled Nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram falling bawling” in Stephen’s “Dance of death” (U 15.4144–5, 4139) Interestingly, the first two occurrences of the pillar in “Circe” may refer to historically true events because in at least two recorded instances, (in 1881 and 1897, a man climbed over the railings at the top of Nelson’s Pillar and, in 1917, a man committed suicide from the top of the pillar.81 Moreover, this effects an ironic inversion of the appearance of Nelson’s monument in “Aeolus,” “Wandering Rocks,” and “Hades” especially through the distortion and fragmentation of the monument into dead materiality and “élan vital” in

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the last quotation from “Circe.” As Kenneth Gross argues, “if statues can be mirrors of our internal objects, they can also become the places where such objects are deformed, and reassembled . . . by the very ‘gravitational pull’ of such statues.”82 Reading the monument itself as an agent in its space of performance invites a distinction between human and nonhuman agency and an envisioning of materiality that is invested with intention and desire. As I mentioned in the first chapter, there has been some debate about imaginary transformations of monumental spaces as well as the surreal or magical agency of monuments. For instance, W. J. T. Mitchell mentions that the monument “may become the object of imaginary renderings,” which would include “fantasies.”83 The fantastical transformation of statues into living, moving, and speaking bodies has featured in literature for a long time. For instance, the fifteenth-century Italian prose romance Hypnerotomachia by Francesco Colonna presents a series of adventures around animated statues. Reading this literary phenomenon in relation to surrealist literature, Sergiusz Michalski notes that, in André Breton’s Nadja, Philippe Soupault’s Les Dernières Nuits de Paris, but especially in Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, monuments become “the stop signs of black magic which interrupt ‘la flânerie du rêveur’.”84 In “Circe,” Dublin monuments come alive in Bloom’s and Stephen’s internal odysseys across dreamscapes where personal fantasies merge with historical nightmares. This expresses the repercussions of a process of excessive and abusive memorialization inverting the positive implications of both what Lefebvre describes as the transformation of “the space of death” into “a living space” and what Pierre Nora suggests in his notion of “the memorial nation” wherein “[s]tones and walls come to life, sites begin to stir, landscapes are revitalized.”85 *** Anne Fogarty writes that, “Despite its displacement by the current Spire, Nelson’s Pillar in absentia remains as much part of the current fabric of O’Connell street as when it was actually in position there, due to its Joycean fictional afterlife.”86 As it has become clear, the notion of present absence is appropriate for a reading of Nelson’s Pillar in Ulysses especially because Joyce’s text reconfigures the paradoxical ontology of the monument as a perpetually incomplete object-process that comes alive through a confluence of real and mental events across past, present, and future

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time frames. As we move through the episodes, the fixity and solidity of Nelson’s Pillar that are textually recorded in “Hades” are gradually undermined as the pillar imaginatively comes to life in the one-legged sailor’s singing of “The Death of Nelson,” in the vision of a falling monument set against the theatricality of “the onehandled adulterer” posing as the center of attention “THIS FAIR JUNE DAY,” and finally in its multiple phantasmagorical transformations at the crossroads of the human and the object in “Circe.” The implicit animation fantasy that underlies these monumental awakenings communicates the complex interconnections between the psychological and material lives of Dubliners and the imagined lives of the pillar. This fantasy is also the expression of the interrelation between the threatening violence that Nelson’s Pillar represented and the iconoclastic violence that threatened to break it and that eventually broke it. Flowing through the countermonumental energies of Ulysses is a strong sense of a crippled or illusory revolution whose seed falls on stony ground or, instead, a revolution that risks being reduced to a sensational story in the news. But the countermonumental energies of Ulysses are also part of microhistories erupting in macrohistory through the channels of the everyday as the circulation of bodies, words, and dreams in a landscapetheater orchestrates a phenomenology of stone to the rhythms of human life that build, conserve, ignore, insult, awaken, attack, and destroy monuments. In this respect, Joyce’s statement, in a 1907 Italian lecture on the poet James Clarence Mangan, that the monument “is the most polite and effective way to assure a lasting oblivion of the deceased” (CW 176) is partially contradicted by Ulysses since it demonstrates that, despite the ineluctable relation of modern urban indifference to monumentality, the flux of material and conceptual lives traversing monumental space transform it into the site of myriad, seldom polite engagements with the figure of the deceased. In Ulysses, monumentalization signifies and is acted out on various levels: as object, historical-political and social practices, literary motif, and shifting metaphor across the spaces of the ontological, epistemological, phenomenological, spatial, and textual. As this chapter has shown, approaching Nelson’s Pillar from this perspective not only reveals the monument’s overdetermined horizons of meaning as Ulysses anchors the texture of social practice in the text’s signifying practice, but also suggests the ways in which Joyce’s multiple representations of the pillar allow a reconsideration of monumentalization and of the theoretical work on both

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this subject, specifically, and its larger significance with respect to related issues including memory and forgetting, iconoclasm, spatial and discursive relations, the everyday, performance and performativity, and the real and fantastical dimensions of countermonumentality. Accordingly, Ulysses is part of the countermonumental discourse supplementing the Pillar Project for it invites every reader to imagine a replacement for Nelson’s Pillar through the history that the text creates for this monument.

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Chapter 3

Burning Temples and Falling Empires: Unraveling Arsonists’ Dreams in Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

I wrote The Temple of the Golden Pavilion in order to study the motive of the crime. I wanted to show that even a trifling concept, like “beauty,” can be the motive for such a serious crime as the burning of a national treasure. In other words, in order to live through the present age, one needs to believe in such a trifling idea and make it a motive to live. Hitler is a good example of how this idea may become a motive for suicide or death.1 even the dead Hitler will remain with the Germans, with the survivors, with their descendants, and even with the unborn. He will be with them, not as he was with his contemporaries, but as an eternal monument to what is humanly possible.2 “The Reichstag went up in flames as well,” said Javer, pointing to a place on the globe. “Who burned it?” Ilir asked. “Who? Arsonists, obviously,” Javer said. “Every city in this world has a building that should be burned,” Isa said.3

If Adolf Hitler is a useful figure in reading the paradoxical entanglement of the fascination with monuments and the impulse to destroy them in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, this is because Yukio Mishima’s novel portrays a politically charged, obsessive psychological journey into the combined imperialist and ultranationalist dualistic ethos of monumentalizing the self and the homeland and/or killing both. However, overestimating the Mishima/Hitler link is a critically dangerous mistake if only it oversimplifies Mishima’s ethics and politics and smooths over the historical and personal differences in the disturbing narratives of the two figures. Mishima who wrote the play My Friend Hitler in 1968, staunchly supported Hirohito, the Japanese emperor who allied himself with Hitler and Mussolini to form the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. On this basis and relying on other facts

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in Mishima’s life, one of which could be Hitler’s suicide and the Japanese writer’s sepukku or harakiri, many critics have read Mishima’s politics as categorically fascist.4 For instance, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel states unequivocally that “Mishima’s political engagement was fascist,” while Edith Wyschogrod mentions “Mishima’s postwar creation of a Fascistoid private army.”5 Other critics nuance the connection and limit its effects to certain aspects of Mishima’s aesthetics and politics. Without making any exaggerated claims with respect to fascism in Mishima’s writings, Reiko Tachibana Nemoto argues that “fascination with destruction and ultimately with self-destruction on Mishima’s part originated in the Japanese Romantic school, the so-called Nihon Roman-ha, which emerged in the mid-1930s simultaneously with the rise of fascism.”6 Both literary and political fascism in Japan influenced Mishima, especially in regard to their mutually constitutive endorsement of a “romance around death.”7 For Peter Abelsen, Mishima’s “choice to die for the cause of rightism was Romantic Irony taken to its very limit: an attempt to achieve his premier aim in life, realization of a tragic, aristocratic purity, without a fully fledged belief in the cause.”8 Dennis Washburn further emphasizes Mishima’s fascism-with-a-difference mode of being and writing by reading it in terms of fascism-as-a-performance. Speaking of Mishima’s militarism, Washburn writes: “His critique of modern Japan took a fascist swerve toward a martial code, but he knew that turn was a performance, that the code was anachronistic and inauthentic because it was self-consciously revived.”9 And it was especially the ultranationalist framework of the ancient Japanese Shinto religion that inspired the martial code that Mishima espoused. In his autobiographical work Confessions of a Mask, Mishima describes how the young boy is mesmerized by the bearers of the Shinto shrines as they proceeded past his family home and shows how this fascination marks a shift from regarding the procession as merely everyday spectacle to envisioning vitality and life in the monumentalized gods. As Marguerite Yourcenar notes, the young Mishima had taken part in similar processions that had not only religious but also ultranationalist resonances.10 If these critical viewpoints read together tell us anything, they most importantly signal the necessity to look beyond the platform of fascism and Hitlerism in order to read Mishima. More importantly, while bearing in mind that it always seems that Mishima “texts his body, being, and death into his work in a way that makes it difficult for the critic to separate the socio-historical Mishima from its textual representation,”11 we must examine the significance of the individual texts at least partially independently from the biographical reading. The larger implication here is that approaching political and social history in Mishima presupposes a consideration of

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Japanese post-imperialism, postwar and postoccupation political aesthetics and aesthetic politics, neofascism, and postmodern spectacle and performativity. Using these elements as the components of a historical-aesthetic platform, we can look at the central idea of violence that in Temple revolves around the interrelated concepts of monumental imperishability, its relations to the human body and narcissistic and nationalistic aspirations, its paradoxical entanglement with the impulse for destruction, and their various phenomenological and political significations. It is at the intersection of these trajectories that we should approach Mishima’s fictional representation of the act of destroying the golden temple, based on the real event in 1950 when a deranged monk burned down the classic Rinzai Zen temple, Kinkakuji, in Kyoto. *** The temple of the Golden Pavilion has intertwined political and religious microhistorical dimensions across six centuries in Japan. The Golden Pavilion is the popular name for Rokuon-ji, a Rinzai Zen temple in northwestern Kyoto in the Kitayama area. The temple takes the name Golden Pavilion, a literal translation of the Japanese Kinka-kuji, from the three-story gold-leaf pavilion, which is the centerpiece of the monastery garden. The Golden Pavilion sits beside a small pond, in which it is spectacularly reflected. The temple was originally the site of the retirement villa of the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), which was built in 1397. It was converted into a Zen temple after Yoshimitsu’s death. Musô Soseki (1275–1351) is regarded as the temple’s founding abbot, although it was constructed long after his death. With the exception of the Golden Pavilion itself, most of the temple buildings (schishidô garan) were destroyed in the Onin War (1466–1477) and later restored. The Golden Pavilion was burned to the ground in 1950 by a resident cleric. It was rebuilt [in 1955] to precisely match plans of the original.12 The reconstruction of the Golden Pavilion included, in 1987, the addition of a layer of gold leaf, five times the original thickness, and the restoration of the pictures on the ceilings. In 1994, the Golden Pavilion was named a World Cultural Heritage Site.13 Nevertheless, the importance of this monument is related not only to its architecture and role in Japanese religious culture but also to the political revolutions of imperial and postimperial Japan that engulfed it in cycles of wartime destruction and endowed it with

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Figure 3.1 Kinkakuji Temple, also called the Golden Pavilion, Kyoto, photograph by Albert Mendelewski. Courtesy of http://www.istockphoto.com File #: 15313347

the paradoxical appeal of monuments as objects of worship and/or attack (Figure 3.1). *** A confluence of motives and obsessions in the combined figures of the worshipper and the destroyer of statues emerges in various national literatures in different historical periods. One good example is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, written at a time of republican turmoil in Europe and at the eve of the Civil War in America. Like Hawthorne’s romance, Mishima’s novel only appears to foreground aesthetic elements at the expense of the political. Many instances throughout Temple seem to corroborate the claim, made by several critics, that the novel essentially engages the concept of beauty and, hence, the crime perpetrated by the main character, Mizoguchi, has a primarily aesthetic quality. This seems to be in line with the actual statement made by Hayashi Yoken, the Zen acolyte who burned the real Golden Pavilion, that his motive was “antipathy against beauty.”14 Generally, creative and destructive relations to beauty appear central to Mishima’s various

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novels: “Mishima’s protagonists strike out against the destruction of beauty (The Sailor Who Fell [from] Grace [with] the Sea) or, conversely, against beauty itself (Thirst for Love) or try to create beauty through ritual suicide (Runaway Horses and the short story “Patriotism”).”15 Robert Jay Lifton explains that the literary school to which Mishima belonged epitomized “a wartime ethos, according to which everyone, but especially able young men, were expected to be ready to die—beautifully—for nation and, above all, emperor.”16 Both Hayashi Yoken’s and Mishima’s statements and actions accord with the argument, quoted in the epigraph that “Hitler is a good example of how this idea [beauty] may become a motive for suicide or death.”17 This association of beauty with a paradoxically destructive and creative martial code anchored in ultranationalist beliefs is, as I show later, at the heart of Temple. Even a few moments before setting fire to the Golden Temple, Mizoguchi describes his act in aesthetic terms: “[T]his delicate building, wrought of the most slender timber, was trembling in anticipation of nothingness, like a jeweled necklace trembling in the wind” (Temple 241). As we will see, the centrality of nihilism to Mizoguchi’s aesthetic response to the monument is evident throughout. However, this nihilistic texture is neither seamless nor reflective of a particular philosophical trend but is rather imprinted with the sophisticated paradoxes that result from its overdetermination with myriad aesthetic, philosophical, psychological, and political layers. Still, it is useful to begin with the straightforwardly aesthetic groundwork to Mizoguchi’s phenomenological response to the temple. On the first page of the novel, we learn of the exquisite beauty of the temple that entranced Mizoguchi even before he became an acolyte and really saw it. Father had never told me that the real Golden Temple was shining in gold, or anything of the sort; yet, according to Father, there was nothing on this earth so beautiful as the Golden Temple. Moreover, the very characters with which the name of the temple was written and the very sound of the word imparted some fabulous quality to the Golden Temple that was engraved on my heart. (Temple 3–4) The temple acquires an almost magical quality in the eyes of its becharmed beholder for whom “the blanched wooden frame, dappled by the moonlight, looked mysterious and bewitching” (Temple 15). Mizoguchi’s obsessive involvement with the imagined life of the temple makes him read the monument’s inscrutability as a resistance to communication rather than what he should normally perceive as the mundane silence of inorganic matter: “Whatever words people might speak to the Golden Temple, it must continue to stand there silently, displaying its delicate structure to the eyes

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of the world and enduring the darkness that surrounded it” (Temple 19). But the monument seems to have not only a willfully silenced speech but also a hidden vitality that permeates every one of its details especially the copper-gold phoenix on top of the temple. Mizoguchi admits that “it would be untrue to say that this bird did not look as if it were flying” and adds that “[i]n order to fly, the phoenix remained motionless, with a look of anger in its eyes, holding its wings aloft, fluttering the feathers of its tail, bravely stretching its majestic golden wings” (Temple 19). Already Mizoguchi is expressing the paradox of still mobility or lifeless vitality. The fact that he later explains his vision aesthetically and philosophically as “this golden phoenix was flying eternally through time on its shining wings” (Temple 19) does not lessen the disturbing effect of the imagined transformation and what it reveals here in terms of both the psychotic seer and the powerfully suggestive seen object. As we will see in Pamuk’s The Black Book in Chapter 5, the imagined awakening of monuments is significant in not only unraveling the historical lives that are buried in monumental space but also in disentangling the psychological drama that makes unbalanced characters, like Mizoguchi in Temple and Galip in The Black Book, invest monumental space with their desires, fears, and psychoses. Violent historical circumstances seem to exacerbate this psychotic fascination and, hence, fuel the imagined awakenings of the monuments. In The Black Book, the Atatürk statues come to life in a dream preceding the 1980 military coup in Turkey. In Temple, Mizoguchi explains his imaginings as triggered and accentuated by the war: “The Golden Temple stood on this same edge, faced us, talked to us. To this extent had the expectation of air raids brought us and the temple closer together” (Temple 41). Mishima commented on the deep impact of the war on his obsessive attraction to death and suicide, stating that World War II was “the time, the only time in my experience, when death was a rite and an intoxicating blessing.”18 Experiencing the Tokyo air raids, “beautiful . . . flames seemed to hue in all the colors in the rainbow, like watching the light in a distant bonfire at a great banquet of extravagant death and destruction.”19 Lifton explains that [t]his sense of beauty in destruction, specifically associated with air raids, was not unique to Mishima. Many Japanese express similar images, reflecting what was undoubtedly an awesome scene, as well as cultural imagery of beauty in destruction. Nor was that sense entirely absent among Europeans, witnessing air raids. With Mishima, however, the images are rendered more extreme and elaborate . . . by the death constellation he brings to it.”20

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Mizoguchi states that the war contributed to his mental dissociation from reality and his immersion in a dreamscape. In what sounds like a twist of Charles Bernstein’s “War is surrealism without art,”21 he says: “For us boys, war was a dreamlike sort of experience lacking any real substance, something like an isolation ward in which one is cut off from the meaning of life” (Temple 43). The almost unimaginable brutalities committed during World War II and the fact that the acolytes were distanced from this atrocious reality endowed the war with surreal qualities. Of particular interest here is what the Golden Temple comes to signify, as a monument, at the intersection of real violence and a fecund but agitated imagination. *** Mizoguchi’s pyromaniac obsessions, fueled by the events of World War II that ravished all kinds of spaces with its conflagrations, are embedded in the twisted rationale of killing a monument by fire in order to release its vital energies, to awaken it from material slumber and purify it from a corrupting imperishability: When the first B-29s attacked Tokyo in November of 1944, it was expected that Kyoto would be raided at any time. It became my secret dream that all Kyoto should be wrapped in flames. This city was too anxious to preserve its old things just as they were; the multifarious shrines and temples were forgetting the memories of the red-hot ash that had been born from inside. When I imagined how the Onin War had laid waste this city, I felt that Kyoto had lost part of its beauty from having too long forgotten the unrest of war fires. (Temple 43–4) In Ismail Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone, the communist partisan Isa, speaking of the German Reichstag but also expressing violent desires against the political and military oppression in Albania, says that “[e]very city in this world has a building that should be burned.”22 That the temple of the Golden Pavilion deserves the same destiny in the Japanese arsonist’s geopolitical vision does not necessarily complicate the relationship between Mishima and fascism—because that would mean taking the comparison or contrast too far—but rather it underlines the political dimension of Mizoguchi’s act within a world vision of postwar and post-imperial monument destruction. Mizoguchi’s vision of Kyoto on fire exemplifies postwar Japanese literature, including what has been called atomic bomb literature, in that it shows that the ravaging of the city by war and the subsequent burning of the monuments that represent its past glory are

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complementary processes. Nemoto writes: “In Japanese and German postwar literature the destruction of buildings or entire cities is a commonly shared experience. . . . Similarly, in Japan genbakubungaku (atomic bomb literature) portrays hellish pictures of the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”23 The Temple of the Golden Pavilion was not destroyed during World War II. Interestingly, the American secretary of war Henry Stimson prevented the bombing of Kyoto in order to preserve the city’s artistic and architectural treasures. That the Zen acolyte rather than the American air force destroys the national treasure shows that this act is motivated, at least partially, by national postwar and post-imperial malaise that translates itself in not only revolutionary but also self-defeating acts. Jean Genet’s writings on the Palestinian struggle, especially the 1982 Shatila massacre and the Palestinian exodus from Jordan in 1971, carry similar conceptual potential with respect to working out the complex and disturbing relationship of war and revolution to a form of beauty that is both enlivened and doomed. In “Four Hours in Shatila,” Genet describes how, “breaking with the ancient ways, a new freedom pushes through the dead skin, and fathers and grandfathers will have a hard time extinguishing the gleam in the eyes, the throbbing in the temples, the joy of blood flowing through the veins. In the spring of 1971, in the Palestinians’ bases, that beauty subtly pervaded a forest made alive by the freedom of the fedayeen.”24 Genet’s vision here is both akin and antithetical to Mishima’s since the beauty of the fedayeen is part of a revolutionary landscape marked by destruction and bloodshed, but beauty here also paradoxically has an optimistically reviving power because it is a principle of life against neocolonialist atrocities and regional betrayals. From this perspective, the complex reflection on beauty and destruction in Mishima’s text also forms what could be read as an alternative thesis on the philosophy of history. Twisting Benjamin’s “thesis,” Mizoguchi longs to be “man enough to blast open the continuum of history.”25 According to Mizoguchi’s thesis, violent revolutions revitalize history and monumental landscapes with a paradoxically regenerating, destructive fire. The dream or longing that the Golden Temple burns in the raids occasions an enchanting vision of monumental awakening: Tomorrow the Golden Temple would surely burn down. That form which had been filling the space would be lost. Even the bird on top of the temple would be revived like the classical phoenix and soar away. And the Golden Temple itself, which had until then been constrained by its form, would be freed from all rules and would drift lightly here and there, scattering a faint light on the lake and on the waters of the dark sea. (Temple 44)

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This powerful vision gains apocalyptic dimensions as Mizoguchi states that “[w]hat I dreamed of was something like a huge heavenly compressor that would bring down disasters, cataclysms and superhuman tragedies, that would crush beneath it all human beings and all objects, irrespective of their ugliness or their beauty” (Temple 44). We are reminded that similar visions of monumental destruction and monumental awakening at moments of real or imagined historical revolution in Ulysses, The Black Book, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting are staged as part of comparable apocalyptic dramas that bring about massive devastation. What is particularly engaging is the four novels’ imaginings of urban dreamscapes marked by conflict and iconoclastic violence within an expansive twentieth-century East-West space-time where many imperial worlds collapsed and where apocalypse is a recurrently incomplete, disruptive project creating internal and external exiles. Yet an important distinction still has to be made between, on the one hand, the predominantly aesthetic texture and perversely ecstatic tone of the description of the apocalyptic moment in Mishima’s novel and, on the other, the explicitly bleak political aspect of Joyce’s, Kundera’s, and Pamuk’s descriptions. What binds the visions of monument destruction in all these texts, however, is the apocalyptic framework that seems to imply that, from ideological and psychological perspectives, the fall of a monument has the symbolic magnitude of the devastation brought about at the end of the world. *** Despite his insistence on the centrality of beauty as an aesthetic principle motivating his actions, Mizoguchi seems aware of their further implications. For him, the Golden Temple is a symbol of oppression; he tells his mentor Kashiwagi: “ ‘No, the Golden Temple certainly isn’t powerless! It’s the root of everyone else’s powerlessness’ ” (Temple 167). From this perspective, he relentlessly strives to obliterate the surviving symbol of a dying world that he paradoxically longs to immortalize in a personally induced doomsday. The empire to which he is attached as a cultural heritage is fading away and everything must die with it since, in Mizoguchi’s disturbed vision of things, postwar reality is impossible and all that survives in it is fake and hence deserves to die. In this context, he forms a perverse conception of his role in the social and political structure of wartime Japan: “I was conscious, under my ugly, stubborn forehead, that the world of death which my father ruled and the world of life occupied by young people were being brought together by the mediation of war. I myself would probably become an intermediary” (Temple 21). In this context, Heinrich Böll’s Billiards at Half Past Nine is

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particularly relevant since it engages with the event of monument destruction in the context of late World war II Germany. Robert Faehmel, the architect who blows up the fictional Saint Anthony’s Abbey, which his father had built in 1908, three days before the end of the war, says that “he had waited during five years of war for that moment, the moment when the Abbey would lie there like a gift of God and be his prey.”26 As in Mishima’s novel, monumentalization and countermonumentalization seem here to be embedded in traumatic cycles of violence engulfing personal and national histories. According to Nemoto, “The monument thus represents the child’s desire to fulfill the value system of his father, as well as the collective Japanese cultural devotion to the traditional past.”27 However, the way Mizoguchi expresses his pyromaniac obsessions against the monument reveals that the paradoxical relation to the burning empire acquires vaguely anarchist dimensions and politically ambiguous revolutionary rhetoric asserting an ecstatic pleasure in the anticipation of revolution and destruction: “When the Golden Temple has been burned down. . . the world of these fellows will be transformed, the golden rule of their lives will be turned upside down, their train timetables will be thrown into utter confusion, their laws will be without effect” (Temple 185). Again, here is another aspect of Mishima’s twist on Benjamin’s conceptualization of revolutionary moments in history: “The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar.”28 Mizoguchi anticipates a revolutionary upheaval that would upset basic temporal references, and hence Japan’s historical continuum. There is considerable irony here given that when Hayashi Yoken burned down the Golden Pavilion, Japanese postwar reality sustained its essential patterns. Nonetheless, Mizoguchi’s impassioned, though mistakenly executed, quest for apocalyptic national transformation seems striking because it is grounded in the paradoxical belief in the possibility of radical cultural transformation and traditional preservation at one and the same time. We see a similar awed fascination with the apocalyptic image of the burning national treasures of the Ottoman Empire in Pamuk’s İstanbul. It was from here he [Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar] watched the fire that destroyed the waterfront palace of Princess Sabiha and the wooden building that had once housed the Ottoman Assembly and later became the Fine Arts Academy, where he was an instructor. The fire had raged for an hour, casting a fine shower of sparks with each new explosion, and with “the leaping flames and columns of smoke, there was something in the air

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that suggested the Day of Judgment had arrived.” Perhaps he felt a need to reconcile his pleasure at the spectacle with his despair at seeing one of the most beautiful buildings from the reign of Mahmud II destroyed, taking its priceless collections with it including that of the architect Sedad Hakkı, whose archives and detailed plans of Ottoman monuments were said to be the best of his age), for he went on to tell how Ottoman pashas took a similar pleasure in watching the great fires of their time.29 In both texts, the contradictory emotional states of mourning an empire and relishing in its annihilation are interpolated. This is an important link given that the two novels portray the ends of Oriental empires that however have remarkably different geopolitical histories and architectural and monumental traditions that are heavily inflected by distinct religious ideologies and prohibitions. *** Both Temple and Istanbul stage monument destruction as a performance peculiarly enjoyed by a culturally voyeuristic audience. Mizoguchi’s conception of his planned arson exaggerates the political significance of both the monument and his actions against it by staging it as a spectacular event. In a vividly cinematic image recalling Mishima’s use of hyperbolical pastiche and spectacular performance as a link between his art and life (his ritual suicide was a staged performance in front of spectators), Mizoguchi portrays himself as the incognito arsonist: “It made me happy to think that these people were completely unaware that the young man who sat there next to them, warming his hands over the brazier with an unconcerned look, was a prospective criminal” (Temple 185). Throughout his psychological and physical journey to the final act, Mizoguchi’s intention to kill himself as well as the monument seems fake, pure performance. He even admits that he “bought the drugs and the knife for the remote eventuality of having to die” (Temple 226). After committing arson, he throws away the arsenic and knife and declares, in a final flourish to his act: “I wanted to live” (Temple 247). Critics have read this lifedeath relationship in Temple in terms of Zen Buddhism and also from a biographical perspective that has sometimes led to an overinterpretation of the relationship of the novel to Mishima’s life. The Zen Buddhist requirement to kill the self is at the heart of the main character’s predicament since “[b]y failing to extinguish the self, Mizoguchi fails to destroy the subjective, inner vision of the Kinkakuji that is the source of his dilemma.”30 Mishima’s own failure lies in the fact that the “irony of his death is that

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it can be interpreted as just another expression of the inauthentic. His suicide, with its counterfeit political motives, possesses a disturbingly contrived, literary quality. . . . For all of its horrible reality, his suicide, his seppuku, was also just another piece of writing: a forgery, a simulacrum, a work of kitsch art.”31 Therefore both writer and character fail each in his own way, one by continuing to live and the other by dying, but both failures are part of a paradoxical ontological conceptualization of tradition and revolution executed in a performative act of destruction against organic and inorganic matter. In both cases, a sculpted body is victim and victimizer, asserting both the power of the will and the relinquishing of it in a Nietzschean reading of Buddhist ethics. Many critics have given great attention to the koan, the paradoxical story told by the Buddhist Superior at the temple after Japan’s defeat and aimed at spiritually awakening the acolytes. Wyschogrod speculates that “[p] erhaps through his incendiary sacrifice, Mizoguchi hopes, in Buddhist fashion, to become egoless in accordance with the early gloss of the Superior on the day of Japan’s defeat. If so, Mizoguchi’s immolation of the temple could imply obedience to the traditional command to slay the self: ‘When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha’.”32 In contrast, Karen Tei Yamashita downplays heroic and metaphysical undertones in Mishima’s philosophy explaining that he “represents a defeated Japan in which Zen Buddhism is used to justify resignation and violent action as tactics for survival.”33 Rather than downplaying the uniqueness of Mizoguchi’s action, reading it in the context of postwar Japan allows us to confirm its particular place in the history of political violence. The sequence of excessive fascination with the monument, violent action against it, and then resignation at the end reinforces the paradox of Mizoguchi’s stance as monument worshiper and monument destroyer. For Nemoto, Mizoguchi’s decision to kill the temple in order to revive it is impregnated with the dialectical rationale of the “Murdering Sword” and the “Life-Giving-Sword” at the heart of the Buddhist koan: Through the Superior’s choice of this koan to analyze on the night following the Emperor’s surrender, which was broadcast on the radio, Mishima implies the death of Imperial Japan and of the divine Emperor by the Murdering Sword; because no voices of wisdom spoke on their behalf, and no one performed actions of ‘magnanimity,’ they, like the cat, had to die. In a sense Mizoguchi has sought the Life-Giving Sword throughout his life, but has failed to find it. He takes up the Murdering Sword instead and kills the beauty of the Golden Temple, as Mishima would later choose the Murdering Sword to kill himself . . . .34

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Yet despite the importance of these readings that place the act of monument destruction within the framework of Zen Buddhism, they miss the broader philosophical implications of life and death in the context of Mizoguchi’s continued engagement with the monument as an enlivened body in relation to humans and inflected by the dynamics of mortality and immortality. *** Mizoguchi’s performance is culturally countermonumental while it seeks to be historically transformative. He is aware that by destroying the temple he would be actively damaging the monumental treasures of Japan: “If I were to set fire to the Golden Temple, which had been designated as a National Treasure in 1897, I should be committing an act of pure destruction, of irreparable ruin . . .” (Temple 183). Anticipating the occupation of postwar Japan, a postdefeat planning group for Japan that was organized by the U.S. State Department on October 20, 1943, put together a document known as “Memorandum: Freedom of Worship,” which expressed serious reservations about the future role of ultranationalist Shinto shrines like the Yasukuni Shrine but stated that “[n]o action should be necessary in regard to Buddhist temples.”35 As history has proved, despite the marginalization of Buddhist temples in the policies of occupied Japan, these sites were not spared violent reprisals by the defeated Japanese themselves. Mizoguchi symbolically starts the fire at the feet of the wooden statue of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu that, as we learn at the beginning of the novel, “was famous as a National Treasure” (Temple 25) and commemorated Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408) who “took over the Kitayama Mansion of the Saionji family and turned it into a large-scale villa” comprising Buddhist structures, namely the Reliquary that later became known as the Golden Temple (Temple 18). Mizoguchi deliberately begins his almost ritual performance in front of the Yoshimitsu statue as though he were defying the individual who had owned the Golden Temple by proving the irrevocable death that denies it not only the right to control but also any power to resist: “Those eyes of Yoshimitsu’s. Everything would be performed in front of those eyes. In front of those unseeing eyes of a dead witness” (Temple 236). It is a subversive performance against the political figure who sought to immortalize his place in imperial Japan through the monumental architecture of the Golden Pavilion and its links to divinity. Implicitly, it is an act of looking back in anger at what has been lost in terms of imperial grandeur and, hence, critiques what remains in postwar and post-imperial Japan. Again, the paradox of monumental immortality and perpetual death weighs on Mizoguchi’s act.

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Destroying the Golden Pavilion entails not simply the ruin of an architectural structure but also the collapse of a symbol of political power that is deeply embedded in the imperial history of Japan. In The Temples of Kyoto, Donald Richie and Alexandre Georges explain that the pavilion was constructed “as a metaphor”: The pillars extend the structure itself over the pond which suggests that the place of proper worship is between heaven and earth. It was also otherwise built to conform to descriptions of the Western Paradise of the Buddha Amida, and to embody the harmony which ought to exist between heaven and art. At the same time, of course, it also suggested that this paradise could be found on earth, and that if it were built by someone of the taste and discernment of Yoshimitsu this might surpass the celestial version. . . . [T]hat ‘the Golden Pavilion, like other temples built by political figures, symbolizes legitimized political power—legitimized, that is, by heavenly mandate’.36 The history of the Golden Pavilion’s symbolism is thus part of the political iconography of imperial Japan, which represented the emperor as sacred. As Nemoto points out, “Mishima’s ideal image of the emperor centers on this period, that of the Meiji (1867–1912), Taisho (1912–1926), and Showa (1926–1945) emperors, in which the concept of kokutai (the national polity) or ‘the sacred nature of the Japanese nation’ (Tasker 138), placed great emphasis on the emperor’s divinity as a descendant of the Sun Goddess, and on the nobility of the Japanese people as ‘children’ (sekishi) of the emperor God.”37 Accordingly, for the writer who staunchly held such beliefs as part of his political aesthetics, “the loss of the Emperor’s divine identity meant the loss of the Japanese soul, with social chaos as the result.”38 Washburn notes that this conviction compelled Mishima to adopt the role of a cultural critic denigrating postwar Japanese society as well as that of a political ideologue since he founded a private military group seeking the reinstatement of rule by the emperor.39 Mishima translates the political indoctrination of the soldier/ terrorist paradoxically through the character of the Zen acolyte who is aware of the grand political and cultural impact of the act of monument destruction on the national level, what Robert Bevan calls an act of “cultural cleansing.”40 His ultranationalist devotion to the dying empire expresses itself paradoxically in an act of cultural assassination against its heritage in monuments. For a monument to survive while a devastating conflagration consumes the imperial homeland seems presumptuous and anomalous. In Mizoguchi’s

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paranoid schema, the inviolable beauty and silence of the temple function as a counterpoint to the destructive ugliness and clamor of the war: “That summer the Golden Temple seemed to use the bad war news that reached us day after day as a sort of foil against which it shone more vividly than ever” (Temple 33). At a time of war, the unnatural aura of peace that surrounds a monument becomes oppressive and almost farcical. According to Lefebvre, “[t]o the degree that there are traces of violence and death, negativity and aggressiveness in social practice, the monumental work erases them and replaces them with a tranquil power and certitude which can encompass violence and terror.”41 But The Golden Temple shows that this dynamic is inevitably undermined during periods of brutal conflict. Complicated by the contrast between the aggressiveness he experiences internally and in the world outside on the one hand and the monument’s “tranquil power and certitude,” Mizoguchi’s conflicting feelings about the temple blend a fanatic reverence with an obsessive iconoclasm. From the perspective of postwar, post-imperial Japan, “Mizoguchi’s combined love and hatred for the monument reflect the ambivalent feelings of the Japanese people, and especially of Mishima’s generation, toward the Emperor who, they feel, betrayed them through his Ningen-Sengen of 1945, the proclamation that changed a divine figure of authority into a merely human function of the state.”42 Nonetheless, the straightforward historicalbiographical explanation is again complicated by the phenomenological and psychological dimensions of Mizoguchi’s reactions and the ontological paradox underlying the monument. During the last stages of the war, Mizoguchi’s irrational belief in the durability of the temple contends with an equally unwarranted conviction that it will definitely be the target of air raids. It may seem strange, but until then I had never thought of connecting the Golden Temple with the air raids. Since Saipan had fallen, air raids on the mainland had been inevitable and the authorities were pressing forward with plans for evacuating part of Kyoto; nevertheless, as far as I was concerned, there seemed to be no relation between the semi-eternal existence of the Golden Temple and the disaster of air raids. I felt that the inherently indestructible temple and the scientific force of fire must be well aware of the complete difference between their natures, and that if they were to meet, they would automatically slip away from each other. The fact remained that the Golden Temple was in danger of soon being burned down in an air raid. Indeed, if things continued as they were, the Golden Temple was sure to turn into ashes. Since this idea took root within me, the Golden Temple once again increased in tragic beauty. (Temple 39)

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Figure 3.2 Snow over Kinkakuji Temple, Kyoto, photograph by Ravee Chulamorkodt. Courtesy of http://www.istockphoto.com File #: 15228610

This passage abounds with paradoxical thoughts, the most obvious of which is the belief in both the vulnerability and imperishability of the Golden Pavilion as it is subjected to the threat of being destroyed in an air raid. The indestructible national monument seems like an anomaly in the burning empire ravaged by the war. Still, paradoxically, it is only when Mizoguchi is capable of imagining it burning that the temple starts to exist. It is enlivened by the possibility of it being killed, for its continuous life became unreal as soon as it clashed with the successive deaths around it (Figure 3.2). Until now the imperishability of the temple had oppressed me and kept me apart from it; but its imminent destiny of being burned by an incendiary bomb brought it close to our own destiny. It might be that the Golden Temple would be destroyed before we were. At this thought, it seemed to me that the temple was living the same life as we were. (Temple 41) The common life that a monument and the community living around it share is a significant theme in Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone. In that novel, which also stretches to the latter days of World War II, the awe that the inscrutably silent, seemingly indestructible monument inspires is unsettled by both the religious taboo that forbade figural representation in the Albanian Muslim

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context and the cultural-poltical taboo that the Greek sergeant breaks by firing at the statue: A Greek sergeant fired several shots, but no one was hit. He did, however, get the city’s only statue in the thigh. It was a big bronze statue in the town square, erected back in the days of the monarchy. The city had never had statues before that. The only representations of the human form were the sacrecrows in the fields on the other side of the river. When plans to put up a statue were announced, many fanatical citizens who had hailed the anti-aircraft gun had been somewhat skeptical. A metal man? Was such a novelty really necessary? Might it not cause trouble? At night, when everyone was sleeping as God had ordained, the statue would be out there standing erect. Day and night, summer and winter, it would stand. People laughed and cried, shouted and died. But not the statue. It would just stand there and not utter a sound. And everyone knew how suspicious silence was. . . . Anyway, this was the statue the Greek sergeant shot. People rushed to the square to see the bullet hole. Some of them went starry-eyed and imagined that they themselves had to limp. Others actually were limping, as if they had been hit in the thigh. The square was in turmoil.43 As the excerpt shows, the exceptional existence of the monument in the square affects the everyday lives of the citizens on combined psychological and political levels. But what is more important is that the meeting of the exceptional and the everyday as well as the alternating effects of breaking the religious taboo first by erecting the monument and then by attacking it all contribute to closely binding the lives of the community members to the imagined life of the statue. Analyzing the phenomenology of landscapes, Chistopher Tilley argues that “artefacts, places, and landscapes may become parts of bodies: the hand and arm which bear an artefact become fully animate and continuous with the arm that grasps it; houses and canoes may become metaphorically conceived as bodies engendering social relationships in space-time; and, like persons, things may have biographies.”44 In Kadare’s novel, the phenomenological continuity between the body of the statue and the human bodies that circulate around it provides a further dimension that is immensely useful in the critical endeavor to locate and define the life of the monument—just as we have seen in Ulysses in Chapter 2. The idea that a space of lived experience conjoins the monument with the people who pass by it in everyday life accords with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s explanation of the concept of “participation” to define

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Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel animistic and anthropomorphic systems of thought, which have always preoccupied anthropologists, in which “inanimate” natural objects, such as trees, stones or mountains, or artefacts, buildings and monuments, are regarded as being alive or having a soul, and akin to a person; a thought system in which people and animals and things reciprocally participate in each other’s existence . . . .45

Conceptualizing a framework of participation that joins monuments with the people around it reemphasizes the agency of the former with respect to the constitution of the material and mental spaces in which it is embedded. Notwithstanding the imaginative appeal of this idea, it certainly becomes disturbing and dangerous when it occupies the thoughts of a monument worshiper. *** Monumental immortality is, for Mizoguchi, an oppressive ontological conception that he strives to deconstruct imaginatively and materially. It is by means of this deconstructive effort that he reconciles his delusional visions of it as an actually living monument with a balanced conceptual perspective on its symbolical mobility: The Golden Temple was no longer an immovable structure. It had, so to speak, been transformed into a symbol of the real world’s evanescence. Owing to this process of thought, the real temple had now become no less beautiful than that of my mental image. (Temple 42) Still, the resolution of the philosophical paradox into a matter of symbolism only partially appeases Mizoguchi’s obsessive preoccupation with the monument. His dangerously deep involvement with the temple takes on erotic dimensions: I felt that a bridge had been built between myself and the thing that until then had seemed to deny me, to keep me at a distance. I was almost intoxicated with the thought that the fire which would destroy me would probably also destroy the Golden Temple. (Temple 43) Interestingly, the erotic link extends until just before the act of burning the temple. In an instance that can be compared to Rashid’s first sexual experience in the red light district before participating in the political protest in Dear Mr. Kawabata, Mizoguchi decides to visit a brothel before burning the Golden Temple. But in Mizoguchi’s case, the erotic element is embedded

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in the rationale of destroying the desired object to validate the self as a functional sexual being in the world: “I really was no longer sure whether I was intending to lose my virginity so that I could set fire to the Golden Temple or whether I was planning to burn the Golden Temple in order to lose my virginity” (Temple 209). In both cases, there is a rite of passage from the utopia of the national monument to the heterotopia of the brothel, or rather a movement across different heterotopias that refract one another in terms of their dynamics of desire and discipline. The establishment of an erotic link between self-destruction and the destruction of the monument, which is representative of the burning empire, is an investment in a nihilistic perspective. On this basis, desire and its violent consummation become objects that, for both Mizoguchi and Mishima, tentatively fill an existential emptiness brought about by political and aesthetic malaise. Nina Cornyetz contends that [i]n the postoccupation situation, disengagement from the material or discursive other(s) who might anchor the self (be it God or the emperor, Japanese history, Orientalism, or normative culture) creates a void. This emptied space is filled only temporarily, and alternately, by narcissism, lack, flux, and the wealth and reflected desire of multiple others in a commodified global market.46 Desire circulates in and out of Mishima, Mizoguchi, and the temple and through a network of narcissistic refractions that bring together life and art in an attempt to fill a political and existential void with multiple performances ultimately leading to the destruction of both the self and the desired object. In Mishima, Cornyetz finds a romantic basis for this longing to fill the void in order to make up for the loss of the empire. She writes: “Mishima’s advocacy of a revived imperial system was not the result of a naïve fanaticism grounded in belief but a deliberate, and therefore romantic yet ironic, recirculation of a falsehood.”47 Still, Mishima’s staged performance of “a falsehood” in both his life and art involved a destructively performative act that transcended the purely aesthetic romantic impulse. In this respect, Nemoto argues that Mishima was inspired by the Japanese Romantic school, the so-called Nihon Roman-ha that “considered Japan to be a nation inhabited by a superior race and culture, for which the divine Emperor was a uniting force.. . . This expectation of self-destruction led these writers to a desire for the world’s destruction as well: beauty and destruction were thus their ultimate values.”48 However, it is important to remember that Temple was written not in the context of 1930s fascism, which witnessed the rise of the Nihon Roman-ha aesthetics, but rather in the postwar period, which

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gave rise to different perspectives on the relations of beauty to destruction. In this context, Temple exhibits “the sense of nihilism and sensual escapism that seems to be almost a stereotype of postwar Japanese literature”49 but which, with Mishima, becomes a strange amalgam of romantic aesthetics, philosophical subtexts, and obsessive, destructive desires that have complex ramifications on personal and political levels. For Yamashita, Mishima’s and Yasunari Kawabata’s literary answer to the question “What do you have left after the war?” was “women, the aging and disabled. Therefore, there is a physical and sexual presence that can only be manifested as useless beauty, useless sexuality, love that cannot be consummated, only imagined.”50 But Temple reveals a still more complex dynamic: The nexus that links Mizoguchi, the monument, and the destructively erotic impulse are inflected by the postwar, post-imperial historical framework as a political trigger. My reading thus moves beyond the common perspective on Mishima’s postwar aesthetics as an assimilation of the political within a neutral cultural territory. The latter perspective is clear, for instance, in Noguchi Takehiko’s statement that Mishima’s “stipulations add up to what he thinks an emperor ought to be, namely, a sovereign who would be the ‘overseer of beauty’ and totally devoid of any political meaning.”51 Even if Mizoguchi’s motivation is aesthetically romantic, it is politically dangerous and erotically sadomasochistic. And it is by looking at transgressive desire that we can further assess the degree and nature of political subversiveness involved here. John R. Wallace argues that “Mishima, in Kinkakuji at least, envisions eroticism as having a violent and amoral, if not immoral, essence that provides a channel to the beautiful only through the inverted terms of transgression.”52 The more important critique that Wallace contributes in this respect is of the relationship of this form of erotic impulse in Temple to the compulsion to transgress specifically into the realm of taboo: Mishima . . . constructs a world in Kinkakuji where violence is a compelling, if not root, component of desire and one’s relationship to beauty. This “negative” of Mishima formally resembles that of Hegel where death and destruction are, by dialectic logic (a structure within the realm of reason), a necessary part of truth. At a more sensual level, however, Mishima parts with Hegel’s spiritual vision by making central to his discourse the transgression of taboos censoring an impulse to defile one’s erotic object. In this sense his notion of eroticism and one’s relationship to the beautiful is closer to that of Georges Bataille.53 The eroticism that influences the way Mizoguchi views the temple seems to be closely linked to the prohibitions that place it in the realm of taboo. We

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read in Temple that a notice board at the temple’s gate proscribes “alterations,” imposes absolute “preservation of these premises,” and threatens punishment. For Mizoguchi, there is a discrepancy between this logic of fear of possible vandalism and the “immutable, indestructible temple” (Temple 128). In an ironically but unwittingly self-reflexive judgment, he argues that “[t]he man who had drafted these regulations and who had thus given a summary description of this sort of deed must have been someone who had hopelessly lost his bearings. For this was a deed that only a madman could plan . . .” (Temple 128). Significantly, both the person who sets the rules of taboo and the taboo breaker are considered insane. Here again is paradox that amounts to a complex rationale and that is typical of Mishima’s work. The paradox lies essentially in the fact that psychological and material forms of violence feed both relations to taboo: creating it and breaking it. Not only is there, in Mizoguchi’s reflection and subsequent action, a cyclical flow of violence that returns on itself in a Nietzschean-Buddhist fashion, but also there is the paradoxical self-reflexive metanarrative of the relationship between madness and taboo: “[H]ow could one possibly scare a madman in advance by threatening to punish his deed? What was probably needed was a special form of writing that could be understood only by madmen” (Temple 128). What is suggested here is the entropic and performative discourse of madness that we can read, indirectly, through Harold Bloom’s statements on dark humor: The dissonance and schizophrenia of entropic humor have traditionally centered on borderland areas of the imagination: taboo and insanity, dream and fantasy, mirror-worlds at the lip of the abyss, realms of the hypothetical, the ostentatiously fictive or surrealist. [. . .] Parody and paradox are the mode of being of these narcissistic anti-worlds, and in their play with chaos they emphasize precisely form, shapeliness, structuration in an exhilarated, euphoric flaunting of artifice.54 Mizoguchi’s narcissistic antiworld seems structured and obsessed with taboo to the point of insanity and at the limits of the surreal and the spectacular. This is what makes his erotic relation to the temple a paradoxically dark but “exhilarated, euphoric flaunting of artifice.” These thoughts help take us further into reassessing the ways in which monument destroyers have been approached as madmen whose acts defy rational explanation. What underwrites such an approach is a perspective on the incommensurable magnitude of taboo breaking and its relations to psychological and political repression. Accordingly, the political ramifications of invading the dreamscapes of actual, potential, or falsely accused vandals in monumental space is a central topic in a section of the following chapter examining Pamuk’s representation of the

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Turkish secret services’ use of an amalgam of taboo, rumor, fear, and propaganda in dealing with Kurds’ attacks on Atatürk’s statues. Notwithstanding the importance of taboo in this respect, the most powerful twist of the erotic connection is its implication of consubstantiality, noted earlier in the chapter, between the physical structure of the temple that becomes a living body and the body of its lover that becomes pure matter: “Just like my own, frail ugly body, the temple’s body, hard though it was, consisted of combustible carbon” (Temple 43). In this respect, Mizoguchi’s statement extends the implications of the phenomenological continuity between the body and the perceived world whereby there is “a dialectical relation in the body in which each is mutually adjusted to the other. Sensation is a communion, or coexistence between body and thing.”55 Mizoguchi’s peculiar friend-foe Kashiwagi expresses similar yet less radical viewpoints on the similar constituency of the funerary pillar and the body it encloses: “Kashiwagi, slapping the top of the moss-covered pillar. ‘It’s stone or bone—the inorganic residue that people leave after they are dead’” (Temple 110). This comparison resituates monumental immortality in the world of human mortality to which it paradoxically corresponds. Again, there is an almost identical moment in Kadare’s novel when, beneath the same tarpaulin that had covered the main square’s only statue before its erection, piles of dead bodies (victims of the conflict between fascists and communists) are hid, and an old crone asks after uncovering them: “Who is that man standing on that rock?” she asked, pointing with her cane. “It’s a statue, Mother Hanko. It’s made of iron.” “I thought it was Omer’s son.” “It is Omer’s son, Mother Hanko. He’s been dead for a long time.”56 This short conversation is saturated with paradoxes revolving around the relation of living bodies to inorganic matter and of monuments to the dead humans they represent and the living and then dead humans who construct, observe, mock, ignore, and destroy them. Both Kadare’s and Mishima’s novels stage an almost hellish wartime landscape in which statues become indistinguishable from corpses. In this context, Lifton refers to “a Hiroshima and . . . a post-Hiroshima world . . . a world in which victimizer and victim are likely to become indistinguishable in their shared relationship to species annihilation.”57 Mizoguchi constantly reworks and complicates the relationships that set humans and monuments in relation to each other and to mortality and immortality:

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Thus my thoughts led me to recognizing more and more clearly that there was a complete contrast between the existence of the Golden Temple and that of human beings. On the one hand, a phantasm of immortality emerged from the apparently destructible aspect of human beings; on the other, the apparently indestructible beauty of the Golden Temple gave rise to the possibility of destroying it. (Temple 182–3) These thoughts lead Mizoguchi to complex philosophical reflections on the phenomenology of the Golden Temple in the context of the relationship between the “continuity of our lives” and the “solidified substance of time” (Temple 183). It is again the same paradox, with a difference. For Lefebvre, “[o]nly through the monument, through the intervention of the architect as demiurge, can the space of death be negated, transfigured into a living space which is an extension of the body; this is a transformation, however, which serves what religion, (political) power, and knowledge have in common.”58 Mizoguchi makes the relationship between the human body and the temple’s body more complex than what is implied by Lefebvre by uncovering the illusion or dream of immortality that is bestowed on both and the irrevocable destructibility of both. But Lefebvre’s thought has further importance here because it helps us read the intertwined roles of religion, political power, and knowledge in forming the burden of imperishability that troubles Mizoguchi since the temple is at one and the same time a Buddhist site, a national treasure, and an epistemological problem. *** When the war ends and the temple remains intact, Mizoguchi persists in his delusional projection of human vital powers on the monument. The temple acquires a mocking, taunting expression and seems to express its defiant imperishability: Until today, the Golden Temple had not been like this. Without doubt, the fact that it had in the end escaped being burned down in an air raid and was now out of danger had served to restore its earlier expression, an expression that said: “I have been here since olden times and I shall remain here forever. (Temple 59) In line with the persistence of paradox throughout the narrative, the architectural structure possessing communicative immortality and expressive vitality is simultaneously silent: “But what I heard this time was complete silence, complete noiselessness. Nothing flowed there, nothing changed.

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The Golden Temple stood before me, towered before me, like some terrifying pause in a piece of music, like some resonant silence” (Temple 60). Both what the temple is imagined to say and what it refrains from expressing disturb Mizoguchi at a time when the radical change in the political system of Japan instigates angry speech and silent resignation. He is again so disrupted by Japan’s defeat that he sees a complete incompatibility between the end of imperial Japan and the survival of the world symbolized by the seemingly perpetual presence of the temple: Even now I can see before me the flame-like summer light of that day of defeat, 15 August. People said that all values had collapsed; but within myself, on the contrary, eternity awoke, was resuscitated and asserted its rights. The eternity which told me that the Golden Temple was to remain there forever. (Temple 60) His friend Tsurukawa tells him that “some new and quite unimaginable period might come to our country” (Temple 64), and he decides that this must be a concretely “evil” period that requires him to “plunge as deep as I can into an inner world of evil” (Temple 65). Later, on June 25, 1950, at the outbreak of the Korean War, Mizoguchi becomes convinced that this is yet another sign that “the world was going to rack and ruin” (Temple 224). Disappointed by the air raids that did not destroy the temple, Mizoguchi’s destructive impulses long to marshal the power of nature against the resisting monument. He imagines that the southeastern wind will acquire his aggressive will and shake and break the temple and him as well: The Golden Temple, which prescribed the very structure of my world, had no curtains to shake in the wind, but stood there calmly bathing in the moonlight. Yet there was no doubt that the great wind, that evil intention of mine, would eventually shake the temple, awaken it and, at the moment of destruction, rob it of its arrogance. (Temple 124) Again, the power that destroys the monument is the same one that enlivens it. Throughout his journey toward burning the Golden Pavilion, Mizoguchi’s intense, if not anomalous, imaginative faculties make him apprehend monumental imperishability as a form of death. Once again, as has been the case throughout the novel, the basic premise is that the monument then should be killed, through an act of deliberate and measured vandalism by man or the connivance of nature, in order to be resuscitated but also to be delivered of its presumptuous persistence. ***

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Paradox emerges as the basic conceptual pattern by means of which Mishima’s novel presents its philosophical stance on monumentalization and the main character’s psychological and aesthetic relations to it. Generally, paradox fits within the larger framework of Mishima’s textual games throughout his novels. Gavin Walker suggests that “[o]ne must proceed within the Mishima text in an asymptomatic reading: disruption, reconstitution, collage, and dissolution of the preprogrammed structures present in the text, what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called ‘reconstellation’ or ‘catachresis’.”59 While this suggestion is basically a poststructuralist interpretation of the general dynamics of the Mishima oeuvre, it may also serve as a signpost for approaching the specific conceptual paradox sustaining the novel’s central mental and physical event—destroying a monument. Nihilism emerges as the basic paradigm underlying the paradox of the arsonist’s dream that compels him to burn a monument in order to revive it from a deathlike imperishability. In this respect, Washburn sees that in Temple Mishima “finds a metaphor in the burning of the famous Zen temple in 1950 for the creative/destructive duality that marks nihilist aesthetics.”60 In many instances, Mishima proclaimed the nihilistic aspect of his aesthetic politics and linked them to the existential implications of the war: I had taken secretly to jotting down epigrams such as “Whether another A-bomb falls or not is no concern of mine.” All that matters to me is whether the shape of the globe would become even a little more beautiful as a result.” I knew I wouldn’t continue in this vein . . . [and] would have to analyze comprehensively the root source of this desperate, nihilistic aestheticism of mine.61 While the creation of beauty through destruction accords with Zen Buddhist concepts, the philosophical subtext is, however, complicated here by psychological and geopolitical elements that are specific to the novel’s character and the postwar, post-imperial context framing the narrative. On this basis, although critics have emphatically associated nihilism with Mishima and the aesthetics of Temple, they have missed many of the philosophical subtleties of this connection as it emerges particularly in the idea and act of burning a national monument. Peter Abelsen argues that the main elements in Mishima’s thought as expressed in Temple are “the philosophy of Nietzsche and that of Zen.”62 Despite the importance of this remark, what many critics overlook is Mishima’s multiply overdetermined, rather than simple, appropriation of the already problematic links between Nietzsche’s core concepts and Zen Buddhism, especially the ideas of eternal return, nihilism, and will to power

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that, together, are at the heart of the philosophical paradox motivating Mizoguchi’s reactions to the monument. Recently there has been significant scholarship on the possible intentional and unintentional misinterpretations involved in both Nietzsche’s reading of Buddhism and the explanation of this reading in Nietzsche studies.63 Analysing Nietzsche’s complex uses of Buddhist thought raises the important question as to whether “Buddhism is founded on a self-contradictory ascetic ideal, a will to extinction.”64 As Bret W. Davis argues in a brilliant essay on the topic, the tensions between will and resignation, mastery and wisdom, death/destruction and the reaffirmation of life are at the heart of the philosophical dilemmas of both Zen and Nietzschean iconoclasts. In Temple, the iconoclastic violence against the monument involves similar paradoxical workings: Mizoguchi seeks to master the monument by destroying it in order to release its vital energies, but he simultaneously submits to its imperishable beauty. Within this framework, monumental significance appears as inherently paradoxical since it assimilates the dualities of the living body and the dead architectural structure and accommodates the myth of immortality within the reality of perishability. Destroying a monument ontologically and phenomenologically partakes in the nihilistic experience at the intersection of the Zen Buddhist and Nietzschean trajectories. However, as this chapter has shown, the significance of Mizoguchi’s act cannot be reduced to the philosophical frameworks that more or less overdetermine it. This is due to the defined parameters of the fictional representation of a factual event, the destruction of the Golden Pavilion at a particular moment of history. Notwithstanding its philosophical subtleties, Temple renders an amalgam of deformed yet highly imaginative psychological and aesthetic sensibilities embedded in the specific historical landscape of wartime and postwar, post-imperial Japan. When Nietzsche read late-nineteenth-century Europe, he saw that “[n]ihilism now appears, not because aversion to existence is now greater than before, but because people have begun to mistrust any ‘sense’ in evil, even in existence.”65 Refracting but also complicating Hitler’s destructive journey beyond Nietzsche’s “good and evil,” Mishima presents a conceptually and textually complex rendering of the scars of radical historical transformation and psychotic fluctuation on the landscape of a nation and the dreamscape of his protagonist. Mishima’s Mizoguchi experiences a specific malaise and “aversion to existence” that are both individually peculiar and collectively representative of a defeated Japan where the seemingly immortal legacy of the past, memorialized in monuments and other lieux de mémoire, appears as both beauty and burden.

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Chapter 4

A History of Violence: Martyrs’ Square and the Fractured Space of Memory in Rashid al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata

Dès lors j’ai pris conscience que la seule issue était la littérature parce qu’elle seule est capable de dire ce qui s’est passé, qu’elle seule peut dire cette folie que l’on ne pouvait appréhender par les concepts et que ne gouvernait nulle logique ou règle.1 I am not one of those people, Mr Kawabata, who believe in the sanctity of place, not one of those who believe that there is a conspiracy on the part of history in the architecture of a place. (DMK 118)

In Rashid al-Daif’s postwar novel Dear Mr Kawabata,2 monumental spaces appear atypical due to both their geopolitical qualities—a complex postcoloniality and uneven modernity—and the ways they are represented in alDaif’s text. This chapter looks at various ways in which monumental space emerges in the novel as a matrix for temporal and spatial displacements that signify on different levels, including the following: the centripetal and centrifugal forces that orchestrate movements between monumental space and its contiguous spaces as forms of sexual and political initiation and violence, the material and symbolical fragmentation of monumental space in the context of civil war, the complex nexus of history and memory overdetermining the war-torn urban space, and the politically performative physical and imaginative events that continually redefine this space. Cultural geography has recently demonstrated a great interest in the transformation of monumental sites into spaces of public performance that are oftentimes dichotomized with respect to their objectives: a reinforcement of existing power structures and social groupings or a resistance and disruption of these. Examples of such new cultural-geographical work that attempts to evade generalities in approaching monumental space include Brian S. Osborne’s study of the George-Étienne Cartier Monument in Montreal and John Bodnar’s analysis of commemorative practices in Cleveland.

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Osborne charts a gradual shift in the use of the performance space of the monument along a continuum that begins in commemorative pageantry in the service of dominant ideologies and regimes and ends in the liberation of vernacular voices in marginal performances. Osborne explains that the first end of the continuum is a space where “the public may experience mythic history through orchestrated commemorations and controlled spectacle. [. . .] Ideally, the involvement of large numbers of people in ritualized performances of remembering at these places reinforced societies’ bonding with them, what they represented, and with each other.”3 According to Osborne, these ideals were the major rationale behind the earliest commemorative events at the Cartier Monument. Osborne then traces the shift in the use of the site as it becomes a space for student protest and various other demonstrations by “nativist and populist groups.”4 Bodnar’s analysis of the continuum that extends from official to vernacular interests in the negotiation of public memory in Cleveland is along the same line. He argues that while cultural authorities aim to present reality in “ideal rather than complex or ambiguous terms,” advocates of “vernacular culture” insist on representing “views of reality derived from firsthand experience in small-scale communities rather than the ‘imagined communities’ of a large nation.”5 What is absent in these studies is an attention to two major points. First, commemorative practices and protests in the context of resistance against certain regimes of power or cultural authorities are almost always implicated in alternative systems of power, including emergent hegemonies that may eventually become as authoritarian as the governing bodies they seek to overthrow. These protests may also be as contrived and controlled as the commemorative practices and demonstrations that are organized by the governing authorities. As a result, their status as forms of resistance becomes ambivalent. Secondly, demonstrations as forms of public protest almost always involve a tension between a centrifugal movement toward heteroglossia and a centripetal pull toward a unitary message and structure. Accordingly, the intended or prescribed unity of what a particular demonstration signifies is weakened by the multiplicity and particularity of agencies and accidents that punctuate its structure or flow. Furthermore, even when multiplicity characterizes the events that resistance movements organize—in monumental space or elsewhere—it may not necessarily be conducive to democratic change beyond the temporal-spatial limits of these events. The uncertain but transformative character of myriad events in monumental space, especially demonstrations, can be elucidated by means of a close reading of a number of juxtaposed and interpolated narratives in

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Dear Mr Kawabata. These fragmented narratives construct a framework for al-Daif’s dramatization of the performance space in and around Beirut’s main monumental site, Martyrs’ Square.6 *** Given the many physical and ideological transformations that affected it for more than a half century, it is necessary to begin with an overview of the history of Martyrs’ Square from the early twentieth century until the last six years when its spatial significance and political function have been revisited and reappraised. In this context, the major focus will be on the political and social transformation of the square in the late prewar years (1960s and early 1970s), the destruction that affected it during the years of the Lebanese War (1975–90), and its reconstruction in the postwar era because al-Daif’s text is temporally situated within this framework. The aim is to show that al-Daif’s narrative does not merely reproduce the political, historical, sociological, and cultural geographical material on Martyrs’ Square and on the Lebanese Civil War. Rather, the narrative presents another set of discourses and experiences that supplement but also challenge the various existing approaches to meanings and events in Martyrs’ Square. Due to their large impact on the space of Martyrs’ Square and on al-Daif’s re-presentation of this space, it is necessary to first address the general geopolitical and socioeconomic issues that to a greater or lesser extent contributed to the outbreak of the hostilities in Lebanon in 1975. Although it would be reductive to single out any particular issue or set of issues as the cause of the Lebanese Civil War, two major events have been recurrently cited, by academic and popular sources, as the major catalysts of the violence (besides earlier turning points in the relationships between the Lebanese Army and the Palestinian forces in 1969 and 1973). The first event is the February 1975 fishermen’s strike to protest the licensing of a large fishing enterprise in the southern city of Saida—40 percent of its population being Palestinian refugees in 1975—culminating with the death of Maruf Saad, Saida’s most popular leader. The second event is the notorious Ain ar-Rummaneh bus incident in which twenty-eight passengers, all Palestinian, were killed by Christian militias. Historians agree that focusing on these two events implies turning a blind eye to a complex body of interrelated and sometimes contradictory facts underlying the war. In this respect, the works of Robert Fisk, Sune Haugbolle, Samir Kassir, Samir Khalaf, Craig Larkin, Tim Llewellyn, Franck Salameh, and Kamal Salibi present, in complementary ways, a distinctively keen interest in contextualizing the war within a larger historical and geopolitical framework,

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demonstrating and/or analyzing its complexity and contradictoriness and examining what it reveals in terms of the political texture of Lebanon and the Lebanese people.7 Moreover, these writers almost always link the belligerent internal conflict to tribal rivalries as well as counterproductive and often disastrous international intervention in Lebanon. In this respect, Salibi claims that [a]t an overt level, the game was a contest between different concepts of nationality for the country. At the covert level, tribal rivalries and jealousies were mainly involved. As long as this devious game was played only among the Lebanese, it could pass for day-to-day Lebanese politics, and the Lebanese state headed by the Maronites could somehow control it. There always remained a lurking danger, however, that the game could run out of control. From the very start, players from outside Lebanon could easily intrude whenever they wished to spoil its normal course; and more often than not they came by actual invitation.8 Another pressing point that these studies emphasize is the fact that the Lebanese people still refuse to face the brutal realities of the civil war and still insist on ascribing the cause of the disastrous cycle of violence to obscure evil powers. Fisk writes: “The Lebanese henceforth referred to those terrible 17 months as al-hawadess, the ‘events’, as if they were the result of some natural calamity rather than a man-made catastrophe.. . . And since no one discussed the war, no one was trying to discover the lessons which might be learned from the tragedy.”9 The last statement is especially important in that it highlights collective forgetting and the failure of the Lebanese to perform the self-analysis that would allow them to prevent the repetition of their tragic war in the future. As Sune Haugbolle argues in his recent study War and Memory in Lebanon, there have been different forms of resistance, on various levels, to this state of officially orchestrated amnesia. Haugbolle shows that, while the Lebanese state and most political parties endorsed and sponsored a war on memory, intellectuals and activists advocated the necessity to recall and confront the past in order to enable genuine political reconciliation and social regeneration. All of these works leave the reader with the impression that, for such an inconclusive and futile war as the Lebanese Civil War, there is no overarching argument or definitive narrative. A similar wide perspective on Lebanon’s violent history, internal conflicts, and internationalization dynamics has informed and influenced the ever-growing body of work on Martyrs’ Square. In the next section, I explore and critique some of the major studies on Martyrs’ Square and the Martyrs’ Statue in order to set the ground for

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an examination of al-Daif’s own, different contribution to redefining what Martyrs’ Square has been and what it can imaginatively become. *** Martyrs’ Square is also popularly known as Burj Square since it was only in 1937 that the square officially acquired its name as Martyrs’ Square.10 Before the 1975 Lebanese Civil War, Martyrs’ Square and the adjoining areas were a meeting point for the numerous religious sects, social classes, and ethnic groups that compose the Lebanese mosaic identity. The Burj formed the locus of business and leisure outlets that included the city’s red light district.11 Khalaf reads the Burj as a site that historically served as an “open space” between the city and the port and as a temporary “home” for myriad groups and individuals including “the villager and regular neighbourhood customer who was seeking familiarity and personal contact and the itinerant visitor and tourist after novelty and adventure.”12 During the war, this space was deserted and divided along sectarian and partisan lines. Martyrs’ Square and the Martyrs’ Statue at its center were a continual target for attacks by Syrian, Palestinian, and Israeli forces as

Figure 4.1 Fire in Martyrs’ Square, Beirut [November 18, 1976]. Courtesy of Assafir Documentation Center, Beirut

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well as Lebanese militias due to the symbolical significance of the site on the Lebanese national level and its geopolitical importance in the capital, the country, and the region (Figure 4.1). Once the animated business and entertainment center of the city, Martyrs’ Square was transformed into a noman’s land traversed by the infamous Green Line that divided the capital into East Beirut—mainly Christian, right wing, and anti-Palestinian—and West Beirut—mainly Muslim, left wing, and pro-Palestinian.13 In this context, Rawi Hage’s novel De Niro’s Game—one of the most brilliant portrayals of the Lebanese Civil War yet—depicts the Green Line as the site of chaotic, carnivalesque violence and tragically farcical everyday life.14 After the war ended in 1990, Solidere, a private urban redevelopment company formed and controlled by the late Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, began executing a highly controversial project to reconstruct Beirut’s Central District around the area formerly identified as the Green Line zone and to make Beirut “An Ancient City for the Future.”15 Many critics have condemned the project on socioeconomic and cultural bases. Saree Makdisi has been one of the outspoken critics of the Solidere project. He argues that the subtext of the project is the creation of a city center that is dissociated from its immediate historical referents and consequently transformed into “pure space, pure commodity, pure real estate.”16 This is the space that the postwar generation experiences as the only social and spatial reality they have known in Beirut. In Nazik Saba Yared’s Canceled Memories, the protagonist’s teenage daughter mocks her mother’s enthusiasm in letting her witness the urban landmarks before they are entirely demolished, saying, “I didn’t even know what they were like before! What would I care?”17 From this perspective, Makdisi shows, through detailed analyses and original documents, that Solidere is essentially a ploy of capitalists who are intent on exploiting and deforming the historical Beirut city center in the context of globalization, spectacle, and commodity culture and contributing to myriad forms of collective forgetfulness. Makdisi contends that “[w]hat the Solidere project represents, in a sense, is an attempt to spectacularize history.”18 Makdisi’s argument indirectly refers to Debord’s distinction between historical knowledge and the “integrated spectacle,” that is the new form of the society of the spectacle.19 In this respect, Debord states that “[i]t is in the interests of those who sell novelty at any price to eradicate the means of measuring it.”20 Anyone with knowledge of the Beirut city center in its prewar and postwar conditions can easily note the radical changes in its spatial, socioeconomic, and cultural textures. Most of its historical and architectural features have been erased, and it has almost completely lost its earlier socioeconomic components. In his extensive study of the politics of destroying monuments, Robert Bevan also examines the double bind of “the post-destruction

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context” when reconstruction projects, realized by the dominant powers, tend to create either a memorial vacuum or a memorial misrepresentation. Bevan comments on the manipulation of architectural heritage and history in the Beirut city center: “The architectural evidence of the historically heterogeneous city centre is vanishing at the same time. The 180 ha project stresses an abstract unity that harks back to a shared Phoenician or Levantine heritage rather than the pluralist reality of the still politically shaky country.”21 Jalal Toufic is even more specific in his condemnation of the reconstruction project. According to Toufic, the political aim and consequence of the project is not only reconstruction after the war but also the destruction of the evidence of the war. He writes: “The demolition of many of the ruined buildings of the city center by implosions or otherwise was war by other means; the war on the traces of the war is part of the traces of the war, hence signals that the war is continuing.”22 In contrast to Makdisi, Bevan, and Toufic, Khalaf, in his most recent work, commends the aesthetic and technical qualities of the reconstruction project: “The judicious blending of authenticity with progressive, often state-of-the-art, elements has become the hallmarks and guiding principles for all subsequent restorative projects.”23 Although it may be true that the reconstructed Beirut city center can be positively evaluated from an aesthetic perspective, it appears like a reproduced image of any European city and, hence, leaves much unsaid about past layers of lived experience and particularly the civil war experience. Most academic commentators on the reconstruction project are involved in an almost inconclusive debate that employs what al-Daif identifies, in my interview with him, as “an intellectual vocabulary that is somewhat dissociated from concrete reality.”24 Abstract language and overgeneralizations also seem to pervade current approaches to the cultural geography of political events— protests, demonstrations, and strikes—that have occurred and still occur in Martyrs’ Square. As I show in the following comparison, this is especially evident in Khalaf’s work on Martyrs’ Square and less so in Tueni’s and Sassine’s. From the beginning of the Lebanese independence struggle, throughout the postindependence upheavals prior to the 1975 civil war and until the present moment, Martyrs’ Square has functioned as a spatial matrix for a variety of more or less aggressive protests. Khalaf notes that Martyrs’ Square figured as the principal public sphere for emergent postcolonial and subaltern voices during the late years of the Ottoman era and also during the French Mandate in Lebanon. He adds that even after the Lebanese independence, “[s]tudent demonstrations, often with heightened confrontational strategies, reserved their most virulent expressions to the Bourj.”25 Many Lebanese and foreign writers, journalists, and politicians have underlined the continuing role of Martyrs’ Square as a forum for a multiplicity

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of political voices and political agendas. Khalaf argues that “[t]he collective enthusiasm sparked by the astounding spectacle of memorials, public demonstrations and political mobilisation hosted there are bound, once again, to redefine the future identity of the Bourj and its public image.”26 Similarly, Elie Haddad reveals that, as a result of the recent demonstrations (2005–6), Martyrs’ Square regained its former status as a dynamic public space for voicing political opinions.27 What clearly characterizes Khalaf’s and Haddad’s comments on demonstrations in Martyrs’ Square is their erasure of the small-scale events that are embedded in the larger context of the demonstration. These erasures contribute to another problem that is the overly positive reading of public action in Martyrs’ Square, as it appears in Khalaf’s work. According to Khalaf, the Burj’s “emergence and survival as a ‘public sphere’ ” is largely due to its three constant attributes, “pluralism, receptivity to change and tolerance to others.”28 In fact, the international political resonances of the globally broadcast images of the massive demonstrations in Martyrs’ Square and its surroundings since 2005 seem to warrant a continued optimistic reading of this public space as a national site of potentially emancipatory action, a version of what Francesca Polletta calls “the ambiguous ‘free spaces’ concept.”29 Still, there is a need to cautiously evaluate and objectively reconsider the grand epithets that have been given to Martyrs’ Square, especially in recent years. This space that has accommodated demonstrations and public protests against authority has also been recurrently mutilated by dreadful rounds of violence that continually refract the communal and factional animosities on its contested public sphere. Thus, it may be excessively optimistic to view Martyrs’ Square as a truly civic space of freedom when civic bases for the Lebanese political space have not been established yet. El-Bourj, Ghassan Tueni and Fares Sassine’s work on Martyrs’ Square, is less prone to overgeneralizations and grand conclusions than Khalaf’s.30 The book is a collection of various excerpts from newspapers, narratives, and chronologies and numerous photographs of celebrations and demonstrations in the square, and as such it does not impose a totalizing reading of Martyrs’ Square. However, while it presents disparate perceptions and conceptions of Martyrs’ Square, this mosaic of words and images does not offer narratives of lived experience by individuals or groups whose physical performances and psychological reactions to this space may have been banal, marginal, or elliptically reflective of trauma. Therefore it seems that, in studying the cultural geography of Martyrs’ Square, critics work on the basis of established cultural, economic, and aesthetic metaphors and paradigms. Hence, they tend to give little attention to the particularity and variety of the immediate experiences of those

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who have dwelled, protested, or fought in this monumental space. They are also hardly attuned to those who have dreamed, imagined, or had to come to terms with it personally, in various encounters and under different circumstances before, during, and after the war. Furthermore, historical and cultural geographical studies and other interdisciplinary work on Martyrs’ Square tend to give little attention to the implications of both the presence and absence of specific kinds of monuments in the square. *** The archeological wealth of Martyrs’ Square is juxtaposed to the Martyrs’ Statue at its center and to the monumental new mosque at one of its corners. Former prime minister Hariri had financed and overseen the early stages of the construction of this mosque that was completed after his death and after he had been buried on its grounds. The mosque has become both a personal memorial for the Hariri family and a national monument for a section of the Lebanese population. Moreover, after Hariri’s assassination, it has become part of a highly politicized public space extending throughout Martyrs’ Square and centred on the surroundings of the

Figure 4.2 Martyrs’ Statue and Mohammad al-Amin Mosque, Beirut [2010]

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Martyrs’ Statue (Figure 4.2). Hariri’s assassination on February 14, 2005, elicited a series of massive demonstrations and quasipermanent “tents of freedom” in the Martyrs’ Square and around the statue. These demonstrations and tents temporarily rallied a majority of the Lebanese parties and sectarian groups, that formerly formed the warring factions in the 1975 to 1990 period, around a united national cause that is the withdrawal of the Syrian army from the Lebanese territory.31 The most easily identifiable national monument in Lebanon is the Martyrs’ Statue in Martyrs’ Square. The monument recently rose to fame when it appeared in the international media as the locus of the March 14, 2005, nationalist demonstration against Syrian occupation and then in the partisan demonstrations presumably against the influence of Hizbullah, Syria, and Iran.32 In a sense, what has been perceived as the Lebanese Spring in 2005 appears to be repeated on a regional scale in the 2011 Arab Spring. In this context, in as much as profound political analysis has proved that it is wrong to propose an absolute binary opposition between the largely pro-Hariri demonstrations in Martyrs’ Square and the predominantly pro-Hizbullah ones in the adjacent Riad el-Solh Square, it also seems necessary to warn against setting similar binary frameworks for the understanding of the 2011 demonstrations that either resisted or supported the Arab regimes. It has become clear that what has been occurring in many of the monumental squares of the Arab world requires a close examination of the intertwined dynamics of desire for change, the need for discipline, and a consideration of the multiple local, regional, and international factors overdetermining the alliances and balance of powers within these squares. The Martyrs’ Statue that now occupies the center of the main square in Beirut replaces an earlier Martyrs’ Statue that was erected in 1937. The statue, in both versions, was dedicated to the memory of the twenty-one Lebanese martyrs—sixteen of whom were journalists—hanged after the 1915 to 1916 rebellion that was spearheaded by Arab nationalists against the Ottoman Empire. The Arab nationalist activists were tried and executed as rebels by the Ottoman authorities in Burj Square. In 1937, during the French Mandate in Lebanon, the first commemorative statue of the martyrs was erected there. The original statue embodies two women, one veiled, symbolizing a Muslim woman, and one bareheaded, symbolizing a Christian woman, weeping over a stone intended to represent the tomb of the Lebanese martyrs. However, this statue failed to attract public support and was soon removed from Martyrs’ Square (Figure 4.3). In 1960, it was replaced by the present Martyrs’ Statue that was designed by the Italian sculptor Marino Mazzacurati. The bronze monument is supposed to embody freedom in the figure of a woman holding a torch in one

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Figure 4.3 The earlier Martyrs’ Statue, now in the gardens of Sursock Palace, Beirut [2007]

hand and embracing a young man with the other. The base of the monument is surrounded with the figures of two martyrs. The Martyrs’ Statue emblematizes European cultural influence in its monumental dimensions, the features of its figures, and its iconography, namely the female with a torch representing Liberty and recalling French but also American postrevolutionary iconography wherein the gendered but abstract figure of Liberty has been employed to represent national identity.33 The European features of the sculpted figures fueled a heated debate concerning the validity of the iconographical template of the monument in the Lebanese context.34 Throughout its history, the Martyrs’ Statue has remained the site of contestation and conflict. In this respect, the most tragically dramatic episode is the Lebanese Civil War when the Martyrs’ Statue was marked with bullets and shrapnel. After the war, the statue was repaired and replaced in 2004, armless and with some preserved shrapnel and bullet marks, again in Martyrs’ Square at the center of the Lebanese capital, Beirut (Figure 4.4). In this respect, what is highly ironic in Martyrs’ Square is the absence of a memorial dedicated specifically to the devastating fifteen-year war and its victims—an observation also made by Robert Bevan and Caroline Nagel. As

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Figure 4.4 Ceremony marking the return of the Martyrs’ Statue after its reconstruction at Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik [July 16, 2004]. Courtesy of Assafir Documentation Center, Beirut

Bevan notes, the absence of a monumental artifact can be as suggestive as its presence.35 According to Makdisi, Solidere aimed to deflect public attention from the “content” of the war legacy in the capital, including the scars that disfigured the Martyrs’ Statue, and to direct this attention instead to the grandiose spaces of mass consumption and spectacular entertainment now surrounding the square.36 The irony of the absence of a postwar memorial is enormous since the war irrevocably marked the personal and collective memories of the Lebanese citizens despite the deliberate erasure of its physical signs from urban space and of its nationally divisive events from official historical records. The significance of this absence is all the more striking when approached within the framework of the relation between monuments and memorials. Monuments and memorials are only occasionally described as separate terms and objects. Commenting on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the art critic Arthur C. Danto outlines the distinction on the basis of the relation between remembrance and forgetting in his statement that [w]e erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget. Thus we have the Washington Monument but the Lincoln Memorial. Monuments commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings. Memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends. . . . Monuments make heroes and triumphs,

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victories and conquests, perpetually present and part of life. The memorial is a special precinct, excluded from life, a segregated enclave where we honour the dead. With monuments we honor ourselves.37 Michael Rowlands points out the fragility of this distinction: The art historian Arthur Danto, writing on the Vietnam memorial, distinguished memorials from monuments on the principle that the former are about the healing embrace of remembrance and reconciliation whereas the latter are usually celebratory and triumphalist. The ambiguity of the statement suggests the distinction may not be so simple, since one of the features of nationalist war memorials has been their capacity to turn traumatic individual deaths into acts of national celebration and heroic assertions of collective value.38 Taken together, Danto’s and Rowland’s arguments remind us of Pat Barker’s Another World, in which the visit to the World War I Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in France makes the protagonist reflect on triumphalism and the finality of death in monumental and memorial space: “It seemed to Nick that this place represented not a triumph over death, but the triumph of death.”39 Here the character’s statement emphasizes that Thiepval incorporates both corpses and monumental figures, the traumatic experience of the loss of human life and the celebratory iconography of the long-lasting memory of heroic sacrifice. Still, acknowledging that there are slightly different rationales behind the erection of memorials and that of monuments—though these terms are used interchangeably and their meanings overlap—provides an insight as to why the Lebanese have embraced celebratory monument making but continually rejected or overlooked the necessity to construct an appropriate war memorial in the public space of the capital. Lebanese individuals and institutions strove to counteract the effects of postwar trauma through attempts at forgetfulness, at dissociating themselves from the past, rationalizing the brutalities of the war, and reclaiming a gilded past. Therefore, as a result of both their almost obsessive attempt to forget or sanitize the civil war and their persistent preoccupation with a heritage of heroism, many Lebanese individuals and groups have preferred triumphal monumental iconography to spaces of audacious recognition and therapeutic mourning. This background allows us to understand why there have been no serious efforts to incorporate reflections on the Lebanese war as part of the Martyrs’ Statue itself or in the square. Instead, the historical relationship of the square and statue to the violent war has

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been abstracted and diluted within the framework of later events. In this context, Nour Dados notes that “[s]ince the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005 and his burial in the nearby area, there have been several attempts to reclaim some of the numerous associations of the past: the square as a symbol of revolution, the square as the centre of the city, the square as a cosmopolitan space, the square as a symbol of national unity, the square as memorial for Lebanon’s martyrs. However, narratives of the square as a line of demarcation, as a place of fear and terror, as a site of death are notably absent.”40 If a war memorial is to be built in Beirut, it must be part of a larger project of public action and complex narratives that would simultaneously acknowledge the past and engage with the challenges of the future. In this context, I find Ghassan Tueni’s words instructive: Advocating the creation, in the center of town, and wherever welcome, of war monuments and museums should not transfigure Lebanon into a living memorial to war. Beyond cataloging the victims and catastrophes of the war, and engaging in some hero worshipping of dubious taste, let us orient our interest toward nurturing hopes for a peaceful future.41 Such a space of memory and hope would comprise the experiential and symbolical dynamics of both monuments and memorials, thus revealing that the naming of spatial objects must depend not only on theoretical distinctions but also on how these spaces are experienced and represented. In the subsequent discussion, I show that literary narratives can provide a template for exploring these multiple but always specific experiences. In an interview with Eddie Taylor, Rawi Hage perceives his writing and art as performing such imaginatively memorializing functions. He says: “But in the absence of an initiative by the Lebanese government to preserve a memory of the war, it was artists and writers who took it upon themselves to create and recreate these events through the fictitious or the real. I believe my novel is an addition to that independent project.”42 The significant role of writers in preserving the memory of war-scarred Martyrs’ Square is clear in such novels as Hoda Barakat’s The Tiller of Waters, in which the square becomes a phantasmagorical space haunted by dogs, Nazik Saba Yared’s Cancelled Memories, in which narrated reflections on the postwar significance of the square occupy an entire section of the novel, and of course Rashid al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata.43 In this chapter, I address al-Daif’s multiple narrations in Dear Mr Kawabata of Martyrs’ Square and the Martyrs’ Statue along a continuum of shifting and intersecting experiences of urban space and a history of violence.

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These narrations trace the space-time of Martyrs’ Square from the prewar years to the late years of the Lebanese Civil War. *** In his essay “Surrealism,” Walter Benjamin writes: “[N]o face is surrealistic to the same degree as the true face of a city.”44 In his prose poem “War Stories,” Charles Bernstein writes: “War is Surrealism without art.”45 Analyzing the movement of the war-induced narrative in Dear Mr Kawabata, Elise Salem concludes: “War distorts and is surreal.”46 These three quotations provide the platform on the basis of which I address the combined stylistic and political implications of the surrealist narrative of the “dream of the half-statue” near the beginning of al-Daif’s novel. Mona Takieddine Amyuni employs the expression “Style as Politics” to argue that al-Daif’s style articulates a political message. Critical attention to the political dimension of al-Daif’s style has been limited and largely overshadowed by more in-depth studies focused on his use of autobiography and related issues. The emphasis in these works is mainly on al-Daif’s narratological techniques, as in Paul Starkey’s work, on general aspects of the relationship between al-Daif’s personal narrative and the history of the nation, as in Samira Aghacy’s various studies, or on al-Daif’s involvement in the articulation of a new aesthetic that is particular to postwar Lebanese literature, as in Ken Seigneurie’s articles.47 Takieddine Amyuni is perhaps the only critic who reads al-Daif’s stylistic and linguistic techniques in explicit political terms. Nevertheless, she does not focus on specific instances of this politically significant style in the individual novels; instead she makes such general statements as “[i]rony, satire, derision, and humor add a rich dimension to the bleakness of the epoch al-Da’if is reproducing, while pity and compassion elevate it to a tragic level.”48 In this section, I explore “style as politics” in al-Daif’s oeuvre within a strictly defined framework: the political ramifications of the use of surrealist techniques in a specific passage of Dear Mr Kawabata. The “dream of the half-statue” passage allows me to study one of the various techniques by which al-Daif rewrites Martyrs’ Square and the Martyrs’ Statue and, hence, contributes an alternative representation of this materially and discursively contested political space. In the multiple narratives of Martyrs’ Square in Dear Mr Kawabata, there is only a timid mentioning of the Martyrs’ Statue when Rashid, al-Daif’s semiautobiographical narrator states, “there is now an improvised café at the feet of the statue of the martyrs in the middle of the square” (DMK 117). That occurs only near the end of the novel in a passage that I will henceforth refer

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to as the Martyrs’ Square passage. The most symbolic and prominent object in the monumental square seems to be symbolically obliterated from the space of the narrative in the same way that it has been the target of postwar attempts—in political and spatial practice and in historical texts—to sever its ties to violent past events and to multiple individual and collective memories. However, this belated mentioning of the Martyrs’ Statue in the long Martyrs’ Square passage comes after a highly symbolical conjuring of a halfstatue in a dream that haunts the narrator. This recurring dream is detailed in the opening pages (6–7) of the book. My argument is that the half statue that appears in the following passage in a surrealistic context constitutes a memory-prophecy of the fate of the Martyrs’ Statue in wartime Beirut. [O]ne day, at the beginning of the war—our war—in 1975, I realized that my mouth was full of ants, that my lips were stitched together like a deep wound sewn up with strong thread. A sort of dream began to dog me, a dream that a huge half-statue was lurking in the midst of a desert that extended to infinity in every direction, spread out like a sea smooth as oil, under a sky that was cloudy and endless, merging with the limitless desert at the farthest horizon. Everything was calm and quiet. . . . Only this enormous half-statue in the middle of the desert, under the vault of the cloud-filled sky. Suddenly soldiers emerged from the two ears of the statue, small as one’s little finger, carrying machine-guns, which they let off in all directions, firing on everything indiscriminately. It was as if everything in this environment was hostile to them. Then they hurried down the folds of the statue until they reached the sandy ground, wet from the rain that had stopped only a few moments ago. They went off into the desert in every direction—so many of them that they could not be counted; it was as if they themselves had turned into the sand. Then they disappeared into the infinite expanse. Their bullets made no sound. This dream stayed with me, together with the feeling of ants crawling inside a mouth I could not open. A certain conviction was born inside me. The war was still in the first stages of its fury, which meant that only madness could speak of this reality, for it defied all normal expression. I was still insisting on speaking of reality. (DMK 6–7) The half statue can be linked to Shelley’s “Ozymandias” since both al-Daif’s novel and Shelley’s poem describe colossal statues in the middle of limitless deserts.49 The statues are simultaneously wrecked and representative of wrecking powers—hegemony in discursive and material forms. Both reflect the oppressiveness and vulnerability of monuments. Furthermore, from an

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interdisciplinary perspective, the half statue in the middle of the desert haunting the narrator’s traumatized memory appears like a surrealist artifact evoking Salvador Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory.50 Besides Salem’s aforementioned brief comment on surrealism in Dear Mr Kawabata and a few review notes concerning the surrealist mode of writing in his novel Passage to Dusk, al-Daif’s possible engagement in a version of surrealist aesthetics and politics has received meager critical attention despite the existence of evidence in his oeuvre justifying this interpretive direction. Chief among the links between al-Daif and surrealism are his knowledge of French surrealism through his postgraduate education in France in the 1970s, his involvement in the Lebanese and French Communist parties and in the socialist revolution in Lebanon, his interest in historical materialism (historical materialism being a fundamental discourse in Dear Mr Kawabata), his declared mistrust of instrumental reason, and his use of surrealist techniques in his novels, especially Passage to Dusk. In the context of a personal communication, al-Daif described the “half-statue dream” in a vocabulary that seems to pertain to surrealist aesthetics. He stated to me that “[t]he dream is a powerful haunting personal memory that can’t be explained rationally. It is narrated gratuitously. It is part of a conflict of the unconscious and irrational with the conscious and rational in Dear Mr Kawabata.”51 This statement echoes to a large extent the surrealists’—namely Breton’s—conviction that their work acts as a vehicle for “the forces of the unconscious” and that “[t]he other that speaks through him [Breton] is no ghost, but his most profound self, the self that the discourse of reason has kept in its place.”52 Al-Daif’s stylistic techniques include some of the major surrealist mechanisms and elements outlined by Breton in his 1934 pamphlet. In “What is Surrealism?” Breton discusses dreams and other psychic mechanisms, dream narratives, the oneiric object, and the exploration of the intersections of the conscious and unconscious, internal and external reality, reality and fantasy, the past and the future, and the communicable and the inexpressible. These mechanisms also comprise an exploration of the uncanny and the marvellous, the politicization of Freudian dream material, and the employment of the surrealist object as a means of widening the scope of our understanding of a complex reality.53 The last paragraph of the “dream of the half-statue” passage makes an indirect contribution to a critique of the aesthetic and political potentials of a surrealist expression or narration of reality—in this case, the reality of the Lebanese Civil War. In the last lines of the passage, Rashid states that “[t]he war was still in the first stages of its fury, which meant that only madness could speak of this reality, for it defied all normal expression. I was still insisting on speaking of reality” (DMK 7). In what amounts to a quasisurrealist

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artistic and political credo of postwar Lebanese literature, al-Daif articulates or rather appropriates a fundamental principle formulated, reiterated, and applied by several surrealists—namely Breton, Eluard, and Aragon—in their works. This principle is that of “surreality” or a “higher reality” that Breton elucidates in the following statement: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”54 Phyllis Taoua argues that Breton’s early manifesto shows that “surrealists lost faith in ‘real life’ because their belief in the precarious existence of ‘reality’ had been exhausted by their traumatic experience of recent European history,”55 that is, the experience of World War I and its accompanying bourgeois capitalist and colonial politics. In the last lines of the “dream of the half-statue,” al-Daif seems to have become disenchanted and traumatized, on political and aesthetic levels, as a result of his firsthand experience of the Lebanese Civil War. In the context of our interview, al-Daif forcefully explains this disillusionment and trauma and their influence on his practice of writing. He says: The war has left a deep impact on me. I have realized, as a result of my involvement in the 1975 events, that war is not a casual occurrence in man’s life.. . . War is paradoxically part of man’s humanity. That was the greatest disillusionment and disappointment after the war. This discovery has profoundly marked my writings and has formed one of its major driving forces. Indeed, it underlies the major themes and plot of Azizi as-Sayyid Kawabata [1999; Dear Mr Kawabata]. Undoubtedly, this insight is not absolutely new in the context of human thought and the history of ideas. However, its significance in my case lies in the fact that I have attained it as a result of my concrete experience of the war. . . . What we were witnessing during the [1975–90] war was an absolute chaos. . . . Thus, I reached the conclusion that this chaotic reality cannot be seized by means of any of the political or philosophical grand narratives. When Marxism failed as a theoretical tool for systematically interpreting the world, I lost my belief in all such systems of thought and sought refuge in writing. I felt that the world cannot be explained but it can only be told. I realized that only literature can tell [al-Daif’s emphasis] the world.56 One of al-Daif’s ways of “telling,” or in this case symbolically foretelling,57 the “rebellious” and “chaotic” reality of this war and of its space is the dream narrative that he employs as a template for his attempt, early in the novel, at representing Martyrs’ Square and the Martyrs’ Statue and narrating the events that ravaged them.

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The aim here is not to argue that al-Daif is a surrealist writer or that he practiced surrealist aesthetic and political tenets in an orthodox manner— given that any description of surrealist work as orthodox can only be tentative.58 Neither do I intend to contribute to the almost inconclusive debate as to whether surrealist dream narratives objectively reproduce authentic dreams or simply copy the texture and structure of a dream.59 Rather, I am interested in the function of al-Daif’s appropriation or idiosyncratic use of surrealist techniques in the “dream of the half-statue” passage as this function relates to the politics of the novel and specifically to the politics of the representation of monumental space. The basic premise here is that al-Daif’s real or fictional dream substitutes, through dream mechanisms, namely displacement and condensation, narrative metaphors and metonyms for the actual events of the war and for the war-torn space, Martyrs’ Square. On this basis, the half statue is a dream substitute for the Martyrs’ Statue that was metaphorically halved during the Lebanese Civil War by the Green Line, which divided Beirut on sectarian, partisan, and class bases into East Beirut and West Beirut. Furthermore, the soldiers that emerge from the ears of the statue seem to represent the numerous warring factions during the Lebanese Civil War. Rashid’s dream describes these soldiers as “small as one’s little finger, carrying machine guns, which they let off in all directions, firing on everything indiscriminately. It was as if everything in this environment was hostile to them” (DMK 7). The image of random fighting reflects the reality of fifteen years of chaotic battles and shifting alliances among the numerous armed groups. The battles devastated Beirut and transformed the bustling capital, particularly the space in and around Martyrs’ Square, into a haunted site. From this perspective, the desert in the narrator’s dream can be seen as symbolic of the deserted space of Martyrs’ Square during the war years. In surrealist imagery, the image of the body, specifically the fragmented body, often functions as a fetishistic site and a common ground for the subjective and the collective spaces of desire and history.60 It is possible to read the halfstatue as a disfigured body though not necessarily a fetishized body. It is especially a representation of the countless people physically disabled during the war and an image of the simultaneous ravaging of human space and material space. Accordingly, al-Daif’s half statue is a countermonument because it perverts the ideal of bodily perfection that is usually embodied in monuments. Still, it is unlike the statue of the disabled, pregnant woman that was placed in Trafalgar Square for eighteen months starting in September 2005 because, as a half statue, it is not a representation of the community of disabled people or an image of generation and hope but rather a marker of the disfiguring of a formerly able body and of the

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breakup of a communal mosaic by war. As such, the “dream of the halfstatue” registers a failure, or a refusal, to read the repercussions of civic strife in monumental or triumphal terms. Monuments are usually interpreted as material embodiments of certain versions of memory or history. Specifically, one dimension of the erection of statues is the act of forming collective memory or spatially representing a historical narrative. Thus, al-Daif’s half statue can be read in the Lebanese context as either the fractured collective memory or the fractured historical narrative of the nation. As it has been mentioned earlier, fractured discourses, for instance “Lebanism” and “Arabism,” instantiate various and often antagonistic ideological approaches to the Lebanese geopolitical entity and its contested identity.61 The conflicting narrations of the Lebanese nation, from the Ottoman period to the postindependence decades, have complicated the representation and interpretation of the Lebanese past and have engendered a series of conflicts in Lebanon. Although they culminated in the civil war, these conflicts are still refracted in Lebanese postwar politics. Such an interpretation of the half statue as a fractured conception of the history of the nation can be indirectly linked to the surrealists’ ambivalent attitude toward history and historical materialism and to the ironic refractions of this attitude in Dear Mr Kawabata. Moreover, the representation of the half statue as a “huge” and almost monstrous presence in a deserted space in this early passage prefigures the description of history in the Martyrs’ Square passage. In that later section of the novel, history is compared to “death, and meaninglessness,” “[an] emptiness dissolving into space,” “[a] tyrant. And a beast” (DMK 116). The historical materialist and economic perspectives can give us a still more specific reading that takes into consideration the surrealists’ hostile attitudes to bourgeois capitalism and their perturbed affiliations with communism and the proletarian revolution, as well as al-Daif’s discontinued involvement in these. On this basis, the huge half statue can be read as capitalism internally disfigured by the power of the working class represented by the soldiers issuing from the half statue. This accords with several historical readings of the background of the Lebanese Civil War, by Kassir and Khalaf, for example, as comprising a powerful class struggle. Many thinkers, historians, and novelists have read the Lebanese Civil War as the result of a growing hostility between the left, presumably representing the cause of the underprivileged and mainly Muslim population, and the powerful right, comprising the empowered capitalist elites who were at the time mainly Christian.62 Dear Mr Kawabata dramatizes and even directly analyzes this antagonism and its consequences from a historical materialist perspective. In the passage immediately preceding the half statue dream

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section, Rashid makes explicit the Marxist basis for his involvement in the violent war. He also presents a half-sarcastic, half-serious rationalization of socialist and communist ideologies. The disillusionment with communist ideals and the revitalization of an even more hegemonic capitalist system in the last years of the war become evident themes in the later parts of Dear Mr Kawabata. Al-Daif’s sarcastic appraisal and, at times, open criticism of communist ideals dissociates his work from that of most of the surrealists, namely the Breton camp, who insisted on proclaiming their commitment to the communist revolution while continually stressing the grander scope of the surrealist revolution.63 Al-Daif is neither formally a member of the surrealist movement nor does he absolutely defend the Lebanese Communist revolution in which he took part. As it appears in a dream embedded in a narrative, the half statue exhibits some essential characteristics of both the surrealist oneiric object, that is the dream object and the image-metaphor that is a product of the unconscious. Taoua argues that “[t]he Surrealists imagined an exploration of the unconscious not as an avenue for transgressive action, or for its more conventional therapeutic role as a means of individual self-discovery and healing, but as a source of artistic inspiration to be reworked by a creative subject.”64 She adds that Breton’s advocation of a journey into the unconscious is associated with his rejection of an aesthetics that reflects or comments on political and historical reality.65 In contrast, al-Daif’s unorthodox use of the role of the unconscious in his image-metaphor of the half statue is highly politicized, representative of political and historical reality, and implicitly associated with trauma. Al-Daif’s half statue lies at the juncture between the conscious and unconscious where the psyche grapples with trauma, mourning, and healing. The representation of the half statue reflects a fissure at which the fragmented national history of the war-torn monumental space and the personal memory of the narrator who experienced this space collude and collide thus deflating a strict opposition between memory and history. The surrealist template of the dream narrative, the irrational, and the fragmented body performs two major functions. It negotiates a complex experience between the narrator’s subjectivity and both the individual physical bodies and public spaces with which he interacts before, during, and after the civil war. This template also communicates an otherwise inexpressible traumatic experience and hence dramatizes a positive therapeutic process through writing. Using the title of Dali’s aforementioned painting, al-Daif’s “dream of the half-statue” registers a “persistence of memory” that the literary text negotiates constructively. In this context, David Punter’s reading of the relationship of postcolonial literature to traumatic memory is very useful:

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The literary, we may say, can be defined—among many other ways—as the major site on which that crucial question—“Do you remember?”—is insistently asked. . . . [T]he question remains of what marks its [literature’s] special relationship with the postcolonial. I suggest that this is at least a matter of the mutual connection with trauma, and thus inevitably with mourning and melancholy.66 The expression “I remember” occurs on almost every page of Dear Mr Kawabata. It resounds with the echoes of both a redemptive will to remember and thus to counter the duty of forgetting imposed by the Lebanese state—which still grapples with the aggressive impact of empires on its territory—and a melancholic tone that implies that the wounds will never be completely healed. The traumatic subtext of the “half-statue” passage is essentially communicated through an act of substitution. Instead of naming specifically the Martyrs’ Statue or any other statue that suffered physical damage during the war, al-Daif presents a surrealistic image of a half statue that is wrecked in the double space of dream and text. This act of substitution intimates a sense of present absence overwhelming the traumatized narrator and the narrative. The issue of the literary reworking of a nexus of traumamourning-reconciliation in relation to national history will also emerge in my examination of Pamuk’s narrative negotiations of the Kurdish and Armenian issues in his novel Snow. Instead of employing a surrealistic technique, Pamuk constructs a traumatized narrative texture that balances repetition and erasure in the communication of present absence. Al-Daif’s text displaces Martyrs’ Square and the Martyrs’ Statue from their location in the official space of commemoration onto a quasisurrealist narrative space that performs its own commemoration of the civil war as the crucial event that disturbs a reconciliation of memory, history, and forgetting by persisting as a present absence. Thus several epistemological confluences and aporias, in relation to remembrance-memorization-commemoration and to memory-history-forgetting, which Ricoeur traverses philosophically in his magisterial work, are rendered narratively in al-Daif’s novel. Moreover, in combining the work of productively imaginative remembrance with the traces of trauma, al-Daif’s “half-statue” replaces the Martyrs’ Statue in a discursive space wherein it becomes both national monument and war memorial thus participating in what Haugbolle, Tueni and Sassine, and others have described as the challenge of remembering the past in order to build a future. Al-Daif’s text is marked with the pains of postwar memory, its traumatic repercussions, and its melancholic dimensions but also with the jouissance that the writer’s pen creates in embodying this pain in an experimental

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narrative form. Middleton and Woods argue that, in historical literatures, “the implicit emphasis [is] not on radical onslaughts on reified literary forms but on experimental, tentative, questioning literary strategies that depend as much on active work by audiences as on anti-realist techniques.”67 Similarly, al-Daif’s success depends as much on the techniques—surrealist or otherwise—that he employs as on the aptitude of the reader to engage with such complexity. *** While al-Daif represents Martyrs’ Square elliptically through “the dream of the half-statue” in a text that treats traumatic experience by means of formal experimentation—in this case experimentation with surrealistic techniques—the latter part of Dear Mr Kawabata presents a different direction. In the long Martyrs’ Square passage near the end of the novel, the narrator names monumental space and narrates a multiplicity of events in this space as conscious and real personal experiences that obliquely traverse it. The narrative dramatizes mainly two demonstrations occurring in the space of Martyrs’ Square. Al-Daif presents these demonstrations in fragments that are embedded in a sequence of passages that all touch on Martyrs’ Square in one way or another. The relationship between these passages is important from a narratological perspective. Starkey explains that al-Daif’s narrative technique in Dear Mr Kawabata consists of a “progressive release of information” punctuated with an ingenious manipulation of movement between “different time frames, either backwards (analepsis) or forward (prolepsis).” Starkey interprets these movements as the means “for conveying what appear to be the random leaps of a disordered memory.”68 In some respects, we can read these fragmentary sketches of Martyrs’ Square as a crisis in narration, symptomatic of a memory that is overburdened and traumatized. As a result, alDaif’s text is both repetitious and fractured. But on the basis of Lefebvre’s distinctions between three levels of space, it becomes possible to approach al-Daif’s text as a palimpsest staging the collusion and collision of the narrator’s personal memories of lived space in Martyrs’ Square with the various material and textual representations of this site as a conceived and perceived space. Thus, on the one hand, in its recurrent attempts to come to terms with Martyrs’ Square, the novel stages an almost compulsive-obsessive discursive endeavor to salvage a material space ravaged by the war. However, the fact that al-Daif is able, through narration and formal experimentation, to reclaim this complex experience of space implies that the crisis is, to a large extent, resolved and the trauma alleviated if not overcome.

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The movement of the narrative charts a labyrinthine space of encounters with a number of constructed others: disenchanting encounters with spatial others, disillusioning futile struggles against ideological others, and demeaning reflections in the eyes of neocolonial others. Specifically, the narrative orchestrates a number of crucial private and public confrontations: the new urban resident experiencing the futility of commemorative events and the defects of public space (the military parade); the communist student clashing with the police (the 1969 demonstration); young men being initiated in the political space of demonstration in Martyrs’ Square and the sexual space of the red light district (the first demonstration); the political activist confronting the reality of martyrdom (the thesis on martyrdom); and the local visitor to a war-torn monumental space returning the imagined gaze of the foreign war tourist (the French tourist episode). I will discuss these engagements with Martyrs’ Square by analyzing the aforementioned juxtaposed narrative fragments. Because they are inseparable, I address, first, the military parade, the 1969 demonstration, and the thesis on martyrdom. I then move on to a discussion of the first demonstration and the red light district episode and end with the French tourist episode.69 *** Rashid, the narrator of Dear Mr Kawabata, recounts the 1969 demonstration primarily as a revolutionary event supposedly orchestrating communist, Palestinian, and Muslim resistance against what this group perceived as capitalist, pro-Western, and Christian hegemony. Nevertheless, this duality is quickly dissipated in the narration of the particular details of the microevents punctuating the demonstration that forms a major event in this case. The narrator presents the 1969 demonstration as a counterpart to the military parade that takes place in the context of the celebration of Independence Day in the same public square (Figure 4.5). In contrast to his active participation in the violent demonstration, Rashid is a cynical, distanced spectator indirectly attending the commemorative event, Independence Day, from the balcony of his room rather than from the perspective of a neutral, consenting audience. However, he seems to have internalized the culture of discipline that the state enforces since he decries the disorderly military parade and the act of vandalism that he witnesses in the monumental square (breaking a telephone booth) and attempts to report this aberration to the policeman. In this respect, Rashid states: “I would have liked to have told this policeman that the man in the telephone box was a relative of the undisciplined soldiers on parade, or at least from

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Figure 4.5 Policemen in Martyrs’ Square [July 28, 1978]. Courtesy of Assafir Documentation Center, Beirut

the same village. I was sure he was” (DMK 120). The civic significance of Rashid’s gesture is undermined since it instantiates a corrupted rationale replicating the paradigm of tribal rivalry that, as historians and sociologists have pointed out, largely contributed to the Lebanese Civil War. The irony at the expense of the narrator’s attitude toward the public sphere, particularly his compromised respect for civic values and police authority, becomes clearer in the light of the first fragmentary narrative of the 1969 demonstration. In this fictional instance that factually epitomizes the height of political tensions and the role of student movements in the 1960s according to most historians of the Lebanese war, Rashid and his militant friend, both members of the Lebanese Communist Party (an ally of the Palestinians against the then Christian capitalist regime) vent their anger and direct their verbal and physical attacks against the policeman. The friend dubs the policeman “[t]he agent, the dog, the instrument of state oppression” (DMK 114). The narrator reveals that one of his friend’s slogans in demonstrations reads “‘Policeman, your son’s a student; throw away your weapon and join us’” (DMK 114). The irreconcilable differences that pit the left-wing student against the policeman ignite a deadly battle that is not appeased even

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when both parties are wounded. Al-Daif’s detailed narrative diagnoses, with almost clinical precision, the blind hatred that afflicts both sides: When I reached the entrance I saw him collapsed on the staircase opposite a policeman, who was pulling at the gun strapped to his shoulder against his body. . . . The policeman opened his eyes. They bulged so much that I thought they would spill out of their sockets. He looked at my friend with these eyes, and my friend looked back. Their eyes met. Then they closed them, so that each could go away to attend to his own pain—or so I imagined, because some moments later I saw him get up and throw himself on the policeman with an animal movement, with all the determination (or what was left of it) he possessed, trying to snatch the gun that the policeman was unconsciously gripping instinctively, without getting up.. . . The policeman stared at him as we were going out and spat, but his saliva got no further than his lips and ran down his chin. (DMK 113–14) In both instances of the military parade and the demonstration, the narrative underlines the role of the police as agents of surveillance and repression in monumental space while it highlights the violence of both the demonstrator and the policeman. This passage is strongly evocative of the few hundred occasions, throughout the last century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, when policemen clashed with students and activists demanding reform and civil liberties, whether in Wenceslas Square (1968), Tiananmen Square (1989), Taksim Square (throughout the 1960s), Tahrir Square (2011), or any other monumental space. The dramatization of violence in al-Daif’s narrative of the 1969 demonstration in Martyrs’ Square negotiates the various interpretations of monumental space by different individuals and groups as well as the dynamics of occupying and controlling this space. The narrative focuses on an organized public performance against a “repressive regime” (DMK 127). In this respect, there are two main differences between al-Daif’s representation of the struggle, on the one hand, and new cultural-geographical and other approaches to demonstrations in monumental space, on the other. Primarily, unlike typical approaches to protests in monumental space, as in the case of Tiananmen Square, wherein the larger impact of violent repression on the protesters is traced, al-Daif’s narrative focuses closely on the details and idiosyncrasies of the specific encounter between a particular student and a particular policeman. Instead of charting the encounter in abstract ideological terms, al-Daif emphasizes the concrete physical details moving from the individual body to the eyes, the stare, the spit, and the chin.

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In this respect, there has been little attention within cultural geography and other geographical and historical approaches paid to the complex politics and details of specific demonstrations. Instead, the dominant tendency has been to systematically structure monumental spaces as sites of discursive struggles between an oppressive official system, on the one hand, and vernacular, popular, or unofficial voices, on the other. As such, these studies neglect the complex human dimensions of events in monumental space, and they provide only a binary analysis of their politics. In the context of Middle Eastern studies, examples include James L. Gelvin’s analysis of demonstrations in post-Ottoman Syria and various articles on the Martyrs’ Square protests from 2005 onward.70 Through a series of binary oppositions, Gelvin categorically contrasts populist demonstrations to protests staged by the Arab government. Even when considering examples of specific protests, Gelvin’s study addresses the collective framework and agenda of the protest without touching on individual small-scale events within the main event. Al-Daif’s novel overcomes binary oppositions by narrating the specificities of the confrontation. Both sides, police and students, prove to be brandishing and enforcing their one-sided ideological conception of public action and the public sphere in as much as they both fail to concretize the ethical discourse of their ideologies on the ground. In this respect, al-Daif seems to be indirectly reinterpreting Debord’s conclusions in The Society of the Spectacle when he shows that both the capitalist state and the left are implicated in a falsification of practical action and of meaningful reality. Furthermore, al-Daif’s text shows that the persistence of protracted violence throughout the demonstration complicates any reading of the square as an “open space” or “free space.”71 Responding to my question as to how he views his dual role as an exmilitant member of the Communist Party and a novelist negotiating not only a horrific experience of the atrocious war but also disillusionment with respect to the practical feasibility of Marxist thought, al-Daif says: The war proved that many of the Marxist theoretical paradigms do not provide an adequate groundwork for elucidating the reality—the events that actually occurred. None of the available conceptual systems could explain this rebellious reality. What we were witnessing during the [1975–90] war was an absolute chaos: The Christian labourer was killing the Muslim labourer; the Muslim was killing the Muslim; the Christian was killing the Christian. The repercussions of the Palestinian strife, the Syrian intervention, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the American-Soviet struggle in Lebanon all contributed to this chaos. . . . When Marxism

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failed as a theoretical tool for systematically interpreting the world, I lost my belief in all such systems of thought and sought refuge in writing. I felt that the world cannot be explained but it can only be told. I realized that only literature can tell [al-Daif’s emphasis] the world.72 As it attends to the intricacies of the dehumanized relationship between individual human beings in a particular instance of public protest, al-Daif’s narrative thus seems to proclaim individual writerly authority to “tell” a crucial episode preceding the war. There will be no atttempt here to acknowledge or contest the legitimacy of this claimed authority. The significant point is that, in telling this episode, al-Daif presents a counterpart to theoretical generalizations about political performance in monumental space and to spectacular or sensational media reports on such events as has been recently experienced with some television coverage of protests in the Middle East and North Africa and earlier in eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Recent studies by cultural geographers have pointed out that political performance in monumental space stages a conflict over the control of space, over the control of the meaning of space, or both. Al-Daif’s narrative of the 1969 demonstration reveals that control over space is at the center of the political struggle that triggers the demonstration and confrontation in Martyrs’ Square. In this respect, Rashid describes the day of the demonstration as “[t]he day the state security forces tried to take over Martyrs’ Square” (DMK 127). The representation of the 1969 demonstration highlights another recurrent process in monumental space: the struggle over the meanings of this space. In this context, Nuala C. Johnson argues that there is a continuous interaction between the symbolic spatiality of earlier events and “the current metaphorical and literal spatial setting of the memory-makers.”73 What is underlined in al-Daif’s second fragment, in relation to the 1969 demonstration, is the undermining of stable present and future identities, communities, and power politics in consecrated sites that are constructed to conserve an ideologically determined myth of stability established in the past. Specifically, the narrative of the demonstration marks the impregnation of monumental space by a conflictual dialogue between the present and the past about the meanings of martyrdom as these inflect the spatial politics of the monumental square. The narrative of imagined or real martyrdom—Rashid and his comrade almost die in the demonstration—elicits a reconsideration of the political and historical resonances of martyrdom thus introducing a matrix of contending interpretations into the official text of Martyrs’ Square. What is unraveled is the heteroglossia of martyrdom rather than its fixity. The

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original martyrs of the square died for the cause of Arab nationalist resistance against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Lebanese capitalist regime constructed and consecrated the Martyrs’ Statue in the 1960s at the apex of capitalist expansion and of uneven socioeconomic development in Lebanon. Then the socialists, communists, and Palestinians appropriated the narrative of martyrdom as their discourse in the conflict that fueled the Lebanese Civil War. Rashid highlights both the ambivalence inherent in this discourse and its perpetrators, victims, and purported heroes. Describing his comrade’s role in the revolution, Rashid writes: “He was seeking his own death. Martyrdom. For it is martyrdom alone in decisive moments like this that can bring history to fruition, spurring it on to take the decisive steps towards socialism. Towards freedom, justice and equality” (DMK 129). The exaggerated rhetorical style of the statement and the content of its context, especially the confrontation with the policeman, reveal ironic undertones that undercut the possibility of reading it as a definitive and valid interpretation of martyrdom and of the meaning of Martyrs’ Square from a socialist perspective. The ambivalent stance with respect to martyrdom is already evident in an earlier statement in the account of the demonstration when Rashid states: “I would also have liked to have said to him [his friend] that courage did not consist in exposing oneself as an easy target when there wasn’t any need for it” (DMK 128). Commenting on the role of the Lebanese writer in deconstructing the rhetoric of martyrdom, al-Daif states: I am going against the dominant rhetoric. Let us not forget that rhetoric determines the conception of the world within a given culture, especially Arab culture. This dominant rhetoric consists of the ideas that death leads to life; that earth needs blood in order to blossom; that martyrdom fertilises earth in order for it to bloom with freedom. This is the prevailing trend of thought in Arab culture. I think that it is dominant in every culture. Nowadays, this rhetoric/dream is being realized powerfully. Martyrs, martyrs, martyrs . . . every day. As I mentioned earlier, there is an inflation in the martyrdom culture.74 As a remedy to this “inflation in the martyrdom culture,” al-Daif advocates a culture of fear that he distinguishes from inaction, passivity, or weakness. In the same interview, al-Daif explains that [f]ear is not cowardice. Advocating fear is a reaction to the inflation in the culture of martyrdom. Dying for a cause is an ideology that has been dominant since the beginning of time and that is anchored in the Arab culture and all the other cultures in my opinion. It is time to serve the

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cause without having to die. Advocating fear is an invitation to develop new ways to serve the cause.75 The “inflation in the martyrdom culture” is paradoxically most pronounced during civil wars when the enormity and absurdity of loss in human life deconstructs the significance of martyrdom. In this respect, Rashid, the narrator, says, We used to name our children, our schools, and our institutions after them. When we mentioned them, we would remain silent for a few moments, and if we were sitting would make a point of standing in their honour. At that time every martyr was a distinguished martyr—not like today, when martyrs come in tens of thousands, but few of them are distinguished. (DMK 128) Still, it is the rest of the fragmentary thesis on martyrdom that ultimately removes it as a discourse from the duality of interpretations structured by the grand narrative of the struggle in Lebanon. The passage immediately following Rashid’s description of his comrade’s martyrdom disseminates the meaning of martyrdom by pointing out its marginal, incongruous subjects. This passage is italicized in a paragraph set between the discourse of socialist martyrdom and an elegy of the age of honoring martyrs in Lebanon, a period that ended as soon as the war started. The italicized narrative concerns the attempted murder of the comrade’s girlfriend. Orchestrated by the victim’s father who epitomizes the disruptive role of reactionary Islam amid the revolutionary socialist forces, the attempted murder deflates the rhetoric of the revolution in as much as it sheds light on the martyrs of everyday life who remain uninscribed in stone, marginalized with respect to all opposed discourses and commemorative events: capitalist or socialist, reactionary or radical, Christian or Muslim. These martyrs are some of the maginalized others of Martyrs’ Square in its material and discursive manifestations. Their present absence highlights a disturbing erasure in the supposedly utopian space of Martyrs’ Square. Saba Yared’s Canceled Memories presents a similarly poignant and suggestive meditation on the wartime redundancy of martyrs: “The Martyrs Square,” Huda continued. “I think that’s the best name for it right now”—even though they had forgotten the Martyrs’ Day during the war, she thought to herself. Why have they forgotten it? Was it because the martyrs back then were different from our martyrs? But then there were only fourteen martyrs, whereas we have hundreds of thousands.

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Was it because those martyrs sacrificed themselves, but ours were sacrificed by other people? Then she remembered that only the fourteen people who were hanged were known. What about the thousands who died of starvation afterwards? . . . History doesn’t remember their names, just as we won’t remember the names of our martyrs.76 Just like Rashid, Huda recalls the numerous martyrs whose names do not enter official history and whose figures are never sculpted in stone, bronze, or marble. At the same time, she raises momentous questions about the meaning of martyrdom in the context of war, economic disasters, and internecine violence. *** In his study of “The Violence of Public Art,” W. J. T. Mitchell argues that [t]he relation of pornography to propaganda is a kind of allegory for the relation of “private” to “public” art: the former projects fetishistic images that are confined, in theory, to the “private sphere” of sexuality; the latter projects totemistic or idolatrous images that are directed, in theory, at a specific public sphere. In practice, however, private “arousal” and public “mobilization” cannot be confined to their proper spheres: rape and riot are the “surplus” of the economy of violence encoded in public and private images.77 Within an economy of violence, the dialogue of pornography and propaganda in the private and public spheres articulates the dialectical rationale of a key passage in Dear Mr Kawabata. The concept of heterotopia provides the most useful theoretical framework for the study of this spatial and political dialogue. On this basis, it becomes possible to understand the representation of monumental space in relation to other spaces in al-Daif’s novel. Hetherington’s basic outline of heterotopias sets the groundwork for the subsequent analysis. He underlines five points with respect to heterotopia: [F]irst, no space can be described as fixed as a heterotopia; second, heterotopia always have multiple and shifting meanings for agents depending on where they are located within its power effects; third, heterotopia are always defined relationally to other sites or within a spatialization process, and never exist in and of themselves; fourth, heterotopia, if they are taken as relational, must have something distinct about them, something that makes them an obligatory point of passage, as otherwise it is

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clear that any site could be described as in some way Other to another site (Genocchhio 1995); and fifth, heterotopia are not about resistance or order but can be about both because both involve the establishment of alternative modes of ordering.78 Both Foucault and Hetherington identify brothels as types of heterotopia. Foucault mentions brothels as prime examples of what he calls heterotopia of “illusion” since “their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory.”79 The following discussion approaches the red light district adjacent to Martyrs’ Square as a heterotopia of illusion undermining the structure and the centrality of the monumental site. The importance of this space in the narrative of Dear Mr Kawabata is that it textually replaces Martyrs’ Square as the major site of action in the narrative of the first demonstration in which Rashid participates with his male friends from his native village, Ihdin. Rashid states: “We arrived very early at Burj Square, the place that had been designated as the starting-point of the demonstration” (DMK 87). Wandering the streets around Martyrs’ Square, the boys find themselves in the red light district, officially named Mutanabbi Street. He adds: “We started to wander round and round, finding ourselves in this same street time and again” (DMK 89). Later, he describes the awesome appeal of this space that deflects their attention from the initial objective of their visit to Beirut: “It was still very early for the time of the demonstration, so we started wandering again through the nearby streets, only to find ourselves once again in the red-light district, Mutanabbi Street” (DMK 90). The fact that most of this episode occurs in the red light district rather than in Martyrs’ Square—the boys hardly spend any time in the square—undercuts the centrality of the monumental space in the urban schema. Reworking Foucault’s understanding of heterotopia, Hetherington argues that “heterotopia are the sites of limit experiences, notably those associated with the freedoms of madness, sexual desire and death in which humans experience the limits of their existence and are confronted by its sublime terror.”80 The heterotopic space of the red light district attracts the would-be political activists and changes the trajectory of their movement from a centripetal direction toward the center of the politicized monumental space to a centrifugal movement toward the margins: heterotopic space and its ambiguous matrix of economic and sexual politics. Instead of an organized performance of political action and activism in monumental space, there is a performance of uncertain sexual and economic exchange as well as a marked tension between control and freedom. Hetherington contends that “[h]eterotopic places are sites which rupture the order of things through their different

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mode of ordering to that which surrounds them.”81 The red light district refracts monumental space through the pattern of naming public spaces (AlMutanabbi commemorates an Arab poet in a space of illicit sex), the web of discipline and desire, the right of access, and the possibility of emancipation through assertive action. As such, the red light district forms a space of otherness and of disturbing mirroring effects with respect to monumental space. As they move from monumental space to the red light district, the boys seem to be crossing a threshold where the rights to enter or to leave are conditioned by financial criteria. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin links prostitutes with the experience of thresholds, rather than boundaries, since a threshold signifies a “zone” and a movement of “swell[ing]”82—much like the liminality that conditions Joyce’s Nighttown in the “Circe” episode. Reading heterotopia in relation to thresholds, Foucault states that “[h] eterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications.”83 Read from this perspective, the red light district seems almost more forbidding than monumental space. Moreover, the red light district is punctuated with internal ambiguities concerning control and freedom, surveillance and privacy, thus disturbing a categorical interpretation of heterotopic space as a site of resistance. The group of friends is threatened by the web of the unknown and the inaccessible in the red light district. They are anxious about their identities, about control by the other—the prostitute as a subject and object of sexual-economic power politics—and about surveillance and anonymity since they are afraid that someone would report their participation in the demonstration and their actions in the red light district to their parents in the village. Hence, what is supposed to function as a space of sexual freedom emerges as a site of restrictions, hierarchies, and spectacular commodification. If limits, ranks, and spectacle seem to be more highlighted in the red light district than in Martyrs’ Square, this is only illusory. The friends’ rite of initiation in both spaces—this is their first experience of sex and of public protest—is interrupted due to a lack of money to pay the prostitute, in the first case, and the taxi to return to their village, in the second. Moreover, in both the brothel and at the demonstration, the boys act as passive followers or initiates. They are intimidated by the authority of the pimp in the brothel and the policeman in the demonstration. Their intimidation is also symptomatic of the disorienting effect of urban spectacle on their rural background. Both the neon signs advertising the names of the prostitutes and the banners advertising the political messages of the demonstration are

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Figure 4.6 The red light district in Beirut at the beginning of the war [November 1976]. Courtesy of Assafir Documentation Center, Beirut

conspicuous aspects of the spectacular public space. Al-Daif’s text ironically shows that both forms of advertisement contribute to a fragmentation and devaluation of reality, of what is being presented for consumption in the sexual and political spheres. In the red light district, the narrator is dazzled by the signs he reads: We started to read the signs with women’s names written on them. Marika! This name caught our attention. . . . We were struck that the signs were no different from other signs belonging to shops, cafés and other similar establishments! We were struck by the women we saw coming out of the buildings and going into the shops next door to buy things. (DMK 89) The most famous sex worker in prewar Beirut, Marika, becomes a commodity amid the luring spectacle of the neon signs (Figure 4.6). Similarly, in the demonstration in Martyrs’ Square, the narrator notes: There were banners, with slogans on them against the capitalist clique and oppressive regime. Some of them called for the state to open the borders with Israel to the Palestinian guerillas. Others called on the

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working class to revolt, to change the regime and to build socialism. A lone banner which caught our particular attention demanded the presidency of the republic for the Muslims. (DMK 93–4) In both cases, image and discourse contribute to the commodification and spectacularization of sexual and political exchange.84 Hence both the red light district and monumental space are dominated by the politics of representation—image or discourse—and by the dynamics of selling what they represent—the female body, freedom, martyrdom, and other such ideals and enticements. Both spaces bombard “consumers” with a confusing wealth of images that may conceal hidden dangers (the banner that “demanded the presidency of the republic for the Muslims” is disturbing to the young men coming from a Christian village). In the previous chapter, I analyzed the ways in which Joyce’s Nighttown orchestrates forms of control, commodification, and tentative subversiveness that associate the heterotopia of the brothel with such official spaces as monumental space. In “Circe,” the text almost dissolves the two spaces in a dystopic carnivalesque drama. In Dear Mr Kawabata, the narrative of the friends’ drift from Martyrs’ Square to the red light district blurs the boundaries between heterotopic space and official space while highlighting their spatial contiguity and the tensions that overdetermine the movements between them thus contributing to a revisioning of monumental space and its so-called margins. That the feminine heterotopic space of prostitution momentarily appears more fearful to the male friends than monumental space sheds a light on the chauvinistic gendering of the latter. The martyrs commemorated in the Martyrs’ Statue in Martyrs’ Square are all men. Numerous cultural geographical and cultural historical studies have noted the erasure of women from the iconography of monumental landscapes and their replacement with symbolic figures.85 In this respect, W. J. T. Mitchell astutely notes that [t]he famous examples of female monuments to the all-inclusive principle of public civility and rule of law—Athena to represent impartial Athenian justice, the Goddess of Reason epitomizing the rationalization of the public sphere in revolutionary France, the Statue of Liberty welcoming the huddled masses from every shore—all presided over political systems that rigorously excluded women from any public role.86 Ironically, however, statues of women have often been the object of more important and expensive market deals than those of men.87 Though abstracted into ideal images and commodified, female figures have indirectly entered the cultural landscape and marked it with their presence.

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There has scarcely been any critical attention to the fact that one of the stone figures in the Martyrs’ Statue is a female liberty figure embracing a young man. This abstracted ideal image of a female initiating a male into freedom is refracted, in al-Daif’s narrative, in the disturbingly real females initiating the young men from the village into another kind of equally compromised freedom, a postvirginal condition that induces both temporary emancipation and disillusionment. Thus, in the red light district, the young men encounter real women who, to some extent, stand as counterparts to the abstract sculpted female figure in the Martyrs’ Statue. Ironically, the juxtaposition shows that the abstract woman of monumental space is endowed with a legitimacy that is denied to the real woman who occupies the socially illegitimate space of the red light district. Nonetheless, neither woman possesses the freedom that she symbolizes or appears to bestow. At the same time, the freedom that both female figures offer for consumption by the males is constrained and compromised by the loss it entails—loss of virginity in the red light district and possible loss of life in Martyrs’ Square. As such, al-Daif’s narration of performance in the feminine heterotopic space of the red light district seems to refract the gaps and erasures of monumental space with respect to women in as much as it reveals the pitfalls of male freedom in both spaces. Thus, relocating what new cultural-geographical and other cultural-historical approaches to monumental space theorize as an absence in commemorative spaces and practices, al-Daif presents a heterotopic presence in a doubling space of sexual and political agency and performance. It is clearly wrong to categorically read either monumental space as a site of control or the red light district as a site of resistance especially since performance in private space can be subject to surveillance in as much as public space can be appropriated for private performance. In fact, the description of the apparent peaceful contiguity of Martyrs’ Square and the red light district in the prewar era seems to suggest a seamless continuity between these spaces. In this respect, Rashid says, We called our capital’s main square Martyrs’ Square by official decree, but it was popularly known as “Downtown” or “Burj Square”. Before the war it was the heart of the capital, with its markets, banks, cinemas, popular theatres, hotels and red-light district, and its bus stations and taxi ranks served by vehicles from every part of Lebanon. It was the heart of Lebanon. (DMK 115) This excerpt is similar to Khalaf’s description of the square before the war: “The Bourj with its boisterous traffic hub and terminals, flanked by all the

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outlets for leisure, entertainment, popular culture, such as cinemas, bars, small hotels and rooming houses, sidewalk cafés and, of course, its infamous ‘red-light’ district.”88 In both Khalaf’s and al-Daif’s texts, the red light district emerges as an apparently organic extension of the monumental space rather than a threatening frontier. The ambiguity of social ordering in heterotopia paradoxically provides a groundwork for understanding the uncertainty that underlies the structuring of power relations in spaces associated with conventional ordering, namely monumental spaces. In this way, al-Daif’s narrative of the young men’s movements between Martyrs’ Square and the red light district seems to be an extension of Foucault’s arguments, in “Of Other Spaces,” on the relationship of the brothel as a heterotopia of illusion to supposedly real spaces—in this case monumental space—that this heterotopia exposes as still more illusory. Furthermore, a reading of movement across monumental space and heterotopic space allows an understanding of the atypical communal formations that are defined by this movement. The group of friends represents a multiplicity and overdetermination of subjectivities: young, male, villagers, students, protesters, sexual clients, in addition to other forms of belonging. Their performance constructs their occasional collective identity as an inoperative community with limited performativity. They become an inoperative community as they face symbolic death through the female body in its living form and monumental form.89 As al-Daif’s narrative reveals, emancipation is not fully concretized for this inoperative community whose performance is characterized by delay and present absence on both symbolical and practical levels. In this respect, Margaret Kohn warns against unrealistic readings of resistance in heterotopic space since it may maintain forms of control and socioeconomic disadvantage. She writes: Heterotopias can be the bases of guerilla struggles against normalization but they can also perfect more nuanced forms of social control. Thus, we need a more precise concept: the heterotopia of resistance. The heterotopia of resistance is a real counter-site that inverts and contests existing economic or social hierarchies. Its function is social transformation rather than escapism, containment, or denial. By challenging the conventions of the dominant society, it can be an important locus of struggle against normalization.90 Kohn’s subtle remark on the relation of heterotopia to social control and resistance is useful for any careful and balanced reading of this concept

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and its applicability. Accordingly, the young men’s experiences in Martyrs’ Square and the red light district exemplify “more nuanced forms of social control” rather than methods of effective resistance or emancipation. Thus, rather than celebrating “the heterotopia of resistance,” al-Daif’s narrative highlights the ambivalent outcomes of attempts at sexual and political emancipation in both Martyrs’ Square and the red light district. *** In the long passage in which Rashid describes Martyrs’ Square, tourism provides the framework for the final examination of the multiple representations of the monumental square in al-Daif’s novel. In describing the late wartime reality of Martyrs’ Square, Rashid emphasizes and laments the excessive commodification of the site within the context of consumer culture, the media, and tourism: Film-makers have taken shots there, photographers have taken pictures there and journalists written articles about the place. Visitors pay visits, tourists travel and there is now an improvised café at the feet of the statue of the martyrs in the middle of the square. Concerts, song recitals and sound-and-light shows have been held there, in some of which children have taken part—children, of course, being a token of peace and the future.. . . Reports of these events stirred in me a desire to disappear, I mean to melt away into nothingness, to become a thing forgotten. (DMK 117) The narrator attempts to specify the cause of his disapproval of the aestheticization and commercialization of Martyrs’ Square by focusing particularly on its cultural transformation in the context of war tourism. Commenting on a French friend’s reaction to the square, Rashid states: I will try to tackle the subject from another angle. A French friend said to me after visiting the commercial centre: C’est beau! C’est poétique! Beautiful, pure poetry! I raised my voice in her face to protest that this was my country, destroyed by evil hands— . . . Exotica!

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She heard me mutter this word and looked as though she would like the earth to swallow her up, she was so embarrassed. Exactly as I would like the earth to swallow me up, Mr Kawabata, as I write these words. C’est beau! C’est poetique! These words expressed exactly how I felt also! In fact, I wasn’t actually upset by my friend, but by a disturbing feeling that could not be overcome by the poetic nature of the dreadful destruction. The feeling of embarrassment was made worse by the painful memories of the suffering we had experienced, the humiliation we had endured, and the fear we had felt. There, and in every place like it. (DMK 117–18) What appears initially as a difference in the responses of the local resident and the tourist reveals two important facts. Primarily, the apparent difference is an illustration of both the inevitability of constructing meaning in monumental space and the impossibility of maintaining this space within a fixed interpretive framework, despite official pressures to do so. Furthermore, it implies the need to specify the historical and personal particulars of the specific sociocultural exchange and of the two individuals’ reactions to monumental space. Significantly, the passage recounts a fictional instance of war tourism. The participants in the exchange are a village-born male writer, who has studied in France, participated in the communist revolution and the Lebanese Civil War, and now resides in Beirut, and his French female friend who is visiting Beirut’s city center in the late years of the civil war. Reading the difference in reaction from the perspective of the backgrounds of the participants in this particular context of war tourism accords with Karen Till’s argument that “[p]laces of memory in a national capital . . . are experienced differently by international visitors, by national citizens from various regions and social groups, and by residents living in that city.”91 Still, rather than being fixed identities, the participants exhibit what can be identified as temporary subjectivities. As Rebecca Solnit argues, tourists can also be, at other times, protesters or pilgrims.92 The context of the sociocultural exchange in this passage also reveals the intertwining of an Orientalist discourse that presents a dehistoricized East as exotic or other and a postmodernist commercial culture that relies on commodities, simulacra, and kitsch, all of which are exemplified in the project of reconstructing Beirut. In this context, Rashid does not assert a binary opposition between Western and Eastern perspectives, or between the French, the former colonizer that has now become a neocolonizer, and the Lebanese,

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the formerly colonized.93 Rather, he reveals their complicity and their implication in similar interpretations of this monumental space. Rashid, the narrator, confesses the fact that he has internalized this mythmaking attitude because he also views the destroyed space of Martyrs’ Square as poetic and beautiful, almost as an “other space,” thus adding a further dimension to heterotopia. This attitude is all the more ironic because Rashid expresses it before the final stages of the war fury that devastated Beirut and before the start of the reconstruction project that aimed at transforming the city center into an allegedly poetic and beautiful space of consumption. As such, the discourse of otherness is disseminated in monumental space across a network of local-global relations. Despite the postmodern techniques of Dear Mr Kawabata, dissemination does not endow the novel with a depthless textuality. Rather, dissemination signals a textual refraction of the persistent and inevitable struggle for mutual understanding among human beings from different backgrounds as they come to terms with the space of war, memory, and monuments. My reading is along the lines of Seigneurie’s interpetration of the combined aesthetics and politics of al-Daif’s writings as “both a clear-sighted admission of human limitations and a voluntaristic adherence to humanism nevertheless.”94 Seigneurie calls this “a humanist survival aesthetic for ongoing war.”95 The expression “ongoing war” is most pertinent here because it registers the repercussions of the war in the postwar period and its literature. On another level, the relations of otherness in the novel also include the narrator’s diegetic other, the narratee who is the writer Yasunari Kawabata to whom Rashid supposedly narrates his personal experience of Martyrs’ Square.96 In all these otherness relationships, the discourses of the aesthetic and the exotic clash with the specificity of the reality on the ground—the human and material cost of the war that only the local resident, represented here by the narrator, has directly experienced. But this historical and spatial specificity is also exemplary of “every place like it” (DMK 118) in the sense that it symbolizes the devastation of monumental spaces by war anywhere else in the world. *** In Canceled Memories, Saba Yared dedicates a very long passage to the contemplation of the Martyrs’ Statue in relation to the intertwined politics of memorials, martyrdom, and the manipulation of collective memory in a traumatized society that is devoted to forgetful spectacle. You miss the Ottomans when we’re standing in front of the statues of the martyrs the Ottomans hanged?”

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Huda was upset by her daughter’s comment. “I don’t miss those times,” she explained. I miss the architectural masterpieces that were built during the Ottoman period. Besides, it wasn’t the tyrants who created those masterpieces, Dina. It was the people, the architects, the labourers, and the craftsmen. They were victims too.” Why had she mentioned only the police station and not Marika’s house, right behind it? . . . Dina was contemplating the martyrs’ statue, now riddled by the bullets of people trying to make more martyrs. The woman still stood there, holding up the torch of liberty, her hand on the shoulder of a young man. Two other young men were at her feet, one in front of her and the other behind her. All of them were looking up. “You think they’re looking up at the future, Mom?” “Will the future remember its martyrs?” Huda wondered instead of answering her daughter and led her toward some chairs lined up by the statue’s base. A few were shaded by umbrellas with Marlboro ads. Another sign stood by the umbrellas: “The Martyrs’ Café.” This is the present’s way of mocking its martyrs, Huda thought bitterly. Some pictures of the old tower, ma’am?” a street vendor said, displaying a collection of cheap, colourful postcards. Huda declined and asked the owner of the café for two sodas.97 In its engagement with Martyrs’ Square, Yared’s novel touches on almost every detail discussed in this chapter in relation to al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata, whether it be the rounds of violence and the different forms of martyrdom that have marked the statue, the spectacularization and commodification of the square, or the spaces of sex and surveillance punctuating and surrounding it. The reference to the “Martyrs’ Café” in both novels and to photographs and postcards representing the square and statue epitomize intertwined processes of commercialization and commemoration whereby representational displacement becomes an index of loss. Dados cleverly comments on the significance of postcards and photographs in relation to the sense of loss with respect to Martyrs’ Square: “Postcards of the place as it looked in the 1960s are even more poignant, representing a Martyrs’ Square of the imagination that continues to haunt Beirut’s mental landscape.”98 Both al-Daif’s and Saba Yared’s novels capture this sense of loss and participate in the complex web of commemorative practices that inscribe Martyrs’ Square with myriad layers of meaning while unearthing its multiple layers of violence. To explain the reason why I chose to discuss al-Daif’s novel rather than Yared’s, I must return to the issue of “style as politics” mentioned near

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Figure 4.7 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Wonder Beirut: The Story Of a Pyromaniac Photographer, 1998–2006

the beginning of the novel’s analysis. Al-Daif’s multiple representations of Martyrs’ Square and the Martyrs’ Statue reflect, stylistically, the difficulties of coping with this space and the history of violence that has disfigured and reconfigured it. The shifts between elliptical, indirect, surrealistic, and realistic depictions of the square and statue make al-Daif’s novel a stylistically political statement on the texture of this space as continually resistant to straightforward representation. As such, al-Daif’s novel offers a textual equivalent to Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s “pyromaniac” photograph of the statue and square for the Out of Beirut exhibition (Figure 4.7). From this perspective, al-Daif’s narrative acts as a textual heterotopia with respect to Martyrs’ Square and its representations in other nonliterary texts, especially cultural geographical, historical, and sociological studies. The preceding discussion has shown that the representation of monumental space in al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata disrupts the fixed paradigms according to which the performance and performative dimension of this space—particularly Martyrs’ Square—has been approached theoretically, culturally, and historically. Al-Daif’s novel shows this monumental space as being exposed to the gaze and intervention of various individuals: bystanders, rioters, protesters, policemen, and tourists. While revealing the specificities of the small-scale events that complicate the reading of the larger event taking place in monumental space, the novel sets this space in relation to other contiguous spaces thus revealing the illusory nature of fixed boundaries and stable representation. This expands Khalaf’s definition of Martyrs’ Square as an “open” space by incorporating not only its positive function as a meeting point and hospitable space but also its combined importance on physical and textual levels as “open” to the traces of numerous passers-by: protesters, fighters, martyrs, artists, and writers.

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Chapter 5

Tabooed Spaces of Greatness and Shame: Monumentalization and the Representation of Terror and Trauma in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Snow

Memorials to Atatürk continue to multiply in Turkey. But it is the Republic of Turkey, which he founded and shaped, which is the main monument.1 In a cobbled-together demi-democracy like ours, in this society so riddled with prohibitions, writing novels puts me in a position not altogether different from my traditional storyteller’s; and whatever the explicit political prohibitions might be, a writer will also find himself hemmed in by taboos, family relations, religious injunctions, the state, and much else.2

In his two novels The Black Book and Snow, Orhan Pamuk initiates a rethinking of monumentalization on theoretical and material levels, particularly in relation to various aspects of taboo and terror in twentieth-century Turkey. From this perspective, this chapter analyzes the two novels’ representations of several monumental spaces and of other spaces that are textually rendered as monumental or countermonumental—through repetition, erasure, or other techniques—including Atatürk statues and Armenian architectural remains. This approach evolves from Pierre Nora’s fluid conceptualisation of lieux de mémoire and from his ingenious cultural-historical distinction between milieux de mémoire and lieux de mémoire. According to Nora, “[t]here are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.”3 This critical examination of Pamuk’s The Black Book and Snow aims at showing the continued presence of lieu and milieu, in contiguous spaces and overlapping traces. Accordingly, it will involve an imaginative journey from a lieu de mémoire, that is mainly here an Atatürk statue, to a milieu de mémoire, whether an abandoned Armenian house in Kars where traumatic memory is revived or the novelistic space in

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which such a “real environment of memory” is imaginatively and discursively monumentalized in the sense of having a monumental significance in the text. Nora’s definition of lieux de mémoire is itself useful here in that it is an expansive category of varied memory sites that refers “to the archives as well as to the tricolor; to the libraries, dictionaries, and museums as well as to commemorations, celebrations, the Pantheon, and the Arc de Triomphe; to the Dictionnaire Larousse as well as to the Wall of the Fédérés. . . .”4 On this basis, it becomes possible to look at the myriad lieux de mémoire of the Turkish republic and the Ottoman Empire, including commemorative celebrations, statues, and archives, whether state-sanctioned or otherwise. Accordingly, this chapter examines monuments and processes of monumentalization as they are embodied and effaced, in an Atatürk statue and in Armenian architectural remains, in the object and the novelistic space in which it is reimagined, as an act of politics and an intervention in the political. The aim is to show how specific instances in Pamuk’s novels negotiate processes of monumentalization that unravel monumental space in its different guises: imbricated in a network of historical particulars from the imperial period to the recent decades in the republic, lived and vandalized, physically and imaginatively, and textually reconfigured through either erasure or repetition. Starting from Lefebvre’s complex understanding of monuments, which was discussed extensively in the preceding chapters, and moving from the space of social practice to the novelistic space in which it is reimagined, this chapter examines the textures of specific passages in which monuments form the anchors of the narrative. These passages mediate a dynamic process of monumentalization that works across the texts and their contexts thus revealing, beneath the “tranquil power and certitude” of Atatürk monuments and the silence of spaces that have unofficial, because taboo, memorial value in Turkey, horizons of meaning that comprise “violence and terror.”5 Shifting between realist and experimental techniques in their representations of different sites and acts of monumentalization, certain passages in Pamuk’s two novels allow a revisiting of the significance of psychological processes, pedestrian and carnivalesque performances, ambivalent forms of resistance, and overdetermined layers of discursive and physical violence in monumental space. As such, this chapter is, at an implicit level, a reflection on the ways in which Pamuk’s The Black Book and Snow supplement and qualify theoretical approaches to monuments—as expressed not only in Nora’s and Lefebvre’s works but also elsewhere in spatial theory and historical and cultural geographical studies. Particularly, this is part of the larger original project of rethinking the political significance of monumentalization in Turkey beyond the

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commonplace banality of politics and through the complexity of literary oeuvres. The violations of monumental spaces and the violence that has marked them in Turkey are closely related to a complex nexus of terror and taboo. W. J. T. Mitchell explains three main forms of violence in relation to public art: (1) the image as an act or object of violence, itself doing violence to beholders, or “suffering” violence as the target of vandalism, disfigurement, or demolition; (2) the image as a weapon of violence, a device for attack, coercion, incitement, or more subtle “dislocations” of public spaces; (3) the image as a representation of violence, whether a realistic imitation of a violent act, or a monument, trophy, memorial, or other trace of past violence.6 Mitchell’s schema is useful as a starting point for analysing Pamuk’s novelistic engagement with the violence of monumentalization in its multifarious manifestations in twentieth-century Turkey: as an official act of the state in relation to its historical records and the collective memory of its people and as a physical space in which terror occurs, is remembered, or effaced. Violence and terror are more often than not symptoms of oppression or repression involving dynamics of prohibition such as taboos. In this context, it is useful to consider Gertrud Koch’s Freudian division of taboos into two categories: [T]aboos which relate to something viewed as holy, and are implemented in order to increase the sense of awe and respect for the sacred object; and taboos which have an exclusive function, segregating and banishing what is considered dirty or dangerous. In any case, breaking the taboo would result in a contamination of the sacrosanct tabooed object or person, while in the second case violation of the taboo sullies the taboobreaker.7 Monumentalization involves either expressions of taboo veneration or an aggressive reaction against a certain taboo object since monument construction is an affirmation of the more or less “sacred” status of the monumentalized figure and, frequently, an erasure of all “dirty or dangerous” traces in its space while monument destruction entails a violation of a taboo. This chapter will show that Pamuk’s The Black Book and Snow complicate the relation of monumentalization to taboo by presenting novelistic textures that mimic and

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subvert these two forms of taboo either by relegating the taboo (in the sense of awfully respected) Atatürk statues and the references to attacks against these statues to a marginal position in the text or by repeating references to the taboo (in the sense of proscribed) Kurdish and Armenian issues in twentiethcentury Turkey. *** In The Black Book and Snow, Pamuk addresses two key moments in the Turkish political drama in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The fictional time frame of The Black Book is nine months before the military coup that swept over Turkey in 1980.8 In Snow, the main event is a play that turns out to be the simulated start of a repressive military coup against Kurds and Islamists in the 1990s. The latter period was marked by violent confrontations between the Turkish Army and the Kurdistan’s Workers’ Party (PKK) and by what has been described as “the post-modern coup” orchestrated by “an alliance of secularists led by the Turkish military” in June 1997 to bring down a coalition headed by the Islamist Refah Party.9 From this perspective, I aim to show that Pamuk’s representation of monumental space in a number of apparently marginal and scattered passages in The Black Book and Snow functions as the groundwork for addressing, first, the powerful nexus of terror and taboo in the two key moments, 1980 and the 1990s, and also in the multilayered history and the troubled memory of the Turkish republic and, secondly, Pamuk’s subtle approach to monumentalization as a mode of political critique and of ethical engagement with history. In order to understand the issues that are at stake here, we must look briefly at the history of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s role in marking twentieth-century Turkish politics and monumental space. After the defeat of the Ottomans at the hands of the Allies in World War I and the signing of the Mudros armistice on 30 October 1918, Mustafa Kemal (who later took the name of Atatürk or “Father Turk”), as brigadier in the Turkish Army, strove to reunite the people and to reorganize the army. Through military action and diplomatic maneuvering, he succeeded in overturning a Greek invasion of Turkey and in forcing the Allies to withdraw.10 Atatürk’s accomplishments provided the basis for the establishment of the Turkish republic that the Turkish parliament, the Grand National Assembly, declared in Ankara on October 29, 1923. At the head of the Turkish republic, Atatürk introduced a number of reforms including the secularization of the state, the Latinization of the Turkish alphabet, the adoption of the Christian calendar and of Western dress, and the improvement of women’s role in Turkish society. Notwithstanding his revolutionary achievements, Atatürk has been recently criticized, especially

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in three respects. Andrew Mango, in his biography of the Turkish leader, sums up these criticisms as follows: “[T]hat he did not establish democratic government, that his policy of secularism divided Turkish society and severed the links between the rulers and the ruled, and that he suppressed ethnic diversity and, in particular, denied the rights of the large indigenous Kurdish population.”11 As the subsequent discussion will show, both the revolutionary cultural achievements and the historical failings of the Kemalist project are significantly relevant to an analysis of the monument-making enterprise in Turkey and to an understanding of monumentalization as a process that has strong political resonances in Pamuk’s oeuvre. Atatürk’s introduction of figural representation into the practices of Turkish monument making exemplified the cultural revolution and the secularization measures that he imposed as much as his commissioning of the great number of statues that represent him personally and that emphasize his image “as a supernatural human, more specifically, as a progenitor of the whole nation and the country” reflected his role in promoting his public image as a cult figure.12 Klaus Kreiser points out that figural sculpture was prohibited by Islamic law in the Ottoman Empire, and he explains that “[t]he fact that, in contrast to Egypt, there were neither figural nor even non-figural public monuments in the Ottoman capital does not mean that sculpture was unknown there.”13 However, the sculptural representations in the Ottoman Empire were markedly different from Western monuments in that, for example, the sculpture on a mosque would appear at the top of a column whereas, in a Western model, the statue of famous men would be placed. In a speech that he gave in Bursa in 1923, Mustafa Kemal forcefully stressed the importance of statues in a civilized nation while arguing that, in the progressive and enlightened twentieth century, erecting statues does not contradict the teachings of Islam: Any nation in the world which wants to be civilized, progressive, and perfect in every way is found to produce sculptors and to make statues. Those who claim that erecting statues as memorials of history is against the laws of Islam are those who have not studied their Islamic canon law. . . . Now that the Islamic truth has been understood and accepted and has been reinforced in their minds, by powerful evidence, it would be an insult to the Islamic world to suppose that enlightened people would still worship pieces of stone. Our nation, which is both religious and enlightened, will develop the art of sculpture, which is one of the means of progress, and will declare this to the whole world by erecting in every corner of the country beautiful sculptures as memorials to our ancestors for all the coming generations. This work has already been started.14

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In this way, Mustafa Kemal’s introduction of figural sculpture in Turkey is itself a forceful act of breaking religious and cultural taboo by means of a rhetorical approach that precludes resistance since it relies on absolute political power to transform age-old laws and traditions. On August 30, 1924, he presided over the stone-laying ceremony of a monument to the Turkish victory over the Greek in Dumlupinar. It was the first monument that included figural representation in Turkey. Mango explains that [t]he monument, whose foundations were laid, was made by a local artist, who sculpted an arm holding a Turkish flag.. . . The arm of the unknown soldier, showing above ground, was the harbinger of full-length statues of Mustafa Kemal which were soon to dot the country. In recent years a more grandiose monument was erected on the hill from which Mustafa Kemal had conducted the battle, and the “monument to the unknown standard-bearer” was moved outside Dumlupinar village, now dominated by a large standard-issue neo-Ottoman mosque.15 The history of the Dumlupinar monument and of its replacement by a more spectacular monument set against a neo-Ottoman mosque reinforces the tension between Kemalism and Islamism dominating the contested Turkish landscape.16 The statuomania of the early years of the Turkish republic was largely fueled by the insecurities and ambitions of the new state and its leader. Mango makes the important remark that the Turkish leader “established his own cult by encouraging the erection of his statues.”17 After the assassination plot that targeted him in 1927, Atatürk showed his “determination to stamp his personality on the new Turkish state” by means of monuments.18 To accomplish the task, he relied on foreign artists, particularly Heinrich Krippel and Pietro Canonica, who designed the principal monuments in the Atatürk era. In addition to other Atatürk monuments in Istanbul, Konya, and Samsun, Krippel designed Ankara’s Victory Monument, which comprised “an equestrian statue of the Gazi [Mustafa Kemal’s nickname, which means “hero” and “warrior of Islam”] in uniform, standing on a sixmetre high pedestal, surrounded by smaller statues of two soldiers, a peasant woman, and a relief showing the Gazi instructing İsmet and Fevzi to pursue the enemy.”19 Pietro Canonica, who designed statues of royal and noble figures, “produced an equestrian statue, which stands outside the Ethnographic Museum in Ankara; one of Atatürk, erect in his military uniform, for the main boulevard in the capital; another equestrian statue for İzmir, and, his best-known work, the monument to the republic in Taksim Square in Istanbul”20 (Figure 5.1).

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Figure 5.1 Republic Monument, Taksim Square, Istanbul [August 2009]

The imbrication of the monument-making industry in Turkey with political affairs and the mirroring relationship between the Atatürk cult and Atatürk statues are also at the basis of a 1951 law that criminalized any insulting expression vis-à-vis Atatürk’s memory in as much as they underlie the various forms of resistance to this law by groups in conflict with Kemalist ideology. The 1951 law and the great proliferation of Atatürk monuments in Turkey, including the grand mausoleum where his body was transferred in 1953, articulate the complex taboos that largely defined the relationship of Atatürk and his statues to major conflictual aspects of contemporary Turkish politics. Moreover, the Atatürk cult, which was the result of Mustafa Kemal entering the political stage at a moment of ultimate crisis in Turkey, resurfaced forcefully whenever the Turkish people and, more importantly, the ultra-Kemalist Turkish Army felt that the principles of the Turkish republic were endangered by Islamists, Kurds, or other political or ethnic groups perceived as being at odds with Kemalism.21 In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s narrator mentions the “street clashes between fervent nationalists and fervent communists” in Istanbul in the 1970s and describes how at his beloved’s home “[t]he television broadcast would end every

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evening between half past eleven and midnight, and the images of the flag, Atatürk’s mausoleum, and ‘our boys’ in the army would be replaced by a snowfall of blurry dots . . .” (MI 309, 310). Pamuk’s The New Life and The Museum of Innocence, particularly, give a clear sense of the proliferation of images of Atatürk around Istanbul, whether in small, framed photographs, on huge posters, or as statues. In these novels, we get a perspective on how the Atatürk cult was not only embodied monumentally in public space but also incorporated in private space. The narrator in The Museum of Innocence cites a “framed photograph of Atatürk, whose frown so closely resembled Füsün’s [his beloved]” (MI 458), and he mentions such images in many other intimate instances in the novel.22 On the basis of the foregoing brief overview of the multiple manifestations of the Atatürk cult and its relations to the politics of monumentalization in twentieth-century Turkey, it becomes appropriate to argue that “the sense of awe and respect” that Gertrud Koch, in the aforementioned quote, employs as a characteristic of taboo of the first kind is a suitable description of the taboo dimension of Atatürk statues. With respect to Turkish history and politics, the second kind of taboo can refer to a number of “dangerous” topics that have been approached uneasily on national and international levels since they threatened both the Atatürk cult and Kemalist ideology in general: the possibilities of diverse evaluations of the Kemalist legacy from the perspective of revisionist historiography, the Kurdish question, and the Armenian massacres. These topics are taboo precisely because they involve forms of terror perpetrated in the visage of the Turkish republic and then forcefully erased from it. In The Black Book and Snow, Pamuk boldly and insightfully unearths traces of terror and taboo by means of an imaginative engagement with acts of monumentalization and their political subtexts. *** In one of the most brilliant passages of The Black Book, Pamuk weaves history, myth, and apocalypse in a surreal vision of Atatürk statues coming alive. The passage narrates a conversation between one of the alter egos of the main character, Galip, and a young man in the central square of an unnamed Anatolian town. Their discussion focuses on a newspaper column presumably written by Galip’s journalist cousin, Celâl: First we discussed the statue of Atatürk, who was pointing at the bus depot, as if to indicate that there was only one thing worth doing in this wretched town and that was to leave it. Then I happened to mention a column you’d written, in which you’d mentioned that there were more than

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ten thousand statues of Atatürk in the country as a whole. You’d gone to say that on the day of the apocalypse, when thunder and lightning ripped across the dark sky and the earth rolled beneath our feet, all ten thousand of those fearsome statues would come back to life. Whatever their poses, whatever their attire—be they dressed in European clothes speckled with pigeon droppings or in the fully decorated uniform of a field marshal, wearing top hats and ghostly capes, or atop rearing stallions with large male organs—they would, you said, begin to turn on their pedestals, and how beautifully you described these pedestals and the countless flowers, wreaths, flies, dusty buses, and horse carts that had encircled them over the years, and the soldiers wearing uniforms that stank of sweat, and the schoolgirls, whose uniforms stank of mothballs, gazing up at these stone Atatürks, year in and year out, as they sang the national anthem—but come the apocalypse they would begin to move; one by one they would step off their pedestals, crushing the flowers and wreaths beneath their feet to vanish into the night. This passionate youth had, it now emerged, read the selfsame column, and how it had fired him up to read of our wretched citizens, quaking behind their shuttered windows, cowering to the roar of the apocalypse as the earth swayed and the sky split in two, and hearing the rumble of bronze boots and marble hooves in the street outside. (BB 357) This excerpt from The Black Book is strongly reminiscent of a passage in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in which the latter describes “ghosts of monuments” that have been destroyed by the consecutive regimes “[w]andering the streets that do not know their names” and “springing up in Bohemia by the thousands, springing up like weeds among ruins, like melancholy flowers of forgetting.”23 We can compare Kundera’s almost explicit political critique by means of the surreal image to Pamuk’s implicit historical and political commentary by means of the apocalyptic image of Atatürk statues coming alive and haunting the streets of Turkey. Kundera embeds his image of “ghosts of monuments” in an informative passage that comments on the historical details underlying successive changes in the naming of a particular street in Prague. He presents this chameleonic process of street naming as a means of forming and deforming the Czech people’s collective memory, thus “brainwashing it [the street and the people] into a half-wit.”24 In the first of two chapters titled “The Angels,” the narrator passes through the streets of Prague on some official anniversary in 1950 following the hanging of two presumed enemies of the communist state, a socialist deputy and a surrealist. He watches young people dancing in rings and, excluded from their communal dance, he then imagines

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them “soaring over Wenceslaus Square” and “below them was Prague with its cafés full of poets and its prisons full of betrayers of the people.”25 In this nightmarish vision, the end of the world is a present peopled with laughing angels, a perversely amnesiac and fanatic humanity in the image of children who play the demonic game of totalitarianism. This merges with a later apocalyptic vision in another chapter also titled “The Angels” in which Gustav Husak, referred to as “The President of Forgetting” and whom the Russians put in power in 1969 after the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring, appears as a version of the biblical Beast of the Land in a landscape deprived of its historical memory. In contrast to Kundera’s historically vivid panorama, Pamuk’s image of Atatürk statues coming alive represses the historical subtext of its apocalyptic drama as it only elliptically alludes to polemical details in the histories of the Kemalist and post-Kemalist periods and combines a sense of satiric comedy and bitter irony with a heightened degree of terror. This is a prime example of the effect of taboo on the literary rendering of history, which in The Black Book is negotiated through a parodic representation masquerading behind a presumably apolitical surrealist façade. A surreal image of Atatürk and of statues coming alive, in this case emerging in what resembles a wax museum imagined in the protagonist’s dream, appears in Adalet Agaoglu’s novel Olmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die). This dream has been approached by several critics including Jale Parla and Sibel Irzik, who notes that “Atatürk as the father of the nation seems to be quite a permanent feature of many a character’s dreams or nightmares in the Turkish novel.”26 Although Pamuk does not present the image of Atatürk statues coming alive as part of a dream, he endows the surreal performance with a nightmarish ambience that is psychologically and historically significant. The garb that the Atatürk statues don for their performance in surreal space functions as metonyms and metaphors of significant elements in the early history of the republic: the European clothes and top hats hint at Turkey’s ambivalent relations with the Europeans throughout the twentieth century and at the controversial Westernizing measures, including those that enforced the replacement of the fez with the hat, while the field marshal’s uniform reminds us of Atatürk’s dual role as political leader and army commander and of the continued involvement of the army in Turkish political affairs.27 These metaphorical and metonymic relations are imbued with an irony that functions on several levels. Primarily, the awakening of thousands of Atatürk statues satirizes the monument-making fever that Mustafa Kemal encouraged and that, in the last decades of the twentieth century,

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involved both the commodification of the leader’s image and its use as a political weapon.28 Moreover, Pamuk pictures Atatürk’s various outfits as smeared with pigeon droppings. The image seems to undermine the sacred space of the monument as well as the superhuman qualities that it articulates. Instead, the image highlights the earthy ordinariness of the monumentalized figure, thus indirectly deflating the triumphalist rhetoric that usually underwrites monumental space. A similar image occurs in Pamuk’s The New Life when the narrator “chide[s] the town pigeons for dropping on the Atatürk statue.”29 In an interview with Arminta Wallace, Pamuk comments ironically on the controversy that surrounded this subject: One row which has been going for several months now is that, in The New Life, I supposedly made jokes about Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. I said pigeons were shitting on Atatürk’s statue, and also that a poster of Atatürk was smiling ironically at people who were drinking themselves to death in a bar, and they fished that out to attack me, very aggressively. In Turkey right now, the Islamic fundamentalists are attacking Atatürk so a controversy arose in the popular newspapers as to whether I might be in the pay of the fundamentalists. Of course I’m not, and of course I don’t hate Atatürk, but I’m not one of those people—and we have them in Turkey, believe me—who say “I like trees because Atatürk used to like trees too”. Now this isn’t censorship either, but the next time you write about Atatürk you get self-conscious and say, OK, maybe pigeons should not shit—or next time, maybe I’ll write “Dear leader, pigeons in this lovely country never shit on Atatürk’s statue.”30 While taboo and the imaginative resistance to its effects envelop the image of pigeon droppings on the Atatürk statue, the description of the “rearing stallions with large male organs” (BB 357) satirizes the masculinist iconography that emerges recurrently as a main feature of triumphalist monuments.31 This tension between ridicule and awe-inspiring grandeur reminds us of the equally satirical portrayal of Flaubert’s statue in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot : “The head is defensively high: only the pigeons can see the full extent of the writer’s baldness.” 32 From a positive historiographical perspective, the vision communicates the apocalyptic dimensions of Atatürk’s crucial role in bringing Turkey from the era of the Ottoman sultanate-caliphate to the age of the Turkish republic and reveals the apocalyptic implications of the revolutionary reforms that

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he subsequently imposed. In 1925, Atatürk declared: “The sublime force of civilization pierces mountains, crosses the skies, enlightens and explores everything from the smallest particle of dust to stars. . . . When faced with this, those nations who try to follow the superstitions of the Middle Ages are condemned to be destroyed or at least to become enslaved and debased.”33 The statement is charged with as much imaginative and emotional power as Atatürk’s previously quoted statement in regard to the role of figural representation in the new republic’s statuary. One way of reading Atatürk’s vision of the revolutionary change that brings about new political formations is through Walter Benjamin’s comments in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in which he describes apocalyptic historical moments and apocalyptic conceptions of history: The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years.34 Atatürk’s revolutionary intervention in Turkey’s political and cultural history made its “continuum of history explode” in many ways. Nevertheless, it is possible to read Pamuk’s apocalyptic narrative of Atatürk statues coming alive not only in relation to the birth of the Turkish republic and its founder’s revolutionary vision but also, and more significantly, in relation to major turning points in its recent political history. The awe-inspiring aspects of the apocalyptic narrative become even more politically and historically meaningful when we consider the highly important fact that the time frame of The Black Book is nine months before the 1980 military coup. Interestingly, the coming to life of monuments has been a common trope in the fictional depiction of historical crises in postimperial literatures. In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the narrator describes an equestrian statue[in Bombay] of the Mahratta warrior-king Sivaji which (we used to think) came to life at night and galloped awesomely through the city streets—right along Marine Drive! On Chowpatty sands! Past the great houses on Malabar Hill, round Kemp’s corner, giddily along the sea to Sandal Point! And yes, why not, on and on, down

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my very own Warden Road, right alongside the segregated swimming pools of Breach Candy, right up to huge Mahalaxmi Temple and the old Willingdon Club. . .Throughout my childhood, whenever bad times came to Bombay, some insomniac nightwalker would report that he had seen the statue moving; disasters, in the city of my youth, danced to the occult music of a horse’s grey, stone hooves.35 The disastrous events in 1980 Istanbul also create an image, illusion, or nightmare dominated by the frightening sound of sculpted horses’ marble hooves. From this perspective, a lot of critical work still has to be done on the links between Rushdie’s and Pamuk’s aesthetics and politics since they articulate hugely influential reimaginings of post-imperial nationhood and are represented here by only brief and limited examples of the connections. But it is also possible to examine Pamuk’s vision of apocalyptic awakenings in postimperial landscapes in conjunction with less influential national literatures and literary figures. For example, Rashid al-Daif’s Ghaflat al-Turab portrays Ihdin, a Christian village in 1980s Lebanon, at the apogee of the civil war when some villagers report unusual experiences and visions of supernatural happenings around the monument of Yusuf Karam, a Maronite leader who led the opposition against the Ottomans in the late nineteenth century. These happenings include the vision of a blue cloud enveloping the grounds and mountains surrounding the Karam monument and the simultaneous sudden appearance of the same blue color enveloping the statue of the Virgin Mary in Ihdin. Others include visions of a tear dropping from the eye of Karam’s horse, of a frown on Karam’s face, and of Karam’s body standing up in his casket as well as his sculpted figure temporarily leaving the horse. The villagers interpret these extraordinary occurrences as signs of an imminent tragedy befalling the Christians in Lebanon. They even presume that the transformations in Karam’s and the Virgin’s statues signify their will to intervene or their will to call on the Maronites to intervene and stop the civil war between the Christian groups.36 As George Hersey notes, in ancient stories [n]ot only do statues move, smile, weep, and so on, they usually do these things when their votaries have broken the rules. The statues’ manifestations of life are intended to chastise. In Rome, in 38 BC, when there was a tax revolt, a statue of the goddess Virtus fell on its face, which was seen as a sign of Virtus’s own displeasure and, as well, the displeasure of a greater goddess, the Magna Mater.37 In 1980, Turkey was a place where both the “votaries” and the presumed enemies of the monumentalized father of the nation were breaking rules.

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Thus in Pamuk’s novel, the Atatürk statues’ “manifestations of life” occur at a moment of serious crisis in Turkish national history. The Black Book stages the coming to life of the Atatürk statues before the 1980 coup that occurred at the peak of a period of political agitation, violence, and economic and social uncertainties in Turkey. While proclaiming that their ultimate aim was to reinstate democracy, the leaders of the 1980 military coup took several drastic measures including: the dissolution of the National Assembly; the ousting of Suleyman Demirel’s government that had failed to stop the vicious cycle of violence between right-wing and left-wing groups; the arrest of the prime minister and his cabinet, the leader of the opposition, more than a hundred deputies, several trade union officials, students, and intellectuals; the suspension of the constitution and of all political and cultural activities; and the enforcement of martial law throughout Turkey. The Turkish people reacted to the coup as an inevitable event and faced it with hardly any resistance.38 From this perspective, the image of “wretched citizens, quaking behind their shuttered windows, cowering to the roar of the apocalypse . . . and hearing the rumble of bronze boots and marble hooves in the street outside” (BB 357) evokes the atmosphere of fear and surrender that overwhelmed Turkey as the army carried out the coup.39 Pamuk also intimates this sense of the people’s awed resignation to the symbols of power in the suggestive image of “the countless flowers, wreaths, flies, dusty buses, and horse carts that had encircled them [the statues] over the years, and the soldiers, . . . and the schoolgirls, . . . gazing up at these stone Atatürks, year in and year out, as they sang the national anthem” (BB 357). The image conveys a monotonous dynamism that almost amounts to stasis. Pamuk’s description of horse carts encircling Atatürk statues for years and of soldiers and schoolgirls dressed in sordid costumes and engaged in a continuous commemorative exercise subtly parodies the rituals of cultic devotion by revealing the tawdriness of a crowd repeating nationalist gestures almost passively if not indifferently. As such, the contrasting images of a Turkish society immersed in commemorative monotony and of Atatürk statues awakening apocalyptically implicitly represent the two facets of Kemalism in twentieth-century Turkey. On the one hand, the apocalyptic image indicates the possibility of a transformative revolution instigating a revival of the birth of the Turkish republic. As the statues are invested with the desire for change, the cultic object revolts against the human who idolizes it by awakening into frightening vitality, but the symbolic potential for revolution is not realized. Kenneth Gross’s conceptualization of “the dream of the moving statue” thus acquires, in the political imaginings of The Black Book, a radical resonance that paradoxically awakens revivalist Kemalist

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spirits that lie dormant in what over the years became a violated and violent national body.40 On the other hand, the image of commemorative monotony undermines the revolutionary implications and instead reveals social paralysis, complacency, and resignation. The vision is especially selfdefeating since the desired change is perpetually delayed to the day of the apocalypse. After Atatürk’s death, both the successive governments and the military coups that punctuated twentieth-century Turkish politics largely failed to realize a true transformation on social and political levels. In this respect, while the leaders of the 1980 coup declared that their intention is to ultimately reestablish democracy, their policies and actions did not reflect democratic practice.41 What best exemplifies the clash and collusion of static and dynamic tendencies is the image of the horse carts encircling the Atatürk monuments for years. This image parodies annual celebrations around monuments and exacerbates the atmosphere of worthless action that amounts to stasis. Pamuk’s image is highly reminiscent of the narrative of Patrick Morkan’s horse that circles King Billy’s statue in Joyce’s story “The Dead” (D 207). In Joyce’s narrative, the horse’s action seems a caricature of a specific historical tradition—people’s habit of circling King William III’s statue every year—and, hence, of the Dubliners’ social and political paralysis.42 Still, Pamuk’s image of the circling carts is also embedded in everyday life. It generally reveals not only the tawdriness but also the paralytic indifference of the crowd that traverses the city with almost deathlike monotony. In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk presents a similar image of an Atatürk statue that is almost overwhelmed by the socioeconomic flow around it: “Arranged around the base of the Atatürk statue were the men who sold meatballs and hot sausages stuffed in bread; they had lit the grills in their glass-covered carts, and the pleasant aroma of grilled meat filled the air” (MI 368). This image can be read as a counterpart to the many representations of Atatürk statues in Pamuk’s work in which the monument appears oppressive and oftentimes fearsome. Instead, in this passage from The Museum of Innocence, the Atatürk statue seems to be engulfed by the positive energies of everyday life. In his incisive study of The Black Book in the context of postmodernist texts, Walter G. Andrews writes: History is revealed, not as the story of personages and events, but as a random collection of lost signs. . . . The odd, coincidental, grotesque, and rare intermingle with “historical figures,” stereotypes, icons, until it seems impossible to tell which is which. We seem to be told over and again that we will never know what life is “really” like, but that we can know what history is like, and it is like a freak show or museum or Aladdin’s store.43

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It is possible to read the coming to life of the Atatürk statues in Pamuk’s novel as “a freak show” but also as the “lost signs” of a disseminated history enacted through the multiple “historical figures” of Atatürk. The image of the “freak show or museum” also recalls “Bedii Usta’s Children,” another chapter of The Black Book in which mannequins buried in an underground private museum refract the figural monumental landscape above it.44 In an interview with Maureen Freely, Pamuk says that his hero, Galip, is incapable of comprehending all these signs in Istanbul and that this lack of full comprehension is an advantage because “it adds a layer of mystery, which is already there, because of all the layers of history in Istanbul.”45 This deferral of full comprehension is part of the play of the fictional and the real, the conscious and the unconscious in The Black Book. The fusion of random bits of the past, dispersed in a postmodernist amalgam of history and memory, with a surreal narrative of apocalyptic dimensions confuses notions of the real in relation to space and time. The fictional, through the eyes of Pamuk/Galip/Celâl, perhaps cannot tell us what life really is but can reveal to us some of the layers of history by means of imaginative forays into representational space. Pamuk’s narrative of Atatürk statues coming alive imaginatively expresses the complex and sometimes contradictory aspects of Turkish cultural, social, and political dynamics that crisscross the trajectories of the revolutionary ideal, the cult of the leader, authoritarianism, and democratic change. Clearly, the image of an apocalyptic awakening of Atatürk statues is imaginary. However, the fictionality of the image does not prevent its relevance to social and political reality. By means of the apocalyptic trope that both literary discourse and political discourse employ, Pamuk’s narrative effects a blasting of one-sided historical accounts thus substituting multiplicity for a linear and univocal reading of Atatürk’s legacy and its refractions in twentieth-century Turkey. While the apocalyptic trope often functions in the discourses of politicians as a technique of rhetorical violence and ideological manipulation couched in quasireligious terms, here it performs the complex and paradoxical role of emphasizing and parodying the violence of a history where stasis and repetition masquerade deceptively as dynamic moments: incomplete revolutions, repressive coups, commemorative monotony, and social paralysis. Thus Pamuk’s representation of an apocalyptic awakening of Atatürk statues and my reading of it contribute together to activating several dimensions of the monument’s “horizon of meaning” that Lefebvre defines as “a specific or indefinite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore.”46 Among these various meanings are terror and taboo and their relations to monumentalization in Pamuk’s novel

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and its historical contexts. On the one hand, the image of Atatürk statues coming alive and spreading awe through “the rumble of bronze boots and marble hooves” (BB 357) undermines what Lefebvre describes as the monument’s apparent “tranquil power and certitude which can encompass violence and terror.”47 On the other hand, by textually demonstrating the making of taboo—by means of the surreal representation of the apocalyptic moment—and by imaginatively intervening in taboo Turkish monumental space and taboo Turkish history, this passage from Pamuk’s The Black Book is a political gesture that both mimics and subverts taboo, thus participating in the negotiation of monumentalization as a process and the rewriting of monumental space as a palimpsest in the context of the nearly century-long history of the Turkish republic. *** A still more elaborate understanding of this bleak vision of apocalypse in monumental space becomes possible if we look at the preceding passage in light of and in contrast to the second chapter of The Black Book, “When the Bosphorus Dries Up,” which narrates another vision—by the same journalist, Celâl—of a dark apocalyptic end in Turkey. What is imagined here is the drying up of the Bosphorus. Celâl describes this event in apocalyptic terms: “a new life will begin” (BB 17), “doomsday” (17), “new civilization grows up” (17), “new heaven” (17), “new hell” (18), and “enchanted terror” (20). As the Bosphorus dries up, all the discarded, forgotten, or concealed objects buried in it get unraveled anew. Celâl describes these objects: I’ll stumble across the palace intriguers of yesteryear, still doubled over in the sacks in which they drowned, and the long-lost skeletons of Orthodox priests, still clutching their staffs and crosses, their ankles still weighed down by balls and chains. . . . I shall see the remains of a looted Genoese treasure, a short-barreled cannon caked with mud, the mussel-caked idols and images of lost and forgotten peoples, and the shattered bulbs of an overturned brass chandelier. . . . I shall certainly pause in fearful respect before the armoured Crusaders, mounted on horses whose magnificent skeletons are still stubbornly standing. As I stand before these fearsome statues to study their mussel-studded weapons and the standards they brandish in their mighty hands, I shall note with horror that it is the Black Cadillac they are guarding. (BB 19–20) Likewise, in Pamuk’s The New Life, the crash at the end of the novel represents, with similarly vivid cinematic effects, the end of the world within

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a Turkish space-time. Talat S. Halman argues that “[t]he crash is the end of the hold of religious faith and ultranationalist passion on Turkish society. It leaves behind it a ‘graveyard.’”48 As far as the politics of apocalypse is concerned, both The New Life and The Black Book are ambiguous because their postmodernist representations of the end of the world waver between serious political commentary and pastiche. As the Bosphorus dries up, the apocalyptic end is marked with a reversal of the vision of monuments coming alive, as relics of dead bodies of men murdered in the past become countermonuments that unravel a bloody history spanning several centuries. These countermonuments appear as “fearsome statues” (BB 20) since they are decayed bodies rather than sculpted objects representing bodies. Ironically Pamuk also uses “fearsome statues” to describe the Atatürk figures coming to life on the day of the apocalypse. Accordingly, the skeletons seem in opposition to the Atatürk statues since they stand as reminders of earlier historical moments that undermine an ideal of Turkish history originating in its father, Atatürk, while they render the continuum of history as a nightmare. A similar representation of a historically layered capital city appears in the Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat’s The Tiller of Waters: “A city that does not advance in time but rather in accumulating layers, a city that will sink deep in the earth as its edifices tower high.”49 Barakat renders a striking historiographical and spatial vision in which Beirut’s underground ruins and its monumental buildings exist in a mirroring relationship. In both Pamuk’s and Barakat’s texts, histories of violence underwrite this relationship, but in the Lebanese novel, the apocalyptic panorama is more poignant because the war has transformed both towering edifices and their underworld into a graveyard. The Bosphorus drying up stands as a negative counterpart to the Atatürk statues coming to life since the former reveals the taboo history buried beneath the purged monumental space. As Benjamin writes: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”50 Ricoeur also expresses this idea of the bipolar structure of history: “What we celebrate under the title of founding events are, essentially, acts of violence legitimated after the fact by a precarious state of right. What was glory for some was humiliation for others. To celebration on one side corresponds execration on the other.”51 Pamuk’s novel thus highlights a tension between a monumental space intended to be a document of celebrated civilization and modern revolution and the Istanbul underworld as an imagined document of violent conflict and repression. ***

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Graveyards, underworlds, and monumental spaces are also central to Pamuk’s autobiographical work Istanbul. There Pamuk replaces the heterotopic spaces of his city, the cemeteries and poor neighborhoods, from their marginal locations in tourist-oriented depictions and official maps, to a central position in the lived spatiality and personal itinerary of the flaneur and memoir writer. Through accounts of his and other writers’ walking journeys in Istanbul, Pamuk highlights the socioeconomic and spatial uniqueness of its monumental space. Furthermore, by depicting reactions to the burning of traditional wooden houses (yalι) in Istanbul, Pamuk links Istanbulites’ apprehension of a deteriorating monumental space with their communal melancholic attachment to a vanishing past. Even more significantly, Pamuk’s use of photographs that refract his journeys through the city initiate a circulation of meaning between image and text in as much as they compel the reader/observer to reinvent his or her itinerary through Istanbul’s landscape by means of the textual and visual signs provided by the book. Rebecca Schneider writes that “the site of the performance, and of the photograph’s significance, is displaced from the fraction of a second caught in an image and replaced onto an aftermath—the ambulatory site of the photograph’s encounter with a future viewer who, paying close attention, performs an analysis.”52 But even more than Istanbul, The Black Book is highly suggestive in respect to revealing the particularities of the writer’s flanerie across his city’s monumental landscape. The Black Book evokes the tensions and links between the local citizen’s and the tourist’s perspectives in regard to the city’s landmarks. In “Signs of the City,” the last chapter of the first part of The Black Book, Galip appears as a peculiar version of the surrealist flaneur defamiliarizing Istanbul’s landscape through the imagined persona of the tourist, one of his shifting alter egos. At the same time, Galip’s double persona reinvents the figure of the tourist and the latter’s experience of urban monuments by endowing it with the local urban walker’s personal relation to the city. As in other chapters of The Black Book, monuments feature here as only a fraction of the Istanbul landmarks that include movie theaters, an opera house, street vendors, and other “signs of the city.” As Galip walks across Istanbul, he explicitly names its streets, bridges, squares, and monuments. Galip’s walk and Pamuk’s text attain a climactic point when they reach Taksim Square, which is a prominent historical site with the Cumhuriyet Aniti, or the Monument of the Republic, dominating its political space. The monument commemorates Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s launching of the War of Independence against the Greek Army in May 1919 and the final Turkish victory in 1922, an event that initiated the foundation of the Turkish republic in 1923. The victory is annually celebrated in Taksim

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Square. The monument was designed by the Italian sculptor Pietro Canonica, who produced several monuments for the newly established Turkish republic. On one side of the monument, Mustafa Kemal is in civilian clothes with Ismet and Fevzi, the only companions whose aid he acknowledged, to his left and right; on another, he is in uniform at the head of his soldiers. The Taksim monument was unveiled in 1928. It was overlooked by a large international hotel, while in 1997 the city’s Islamic mayor threatened to construct an equally large mosque to increase the restrictions on its space.53 The ongoing tensions between Kemalist and Islamic iconographies reflect an underlying discontent that resulted from the Turkish republic’s radical rift with its Ottoman-Islamic legacy. Gavin D. Brockett argues, like a number of other critics, that the tremendous reduction of religious intervention by Islamic institutions in Turkish society proved too abrupt and disruptive especially in Anatolia: “The Kemalist conception of progress derided institutions and cultural accretions—especially religious beliefs and practices—associated with the Ottoman-Islamic past; it reflected not only the elite’s limited understanding of but also its hostility towards the very beliefs and rituals crucial to the definition of Anatolian Muslim identities.”54 Continued tension between the Kemalist political hierarchy and its presumed enemies has sustained the taboo status of its iconography, especially when it comes to monumental representations of Atatürk and the Turkish republic. Accordingly, visitors to Istanbul can see that the Monument of the Republic in Taksim Square is closely protected (perhaps from vandals, tourists, or unhappy citizens) by armed policemen (Figure 5.2). After being off limits for the thirty-three years since a group of armed men “believed to be far-right militants aided by members of the intelligence services” attacked a peaceful rally there, Taksim Square was the stage for the 2010 May Day celebrations. According to the Hurriyet Daily News report on the event: “Many people passed over the barriers surrounding the Monument of the Republic in Taksim Square and climbed on the sculpture. They held banners and flags, chanted slogans, and took pictures of each other on the monument.”55 The workers’ occupation of Taksim Square and its monument appeared like an unusual instance of taboo breaking after decades of prohibitions that included the ban on May Day celebrations. While their political significance and presence are heavily guarded from subversion, Taksim Square and the monument at its center lose their discursive stability in Pamuk’s text as the contours of Galip’s identity fade and his attempts at cognitive mapping multiply: As the music grew louder, he watched Taksim Square—the center of his universe—slowly change shape; soon the buses struggling through

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Figure 5.2 Republic Monument, Taksim Square, Istanbul [August 2009]

the traffic like giant turkeys and the trolleys crawling behind them like stunned lobsters had faded into the misty street corners that had never seen the light of day. All at once he was stepping into a poor, forgotten country he had never seen before, beholding the brash modern square at its center. Its landmarks were the same, but now, when Galip looked at the snow-covered Statue of the Republic, at the wide Greek staircase leading nowhere, at the “opera” house he’d so blithely watched burn to the ground ten years earlier, he knew that they too belonged to the imaginary country they signified. (BB 222–3) Galip experiences Taksim Square as a repetition with a difference, just like the multiple repetitions of Atatürk’s statue on the four sides of the Monument of the Republic. It appears as a depersonalized “brash modern square” and as part of a “poor, forgotten country” that, despite its marked familiarity to the local citizen, becomes other on geopolitical and discursive grounds. According to this otherness dynamic, countries are imagined in as much as personas are imaginary. The Monument of the Republic appears as an anchor to the identity of Taksim Square and to the identity of Turkey

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as a nation. Yet, the country signified by the statue/signifier is imaginary and hence other to the country that Galip experiences as he walks Istanbul. Still, the deconstructive circulation of meaning does not deflate the relation between the monument and the national entity to which it is officially bound since the final sentence reasserts the relationship of belonging that links them. In this respect, Galip’s response to the “snow-covered Statue of the Republic” is reminiscent of Gabriel Conroy’s politically charged thoughts about the Wellington Monument that “wore a gleaming cap of snow” (D 202) in Joyce’s “The Dead.” The Monument of the Republic, like the other landmarks in Taksim Square, exists in a physical, contemporary world and signifies another imagined or “imaginary country” that may be Kemalist Turkey. But the real Turkey that Galip views is “a poor, forgotten country he had never seen before” (BB 223), since its socioeconomic fabric, in 1980, betrays the vision of its founder. These places may appear as antagonistic geopolitical entities, but they are essentially shifting personas of the same country and its monument, reinvented by those who experience it as both imagined and real. As representational spaces, Taksim Square and its monument thus function through Galip’s imagination in terms of signifying practices that evade the finality of a fixed referent and hence signify countermonumentally. Deconstruction, in this instance, is neither a necessary failure nor a revolutionary necessity. While it is not a mere postmodernist exercise in reading the city, it neither directly attacks the monument nor threatens the political system that hegemonizes its rhetoric. It is rather the practice of seeing through different eyes. This is a practice of everyday life that may start revolutions or may instead end in a paranoid search for hidden meaning as in Galip’s case. The other side of productive schizoanalysis is destructive schizophrenia. In some cases, as in Pamuk’s The Black Book, we are dealing with both.56 From this perspective, it is possible to interpret Galip’s inability to apprehend a fixed relation between the monument and its geopolitical referents as part of his compulsive-obsessive reading practices as he walks and reads the signs of Istanbul, but this neurotic relation to the city allows Pamuk’s text to be significant on political grounds also. Moreover, with the application of Deuleuzian terms again, this passage and the novel as a whole reveal—concerning the structuring of relations between city and city dweller, city and text, character and text, and text and reader—a rhizomatic web of reading and writing practices with respect to urban space. In the rhizomatic text, the monument is displaced from the central position that it occupies in the urban square as it becomes no more than one of many landmarks caught in the web of the city. We are dealing with a technique that effects, through representation

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and character perspective, the subversion of the finality of the geopolitical discourse—the definite country as a stable referent and the linked issue of fixed identity—according to which the monument is officially framed and interpreted. The poetics and politics of continuous deferral dominate Galip’s walk through Istanbul, and it is the performativity of his walk that reinvents Taksim Square even more than his practice of reading the city as a text. As Hopkins and Orr argue, “pedestrian performance can access overlapping urban traumas, though separated by centuries, in ways not necessarily given by archival history.”57 Throughout the walk Galip’s persona fluctuates between the flaneur and the tourist, but his perspective never adds up completely to that of either: He’d walked through the streets like a tourist whose plane has been delayed, who finds himself with half a day to kill in a city he’d never thought to visit. The statue of Atatürk told him that a soldier had played an important role in this country’s history; the crowd idling in front of the bright muddy lights of the movie theatre told him that on Sunday afternoons people in this country escaped boredom by watching dreams imported from abroad; the sandwich and pastry vendors waving their knives, as their eyes darted back and forth between the display windows and the pavement, told him that their sad dreams and sadder memories were fast fading from their minds; . . . Dear God, what is there to do at a time like this, on an avenue this dreary, in a city this lost? Galip had mumbled, but he knew at the same time that this was a phrase borrowed from one of Celâl’s old columns. (BB 223) Much of Galip’s walk occurs in an area known as the Beyoglu-Pera district. In a study of “The Predicament of Modernism in Turkish Architectural Culture,” Sibel Bozdoğan describes the Beyoglu-Pera district in Istanbul as “the city’s nearest equivalent to Baudelaire’s Paris.”58 There is no interest here in any straightforward comparison between a walk in Baudelaire’s Paris and one in Beyoglu-Pera, but I use this comparison as a starting point for exploring the doubling of the figure of the flaneur and the figure of the tourist as they negotiate monumental space in the last-mentioned passage from The Black Book (Figure 5.3). While the Atatürk statue appears textually marginal, it becomes the catalyst for evoking key issues in the interpenetrating histories of Turkey, Atatürk, and Atatürk statues. In “The Return of the Flâneur,” Walter Benjamin writes: “The flâneur is the creation of Paris . . . . The great reminiscences, the historical frissons— these are all so much junk to the flâneur, who is happy to leave them to the tourist. And he would be happy to trade all his knowledge of artists’ quarters,

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Figure 5.3 Demonstration for the release of a political prisoner, Beyoğlu, Istanbul [August 2009]

birthplaces, and princely palaces for the scent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile—that which any old dog carries away.”59 Benjamin’s reflections on flanerie are useful here precisely and paradoxically because they are contradicted by the figure of Pamuk’s flaneur. In an interview for The Irish Times about his novel, Pamuk detailed his reasons for writing Istanbul. He remarked that “Walter Benjamin says there are two kinds of city writing: those books written by people who come from outside, who tend to look for the exotic, and those written by the people who have lived in the city, which tend to be autobiographical. So I thought, why don’t I go ahead and write a book that would be ambitious as autobiography, and also ambitious as a strange essay about the town? I thought that if I tried to do this, I would find something new. And this is my attempt.”60 In The Black Book, Pamuk anticipates his achievement in Istanbul with respect to reinventing the flaneur as a central figure in “a strange essay about the town.” Pamuk’s walker in the city is not the creation of Paris [. . .]and his flanerie brings him closer rather than further from the figure of the tourist. Galip is interested in both the “historical frissons” and in “the touch of a single tile” that attract his attention while he walks Istanbul. This is a walker in the city who is implicitly

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aware that the flaneur and the tourist are personas that he can adopt at will and even at the same time. The urban walker in “The Signs of the City” does not practice a flanerie that sets him in opposition to the figure of the tourist. Benjamin writes: “But the great reminiscences, the historical shudder—these are a trumpery which he (the flâneur) leaves to tourists, who think thereby to gain access to the genius loci with a military password.”61 The passage from The Black Book quoted above explicitly deflates this opposition as it states that Galip’s flanerie through the city is similar to that of a tourist precisely in that it seeks to decode the “genius loci” of Istanbul. As such, there are clear links between this passage and the passage in al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata in which, as we saw in the previous chapter, the perspective of the local inhabitant-flaneur clashes then colludes with that of the tourist in their respective outlooks on the ruins of the monumental square in war-torn Beirut. Yet the twist in the comparison here is that Galip is likened specifically to a tourist who finds himself obliged to tour a city that has never appealed to him as a touristic destination. This is tourism with a vengeance, and it seems more vengeful in light of the fact that it is the local inhabitant who becomes a compulsive tourist discovering the city landmarks, including its most conspicuously representative monument, as strangely familiar. The monument is not redundant in the experience of the local inhabitant-tourist since Galip is tickled by what Benjamin identifies as “the historical shudder”62 and responds to it by reflecting on Atatürk’s statue. Galip’s reaction has unusual overtones with respect to both the expected attitude of a local inhabitant-flaneur and that of a tourist. Pamuk writes: “The statue of Atatürk told him that a soldier had played an important role in this country’s history” (BB 223). The least that a local inhabitant-flaneur in Turkey is expected to know is that this is specifically the statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Therefore, the superimposition of the persona of the tourist on the local citizen and flaneur seems to allow the defamiliarization of such a knowledge that is part of both official and popular urban rhetoric. Moreover, due to the close association of Turkey with the figure of Atatürk and due to the sheer number of Atatürk statues throughout the country, even a tourist is expected to come to Turkey with the foreknowledge that enables an unequivocal identification of the statues of Atatürk. Instead, Galip’s response, filtered through the double perspective of the local citizen-flaneur and the tourist, implies a perspective that is unrestricted by the common set of interpretations that accompany any first, second, or millionth experience of Atatürk statues as monuments inscribed with an official history that is consumed locally on an everyday level and transmitted internationally through the tourism industry.

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Ironically it is Galip’s relationship to the local crowd rather than to a group of tourists that mediates his defamiliarizing experience of Taksim Square and its monument. Benjamin explains that “[t]he flâneur seeks refuge in the crowd. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed for the flâneur into phantasmagoria.”63 As Galip approaches Taksim Square, he has already “found himself inside a crowd of people leaving a movie theater” (BB 222), and that situation tinges his experience with a dreamlike aspect. A major aspect of the phantasmagoria overwhelming Galip’s physical and mental rambling is his transformation, as flaneur, into a prism multiplying the images of the crowd and the urban fabric through his varying personas. Quoting Baudelaire, Benjamin sees the flaneur as “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness. . . .”64 In as much as Galip’s kaleidoscopic relation to the crowd infuses the latter with mystery, the complexity of the crowd’s everyday life practice makes the lived spatiality that they inhabit less a decodable grid than a web of possibilities in the sense outlined by De Certeau in “Walking in the City.” This ambiguity is especially important when it affects the statue of Atatürk. In this instance, there is what amounts to a rewriting of De Certeau’s thoughts on the cryptic Igreja do Passo, a church in Brazil: “Returning from this pilgrimage, the passing faces on the street seem, in spite of their vivacious mobility, to multiply the indecipherable and nearby secret of the monument.”65 And indecipherability is an appropriate description for how Istanbul’s monuments appear in Galip’s eyes. John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl offers what is probably the most striking fictional representation of a late-twentieth-century explorer of Istanbul’s space, whose posture as a tourist and a pilgrim conceals his mission as a radical militant. Yanuka’s different personas refract the complex and mystery-laden history of Istanbul’s monumental landscape in as much as his exceptionally shifting personas epitomize the multilayered subjectivities of walkers in the city: In the gardens of Sultan Ahmed Square he sat on a bench among the orange and mauve flower beds, gazing benignly at the surrounding domes and minarets that made the perimeter, and also at the clusters of giggling American tourists, particularly a group of teenage girls in shorts. But something held him back from approaching them, which would have been his normal practice. . . . He bought slides and postcards from the child hawkers without caring about their outrageous prices; he wandered round the Saint Sophia, contemplating with equal pleasure the glories of Justinian’s Byzantium and of the Ottoman conquest; and he was heard to

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let out a cry of frank amazement at the sight of columns dragged all the way from Baalbeck in the country he had so recently relinquished. But his most devout concentration was reserved for the mosaic of Augustine and Constantine presenting their church and city to the Virgin Mary, for that was where he made his clandestine connection: with a tall, unhurried man in a windjacket who at once became his guide.66 Le Carré’s description of Yanuka “gazing benignly” and with “equal pleasure” at Istanbul’s monuments is highly ironic and deflates any assumption of peaceful innocence in either the landscape or its observer. In as much as this passage relates to Lefebvre’s deconstruction of monuments as only apparently tranquil,67 it allows a reconsideration of different histories of violence. Likewise, Galip’s reaction to the statue of Atatürk invites an examination of the history of the Turkish republic and its founder in a revisionist manner that deciphers the secret at the heart of placid monumentality. The emphasis on Atatürk as a soldier who played an important but unspecified role in the history of his country is significant in relation both to the polemical issue of the disengagement of the military from political decision making and to Atatürk’s role in this context. Since the earliest days of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal expressed his worries concerning the role of the army in politics. In 1909, he argued at a Unionist Congress68: “Commanders, while thinking of and carrying out the duties and requirements of the army, must take care not to let political considerations influence their judgment. They must not forget that there are other officials whose duty it is to think of the political aspects. A soldier’s duty cannot be performed with talk and politicking.”69 Retrospectively commenting on the upstart behavior of some of his army comrades in the days after the establishment of constitutional rule in 1908, Mustafa Kemal declared in 1922: “The first measure that came to my mind to combat the evil was to apply the principle that the army should withdraw from politics.”70 On December 19, 1923, the Turkish assembly approved a law that banned the interference of the military in politics but with some exceptions that allowed Mustafa Kemal to keep his rank as marshal while he formed the republic.71 Galip’s reflection on the Atatürk statue thus articulates the tension between, on the one hand, Mustafa Kemal as a soldier and, on the other, his several national roles including his commemoration as Atatürk, the father of the Turkish republic and the enlightened leader who encouraged the withdrawal of the army from the political milieu. Galip’s double persona expresses the immediate knowledge that the commemorated figure, due to its military costume and its prominence, must

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have been some unspecified soldier who has played a certain significant role in the history of this country. The association is not so innocent since, as I have mentioned, Galip’s interpretation underlines the military history of Atatürk instead of his history as the father of the Turkish republic who aimed at a disengagement of the army from the political arena. Yet, against this interpretation, the framing discourse establishes this monument as unequivocally: “[t]he statue of Atatürk” (BB 223), an indelible mark on the history, monumental landscape, and ongoing ideological wars of Turkey. Still, the reflection on Atatürk as a military figure remains a crucial issue given the continuing large role of the army in Turkish politics. *** Almost every one of Turkey’s internal conflicts in the second half of the twentieth century culminated in a military coup. The complex reasons behind the three military coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980 included “ineffective political leadership, the growing challenge of Islam, economic malaise, and PKK terrorism.”72 In 1997 the army carried out what has been referred to as a “post-modern coup” against the Islamist Refah or Welfare Party (later the Fazilet or Virtue Party), which was then at the head of a coalition that had governed the country for twelve months before it was brought down. The 1990s were also a period of heightened PKK activities and serious economic problems. Pamuk presents aspects of this political and socioeconomic drama of the 1990s in his most overtly political novel, Snow.73 One of the many performances that represent this drama in Snow involves an Atatürk statue. In this respect, Nergis Ertürk makes a subtle comment about the importance of performance and performativity in Snow: “Selfconscious about its own international literary audience, the novel makes itself a stage (this is the significance of its numerous scenes of theatricality) on which local characters assume, deflect, defy, or bring into crisis the ‘voicing’ or agency available to them.”74 Interestingly, Snow provides a fictional platform for thinking of performance as a broad category that includes events framed as such, despite their primary political rather than theatrical function, as well as a whole range of everyday occurrences that either comprise theatrical features and/or have a role in negotiating issues of performativity. The main character in Pamuk’s novel, named Sunay Zaim, stages the theatrical event that turns out to be the start of a military coup against Islamists and Kurds in the northeastern Anatolian town of Kars. Zaim is also at the center of the aforementioned performance that occurs in the context of Sunay’s campaign to play the role of Atatürk in a film and in which an Atatürk statue is center stage:

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He [a high-ranking officer] didn’t soften one bit when he saw Sunay quaking with remorse and fear; rather, he ridiculed Sunay for propounding his own political views in the guise of the “man chosen to be Atatürk” and alluded to Sunay’s short visit two days earlier to the town of his birth, during which he had played the “people’s politician.” (Cheered on by convoys of cars and crowds of tobacco manufacturers and unemployed men, Sunay had climbed up to the statue of Atatürk in the town’s main square and inspired even more applause by squeezing Atatürk’s hand; when a reporter from a popular magazine then asked him whether he thought he might leave the stage one day to enter politics, Sunay answered, “If the people want me.”) The prime minister’s office announced that the Atatürk film was to be postponed indefinitely. (Snow 193) Primarily, the textual marginalization of the performance with the Atatürk statue deserves attention. There is an important paradox here. While the parenthetical gesture is a textual embodiment of taboo, the marginalized incident addresses various political, socioeconomic, and cultural issues that are central to both contemporary Turkish politics and its fictional refractions in Snow. Some key historical facts must be noted before approaching this passage. Actors were not allowed to play the role of Atatürk in plays and films until the 1980s. Instead, Atatürk declared that he desired to “portray himself, that he wear his old clothes and act out what he had done in previous years.”75 In light of this fact and of the role of Atatürk monuments as taboo embodiments of the Atatürk cult, Sunay Zaim’s attempt to play the role of Atatürk and his casual behavior with the Atatürk statue may have subversive implications that we can address conceptually through Bakhtinian and post-Bakhtinian interpretations of the carnivalesque. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin describes popular carnival culture as one that is opposed to the official feast since it “marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.”76 Bakhtin’s statement can be useful here if we move away from the specific carnival forms of the Middle Ages and Renaissance that he describes in order to approach the carnivalesque as a sociopolitical phenomenon that has myriad manifestations in twentieth-century popular culture. What is of particular importance is the historical context of the 1990s in Turkey as reflected in the passage from Snow. Before the 1990s, if a Turkish actor proclaimed that he would play the role of Atatürk, that would have been considered an act of defiance since it iconoclastically overturned established hierarchical distinctions and neglected official prohibitions by breaking a political and cultural taboo.

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Sunay’s gesture of shaking the hand of the Atatürk statue not only undermines the symbolical superhumanity of the statuesque and claims a degree of equality with the represented figure but also involves an informal if not dangerously irreverent attitude to the taboo leader’s figure. Thus the unemployed men’s ambiguous reaction (cheering) to Sunay’s gesture of shaking the hand of the Atatürk statue may reveal as much admiration or even complacency in relation to official power as possible submerged indignation at their present social and economic ills. As Lefebvre notes: “Turmoil is inevitable once a monument loses its prestige, or can only retain it by means of admitted oppression and repression.”77 That Sunay’s last name, Zaim, signifies “leader” also sheds an ironic light on Sunay’s possible attempt at identification with Atatürk’s figure. However, from a different perspective, it is also possible to interpret Sunay’s gesture as slightly conservative because it reproduces the numerous instances in which people reverently shook Atatürk’s hand; therefore, it may even reflect an affectionate stance in relation to the leader’s memory. The political element is salient in all of Sunay’s cultural gestures of identification with Atatürk’s figure: staging a Kemalist play, playing Atatürk in a film, squeezing the hand of Atatürk in the monumental square, and— more dangerously—playing the role of the leader in the military coup against the Islamists and Kurds who are presumably threatening Kemalist ideology. On this basis, it is essential to carefully examine the complex implications of the doubling and mirroring effects between politics and performance in this passage. Sunay describes his theatrical practice as “Brechtian and Bakhtinian” (Snow 138). The prerequisite for setting up the Brechtian framework is to consider the meanings of Sunay’s performance as the “people’s politician.” In a clever investigation of post-Soviet politics, titled Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World, Andrew Wilson contends that, with similar but not identical examples in the West and in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, “the post-Soviet world has its own unique breed of ‘political technologists,’ who bestride an entire culture of politics-as-performance, with common patterns and repeat performances.”78 Through the example of Sunay, Pamuk presents, in a Turkish context, the drama of populism and the ritualized show of democracy as they are enacted in spaces that almost perversely reflect each other: the theatrical stage and the political stage. In a conversation titled “On the Theatricality of Fascism,” Brecht looks at “how the oppressors of our times make theatre—not in their theatres, but on the streets and in the assembly halls, as well as in their private homes, diplomatic offices and conference rooms.”79 Although Brecht’s comment relates particularly to Hitler’s Germany, it can also be useful in explaining recent

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political dramas. A perfect example is Muammar Gaddafi whose hysterical performances on Libyan television accompanied one of the most violent repressions of a popular uprising witnessed in the context of Arab dictators’ responses to the wave of democracy movements across the Middle East in 2011. In one of his televised appearances in February, the Libyan populist dictator appeared near a monument representing a fist crushing a U.S. fighter jet. Gaddafi’s performance on this highly symbolical monumental stage sent a defiant message to an international audience extending as far as the United States that bombed the North African country in 1986 but more importantly to close European and Arab neighbors who were shocked by the violence but also awed by the repercussions of the Libyan problem on the level of oil prices, unprecedented numbers of refugees from North Africa, international terrorism, and changing geopolitics. Gaddafi’s monumental stage was consequently bombed in March 2011 by a multinational UN-mandated force. The interpenetration of politics and performance is central to the fictional and historical dynamics of Snow, particularly in the selected passage. On the stage of the National Theatre in Kars, where Sunay carries out the coup, and on the stage of the Atatürk statue, where he campaigns to play the role of Atatürk, the protagonist attempts to elicit the empathy of the people by means of shock and awe. Here the “people” may refer both to the audience of the political performance and the viewers of the theatrical performance. Therefore, Sunay’s reply “if the people want me” signifies: if the people are moved by my performance and are convinced that my will emerges from their own. This represents an act of faking democracy in the context of political theatrics. It is hence an implicit and subtle novelistic critique of the rhetoric of democracy as enunciated by military coup leaders and successive governments in Turkey and elsewhere. Ertürk’s analysis of Snow is relevant in this respect: “The phantasmic figure of Zaim as the circuit of power brings into crisis the very literary and political representation of theater: the imagined autonomy of ‘we,’ embodied in this way in the figure of the libertine ruler, marks the end of the democratic ethicopolitical itself. Snow does not affirm this irrationality so much as it points to the conditions of its emergence.”80 The “ethicopolitical” has been a central issue in the theatrics of democracy from its classical origins to its different mutations in twentieth- and twenty-first-century populist regimes and post-imperial democratization processes—the latter comprising as varied a range of practices from those applied in American foreign policy to those formulated by postdictatorship emergent nations seeking adoption by multinational bodies that operate under the banner of democratic ideals. The two plays that Sunay stages at the beginning and near the end of the coup,

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My Fatherland or My Headscarf and Tragedy in Kars, exemplify the autocratic exploitation of the democratic model in a theatrical context. That the plays end in different forms of violence stands as a fictional equivalent to historical instances in which the impaired use of performance as politics ended in a disaster. Reversing Atatürk’s Benjaminian reflection on historical revolutions, Sunay bemoans the fact that he is not able to employ his “art to intervene in the flow of history” (Snow 189). Sunay’s appropriation of theatrical means to influence politics appears as either farcical or catastrophic unlike the veiled actress Kadife’s performance that disturbs the audience’s established conceptions of nationhood, religious freedom, and female agency. From this perspective, Mary Jo Kietzman writes: The intertextuality between contemporary Turkish and Renaissance English plays [specifically Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy that Sunay adapts for the Turkish theatre] allows Pamuk to explore the potential abuses of Western forms and modes of artistic expression when used to impose an ideology as well as the expressive opportunities these works offer: when used progressively they can give Turkish people a stake in the great stories of literature—stories that enable them to disrupt the state’s nationalist pedagogy with their own self-authored performances.81 Reflecting on the role of theater in political formations, John McGrath stresses that “theatre, of all the arts, surely works at the interface between the creative and the political, calling together audiences of citizens to contemplate their society or its ways.”82 In this context, McGrath sketches out the different ways in which theater can contribute to democracy. He ends on a fairly optimistic tone stating unequivocally that [t]here is a need for a sharp, satirical theatre to scrutinize our values, to contest the borders of our democracy, to give a voice to the excluded, to the minorities, to guard against the tyranny of the majority, to criticize without fear, to seek true and multifaceted information, to combat the distorting power of the mass media, to define and re-define freedom for our age, to demand the equality of all citizens for the short time we have on this earth before we die.83 Sunay’s exploitation of the stage for repressive ends stands as a counterpoint to McGrath’s optimistic visions of the role of theater as a medium of democracy, since theatricality can also be abused especially when the boundaries between theater and abusive political practices become dangerously blurred.

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Today the issue of democracy is highly significant in Turkey as the republic attempts to negotiate its thorny path into the European Union. In her introduction to a politically dense conversation with Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely writes that a crucial question for people in Turkey concerned the distinction between two forms of democracy: what they saw as “a struggle between what some call ‘tutelary democracy’ (in which the army holds the reins, stepping in whenever it sees ‘the nation’ straying from the righteous path) and something more in line with the social democracies of Europe.”84 While the drama of politics as performance in the passage from Snow helps unravel the chameleonic figure of democracy in the recent history of the Turkish republic, it is also significant in contemporary world history especially when looking at the role of street performances in the context of the protests that marked the various popular uprisings in 2011 in the Middle East and North Africa. Recent popular demonstrations, especially in Egypt where the ruling party and Mubarak’s family were mocked and prohibitions were suspended (for example, thousands of people raised their shoes in defiance in Tahrir Square), have proved that carnivalesque performance can be part of highly subversive activism. That Mubarak and his party lost power in the country while the army took control after the “revolution” leaves the question open concerning the temporary suspension of discipline during carnivalesque events and the fragility of democracy after military coups. This kind of evidence invites us to reconsider categorical statements about carnivalesque efficacy, as in the case of Terry Eagleton’s argument that carnival is “a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art.”85 Certainly Sunay’s various appropriations of the Atatürk figure, on the political stage and the theatrical stage, may appear as only a revolutionary work at the ambiguous intersection of life and art.86 Nonetheless, this blurring of boundaries between political action and the artistic/theatrical act is not an “ineffectual” and “licensed affair” because it is a strategic means to subversive ends as it seeks to evade official protocol through its artful devices. Still, the textual marginalization of Sunay’s performance may be mimicking the spatial marginalization of carnival culture and the restriction of its effects within a contained unofficial sphere. In this respect, Bakhtin emphasizes carnival culture’s “extraterritoriality in a world of official order and official ideology.”87 But instead, in Pamuk’s text, the spatiality of the carnivalesque intervenes in the territory of power and in a markedly official space, the monumental space that represents the leader’s celebrated image. Furthermore, Sunay’s performance indirectly incites the reaction of power through the high-ranking official’s attitude that blends ridicule and terror and through the decision to postpone the Atatürk film

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indefinitely. Yet, the direct response of power on the ground and the political ramifications of the crowd’s cheering (are they radically complicit in a subversive act, or are they conservatively applauding an emotional outburst aimed at Atatürk?) are left out of the narrative. This significant present absence in the text, compounded with the ambiguous nexus of complicity and dissent in Sunay’s coup in Kars and its eventual condemnation by the authorities, permits a multiplicity of political interpretations in relation to the Atatürk cult and Atatürk statues, their defense by Kemalists, and their popular transformations in the context of a struggle in which allegiance and resistance often took violent forms. The final and perhaps most significant twist of the relation between Sunay, Atatürk statues, and the “people” in the dialogue of the real and the fictional, the political and the artistic emerges in a passage near the end of the novel. After the death of Sunay, the narrator, another Orhan, says that he met the actor’s wife, Funda Eser—an actress also—and that she told him she remained grief-stricken over the slanders that had prevented her husband (whose death she now termed ‘a work-related incident’) from taking on the role of Atatürk; her sole consolation was to see how many of the newest statues of the great man showed him striking poses created by her husband (Snow 408). This is highly ironic with respect to both monument making and the relationship of performance to politics. Primarily, the statement points out that what we experience in monumental space is often not a visual reproduction of a real-life narrative but a static moment of contrived performance. Secondly, this statement parodies the practice of producing Atatürk imagery in the 1990s (the time frame of Snow) whereby the leader is presented as striking various poses that appear almost theatrical. Özyürek notes an astonishing phenomenon in the production of Atatürk imagery in the late 1990s: “What startled me most was not the multiplication of his image, but its appearance in strange, new places and in new poses, its very commodification.”88 Özyürek argues that Turks in the 1990s willingly and enthusiastically bought miniatures and pictures representing Atatürk in various poses and placed them in the privacy of their homes rather than state-controlled monumental space. Hence they “send a message about their consumer-based and, thus, unforced commitment to the teachings of the founding leader” in the face of the rising movement of political Islam.89 While Kemalist officials countered the public emergence of political Islam by increasing the number of Atatürk monuments, especially in areas where the people voted for the Islamist

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party in 1995, Kemalist consumers countered the Islamist phenomenon with Atatürk imagery in the privacy of their homes and workplaces.90 This trend shows the absorption of public monumental space into a private representational space. It also reflects the transformation of Turkey into a version of what Nora calls “the memorial nation” wherein “the private tends to become public, the sacred is secularized, and the local insists on national notice.”91 According to Özyürek, this private imagery tends to humanize the superhuman Atatürk by portraying him engaged in mundane activities. She mentions that the owner of one of the oldest Istanbul photography shops explained that “he is in search of new pictures of Atatürk that show him among the people because ‘when people realize that Atatürk mixed with the people, they like him much more’.”92 This urge is a symptom of a revisionist movement that aims to introduce a private and intimate element into the figural representation of Atatürk. It is the sort of privacy and intimacy that Sunay’s act of shaking the hand of the Atatürk statue inadvertently conveys. Snow sarcastically approaches this populist strategy in political landscapes. In several instances in Snow, we find Atatürk imagery in private spaces: in the protagonist, Ka’s, hotel room among “calendars, sample business cards and wedding invitations . . . and photographs of the owner with important government officials and other famous Turks who had paid visits to Kars” (24) and among “bottles on the shelf” (94) in the Green Pastures Café where Ka spends some of his time. This privatization of Atatürk imagery is only a pretense of democracy, because it essentially reproduces in private space what occurs in monumental space. The adoption of official imagery in private space is reactionary in the sense that it miniaturizes monumental space and gives it space in everyday and intimate interiors. As Özyürek concludes: “The commercialization of the most potent symbol of the state in Turkey is a demonstration of the fact that being enmeshed in market symbolism neither eradicates nor democratizes state politics. Rather, some citizens take on the responsibility for defending and disseminating state ideology against its critics.”93 Snow sheds an ironic light on the contrived showiness of this phenomenon and its questionable democracy by describing a room in the theater of Kars “lined with pictures of Atatürk and Sunay” (Snow 384). This is the same stage on which the violent coup starts and is broadcast on television to a frightened audience. As such, the media and the theatrical industry become the fourth estate in the Turkish state where Atatürk, the military, and the Islamists compose a triad of power. This corresponds to what Brian S. Osborne describes, in his study of the GeorgeÉtienne Cartier Monument in Montreal, as the role of the “theatrics of

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ideology”94 and the transformative function of the media with respect to monumental space and its audience in the twentieth century. The performance of political violence gets another turn of the screw. *** In Snow, monumental spaces are the sites of various manifestations of violence on physical, psychological, and ideological levels. Appropriating W. J. T. Mitchell’s schema of the violence of public art, three areas of interest emerge here: the representations of monumental spaces commemorating violence, the narration of real or imagined violent actions against monumental spaces, and the evocation of unofficial spaces that bear traces of past violence and that become monumentalized through repetition in the text. Snow communicates these meanings by referring to conflicts that still mark the Turkish republic with a nexus of terror and taboo: a series of attacks against Atatürk statues, the repression of Kurds who presumably perpetrate these attacks, and the expression of the discursive/spatial struggle concerning the Armenian massacres during World War I. In an interview with the Swiss newspaper Der Tages-Anzeiger, Pamuk stated: “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” This statement resulted in his being charged under Article 301/I of the Turkish Penal Code with the crime of “public denigration” of Turkish identity.95 In Snow, Pamuk negotiates the Scylla and Charybdis of the highly sensitive Kurdish and Armenian issues by staging fictional violent episodes in the Anatolian town of Kars, a place that is punctuated with monuments and sites related to the Turkish-Kurdish conflict and the Armenian massacres. The Kurds, who now number around 25 million globally, were distributed in the aftermath of World War I and the division of the Ottoman Empire into independent nation-states, among Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq.96 In Turkey, Kurds form around 20 percent of the population, and they are concentrated as a majority in southeastern Turkey near the borders with Syria, Iraq, and Iran.97 Although some Kurds supported the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923, they realized, after the end of the caliphate, that the Turkish state would not allow “dual identities.”98 There were three Kurdish rebellions in Turkey between 1925 and 1935, and all three were repressed by the Turkish military. In the 1970s and after almost forty years of cessation of Kurdish militant action against the Turkish state, the radical Kurdish organization, the PKK, was formed and expanded under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan until his arrest by the Turkish authorities in 1999. Throughout the years, the PKK has shifted its rhetoric and politics

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along a continuum of Kurdish demands from separatism by means of violence to peaceful attempts at resolving conflictual issues with the Turkish government.99 In the early 1990s, there was a particular increase in PKK attacks and an exacerbation in the Turkish Army’s response to what it recognized as a grave terrorist threat. The human cost of the violence was thousands of Turkish and Kurdish lives.100 Turkish repressive measures against the PKK and the Kurds have taken various forms including, in the 1930s for instance, the deportation of thousands of Kurds and the banning of the public use of the Kurdish language.101 From a socioeconomic perspective, regions with a Kurdish majority, especially southeastern Turkey, have had to cope with devastating conditions: “By the early 1990s, less than 10 percent of adults in the Kurdish southeast had industrial jobs, and most of them tended to be in low-skilled industries.”102 Pressed by the European Union that demands Turkey’s full respect of human rights and the protection of minorities as membership criteria, the Turkish government has gradually proceeded to make some improvements in Kurdish regions by legalizing the use of the Kurdish language and adopting 143 laws, a “harmonizing law,” and four reform packages that, nevertheless, have been critiqued as failing to result in important practical changes.103 The conflict between the Turkish military and the PKK is at the heart of Pamuk’s Snow. In a conversation with a detective, Ka learns that the army and the Turkish secret services, referred to as the MIT, are undertaking a campaign to punish alleged attacks on Atatürk statues and even the unconscious desire for such attacks by Kurdish youths: The more ground the army gained in its savage conflict with the Kurdish PKK guerillas, the lower became the morale of the weak, despairing, and unemployed Kurdish youths who’d fallen in with them; this situation had led some of these youths to nurture strange and frightful dreams of revenge, as was reported by quite a few of the detectives who spent their days dozing in the city’s coffeehouses. They’d overheard youths discussing bomb and kidnap plots, possible attacks on the statue of Atatürk, a scheme to poison the city’s water supplies, and another to blow up its bridges. (Snow 209) Kurds and particularly members of the PKK have been suspected of being behind several attacks on Atatürk statues, and such events still occur today despite the tight grip of the Turkish army, police, and secret services on the activities of Kurdish militants. On January 9, 2011, the Hürriyet Daily News reported that

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[a] group of suspected outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, sympathizers attempted to immolate a statue of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, on Dağkapı Avenue in Turkey’s eastern Diyarbakır province Saturday evening. Firefighters managed to extinguish the flames before the statue was completely burned. The statue was not seriously harmed by the arson attempt.104 Notably, readers’ responses to this report on the newspaper’s website indirectly point out how this recent incident also fits in a political framework comprising the repercussions of the Atatürk cult and the ideological wars between the prime minister’s, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s, party the AKP, which came to power in 2002, and its enemies. These dynamics are highly relevant to reading violence against Atatürk statues in Snow that highlights a period when Erdoğan’s original party, Refah, was struggling to establish itself in the Turkish political arena particularly by appealing to Kurds in the southeast. In Snow, a main target of the terror policy executed by Sunay Zaim’s military group is Kurdish individuals accused of vandalizing representations of Atatürk: There were eyewitness reports, perhaps exaggerated, about the terror Z Demirkol and friends had been visiting on the city throughout the day: they’d raided the Mesopotamia Association, founded by a number of Kurdish nationalist youths to promote “folklore and literature,” . . . Then there were the three men—two of them were barbers and the third was unemployed—who’d been implicated in an incident six months earlier in which parties unknown had poured sewer water over the statue of Atatürk that stood outside the Atatürk Work Plant; although they’d opened an investigation on these men, they’d never put them behind bars; but after beatings that had gone on all night, they’d taken responsibility for a number of anti-Atatürk incidents in the city (taking a hammer to the nose of the Atatürk statue that stood in the garden of the Trade and Industry Lycée, writing ugly remarks on the Atatürk poster hanging on the wall at the Gang of Fifteen Café, and entering into a conspiracy to use a hatchet to destroy the Atatürk statue standing outside the government offices). (Snow 304) The parenthetical gesture, enclosing the enumeration of presumable antiAtatürk events, is a textual expression of taboo with respect to the aforementioned criminal offence of insulting Atatürk’s memory. Interestingly, the

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equally subversive act of pouring sewer water over the Atatürk statue that, according to Gertrud Koch’s schema, can be described as a “contamination of the sacrosanct tabooed object or person,”105 is left out of the parentheses as though the text is potentially tentatively mimicking the act of taboo breaking and then immediately reestablishing the boundaries of taboo through the parenthetical gesture. What is also striking in the passage is that it presents the most concentrated textual occurrence of Atatürk representations in Snow. This is particularly ironic given that Kemalist policy toward the Kurds has been continuously polemical. In this context, Mango writes: The persistence of the Kurdish problem is . . . a failure of the Turkish nationalist approach, which Atatürk shared, but did not initiate. Later, however, his theories of history provided a spurious justification for a policy of assimilation. He could, of course, have tried to implement his original promise of local autonomy; but as the Kurds were (and remain) divided, and fought each other with as much gusto as they resisted attempts at control from outside; it is doubtful that autonomy would have been compatible with law and order.. . . But whatever the cause, he bequeathed the Kurdish problem to his successors.106 Like Mango’s historical analysis, Pamuk’s imaginative approach to the Turkish-Kurdish conflict includes recognition of the debilitating divisions among Kurdish groups and close attention to both the excesses in the repressive reaction against the Kurds and the latter group’s destitute economic condition. In the two excerpts from Snow, real and imagined attacks against Atatürk statues become the groundwork for the negotiation of shared guilt and excessive violence in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. Examining the politics of destroying monuments, Robert Bevan contends that “[t]here are contradictions, inconsistencies and a myriad of local subtleties to the meanings brought to buildings and the actions taken against them; these in themselves change over time. There is no unity of process and purpose but a cluster of interwoven vectors. And in conflicts there will always be a confusion of motives and responsibilities.”107 Pamuk reveals the interpenetration of responsibilities, the multiplicity of motives, and the complexity of agency and its “local subtleties” in the alleged antiAtatürk incidents and the state’s reactions to them. The taboo surrounding Atatürk’s memory and its monumental representations thus becomes the site of unconscious desires and/or fabricated dreams threatening Kemalist ideology. Pamuk’s narrative does not reproduce clichéd interpretations of Kurdish actions as either iconoclastic resistance or mere terrorism. Rather, Snow highlights the significant roles of rumor and propaganda, radical

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distrust, and extremist discourses of authenticity as they fuel a cycle of violence expressed in terrorism and torture in psychological and material forms. *** Immediately after the revolutionary coup in Kars, Ka reads in the local newspaper, the Border City Gazette, that “[d]isputes between Islamists, secularists, Kurds, Turks, and Azeris drive us asunder for specious reasons and reawaken old accusations about the Armenian massacre that should have been buried long ago” (Snow 295). Snow reveals the coaction of terror and taboo not only in relation to the Kurdish question but also with respect to the massacres of Armenians during World War I and in the few years between the war and the establishment of the Turkish republic. At one point in the novel, we learn that [a] defeatist in the crowd [of various Islamist, Kurdish, and leftist individuals meeting secretly in the Hotel Asia], slyly asked, “And whatever happened to the millions of Armenians who once lived all across Anatolia, including Kars?” in the course of a long speech about the Crusades, the Holocaust, the American massacre of Red Indians, and the Algerian Muslims massacred by the French. But feeling pity for this man, the informer-secretary did not write down his name. (Snow 278) The identification of the Turkish massacre of Armenians as one event in a long list of massacres across various spatial frameworks and historical periods suggests an integrative and fluid perspective and a dynamically critical approach transcending the social memory of a closed community. In his magisterial work on the intricate relations of memory, history, forgetting, and forgiveness, Paul Ricoeur writes: “It is along the path of critical history that memory encounters the sense of justice.”108 Ricoeur contends that history’s contribution is “in correcting, criticizing, even refuting the memory of a determined community, when it folds back upon itself and encloses itself within its own sufferings to the point of rendering itself blind and deaf to the suffering of other communities.”109 Pamuk’s citation of various violent historical moments in the preceding passage tentatively suggests the possibility of such a critical history that respects the specificity of a people’s suffering while acknowledging common patterns of injustice, repression, and struggle across different geopolitical situations of conflict. In Snow, Pamuk evokes the history of the Armenian massacres in World War I, but he especially touches on the massacres that happened in Kars

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when the Turkish Army entered the city in 1920. This narrative engagement with two massacres that are clearly distinguishable in terms of cause and scale does not imply that Pamuk erases the difference between the two events or anachronistically extends the blame for the World War I massacres to the years immediately preceding the establishment of the Turkish republic. Rather, the evocation of the Kars events acts as a symptom of the taboo subject of the Armenian massacres, generally, and of the 1920 attacks against Armenian properties and lives particularly. Inevitably, underlying Pamuk’s narrative is the taboo in Turkey that still surrounds the debate on the genocidal dimensions of the World War I Armenian massacres.110 As the subsequent analysis will show, Pamuk’s representation of monumental spaces and of spaces that become monumentalized in the text contributes to a critical history of the massacres, in general, and of the fierce actions against Armenians in Kars, in particular. This is the imaginative space where the memory of past violence encounters a potential sense of justice. An important monumental space in relation to the history of the fall of Kars in Turkish hands is the Kazim Karabekir statue. On October 28, 1920, just when the Soviet Union recognized the province of Kars as part of Armenia, the Turkish Army, led by Kazim Karabekir, attacked Kars and then captured Kars Castle on October 30. After the successive defeats of the Armenian Army, the Armenian government accepted Turkish conditions and signed the Treaty of Gumru, which set the actual borders between Turkey and Armenia, thus surrendering Kars to Turkey. Consequently, Karabekir was awarded the title conqueror of the East, a position that fueled his rivalry with Mustafa Kemal.111 Patrick Kinross states that the Armenian Army retreating from Kars was “followed in a panic by droves of civilians dreading, not wholly without reason, rape and robbery and massacre at the hands of the Turks.”112 Snow expresses a subtle irony with respect to the Turkish victory in Kars by representing the Kazim Karabekir statue as “a giant ice-cream cone” (Snow 68), much like the Wellington Monument in Joyce’s “The Dead.” While it buries the Karabekir statue in a silent snowcovered landscape, Pamuk’s novel unearths the signs of past Armenian presence in Kars and unravels sites of past tragedies that have been buried in whitewashed silence. Again the peaceful snow-covered landscape seems to conceal layers of personal and historical wounds as in Joyce’s story. Bleak yet illuminating moments in the narrative include when “Ka passes an empty one-story Armenian house, its windows boarded up” (Snow 163), symbolizing the indelible traces of forced migration, dispossession, and cultural cleansing not only in Ottoman and post-Ottoman Turkey but in various parts of the world where these forms of injustice have been perpetrated. Near the end of the novel, Orhan, the narrator and Pamuk’s namesake

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in Snow, meets an Islamist Party ex-candidate who makes a summary judgment on the destruction of a hundred-year-old building: “At least it was an Armenian building and not a Turkish one” (Snow 412). The haunting presence of Armenian architectural remains marks the textual space of Snow with an insistence that critically memorializes these nonmonumental sites.113 As such, the narrative enacts its own commemoration of the Armenian tragedy in Kars thus performing what Ricoeur specifies as “the duty to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self.”114 It is the equivalent of the process of “active remembering” that Akçam, among others, considers as Turkey’s duty to a chapter of its past “in the face of forgetting, ignoring, and repressing.”115 In Istanbul, Pamuk shows other dynamics of loss, traumatic erasure, and critical history in twentieth-century Turkey. The Armenian architectural remains that are mentioned in Snow seem to be refracted in the burning yalι or the wooden houses that Pamuk mentions in Istanbul and that started to disappear in fires near the end of the Ottoman Empire. In these two instances, Pamuk shows how Turks have tackled each of these spatial-political traumas with a different sense of communal anxiety: one defensive and the other melancholic and nostalgic. Near the beginning of Snow, Ka meets his lover, Ipek, in a pastry shop that had been an Orthodox church until 1967, when the door had been removed and taken away to the museum. A section of the same museum commemorated the Armenian Massacre (naturally, she said, some tourists came expecting to see remnants of the Turks’ massacre of the Armenians, and it was always a jolt to discover that in this museum the story was the other way around) (Snow 33). Pamuk notes the dissemination of the meaning of the Armenian Massacre amid a conflict between two extremely opposed viewpoints that have produced contradictory readings of past atrocities. Analyzing Turkish society’s defense mechanisms in relation to the taboo subject of the Armenian massacres, Akçam argues that [t]he primary defense mechanisms that Turks use regarding their history are denying those things that were experienced, marginalizing them and behaving as if they never occurred, and projecting their deeds and claiming that ‘we Turks did not murder Armenians; Armenians murdered us’.”116 The parenthetical comment in Pamuk’s text implicitly hints at such processes of denial, marginalization, and projection without reducing the

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interpretive conflict to a conclusive psychoanalytical or political reading. Pamuk thus presents the museum as a contested space wherein the Turkish official and popular discourse on the Armenian massacres competes with the meanings that the tourists bring to it and that are influenced by the Armenians’ century-long campaigns to compel international opinion to put pressure on Turkey to recognize what has been described as genocide. At the same time, these lines subtly extend the political and historical critique of the conflict and its human cost by hinting at the loss of Turkish lives during the campaign on Kars. The body of Pamuk’s Snow communicates the nexus of trauma and taboo that still haunt Turkish and Armenian lived spaces, historical debates, and political milieus. Snow thus ethically performs an act of memory/justice and forgiveness. This is the “therapeutic” double act that Ricoeur emphasizes when he concludes his reflection on the relations of memory, history, and amnesty in relation to past atrocities including genocidal acts: “Political prose begins where vengeance ceases, if history is not to remain locked up within a deadly oscillation between hatred and forgetful memory.”117 The political and historiographical conflicts concerning the traumatic and taboo episode of the Armenian massacres and their genocidal dimensions have often been caught in the grips of the equally dangerous forces of hatred and forgetful memory. Recent scholarly work on the massacres has attempted to find discursive ways out of this conflict.118 By imaginatively revisiting the spaces marked by a history of violence and mediating alternative forms of memorialization with respect to this history, Pamuk’s Snow contributes to this critical attempt by suggesting political possibilities beyond hatred, which often causes or results from terror, and forgetful memory, which is frequently a symptom of the taboo. *** Pamuk’s novelistic ventures into the delicate and vital issues marking contemporary Turkish politics trace a trajectory between and beyond terror and taboo. These imaginative journeys occur across the matrix of monumental space and the various acts and meanings of monumentalization and countermonumentalization that form this space. In The Black Book and Snow, monumental space does not simply refer to an object that is viewed or ignored, built and destroyed, brought to spatial and discursive prominence or mentally erased due to excessive familiarity and redundance in the urban fabric. It also refers to the phenomenon of monumentalization as articulated in the Atatürk cult and its accompanying monument-making project that marked both the birth of the Turkish republic and the moments

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in which Kemalist ideology considered itself in danger. More significantly, in these two novels, monumentalization is an act that the text performs or to which it reacts in several ways: by revealing layers of conflict and violence beneath the taboo Turkish monumental space and within its history; by defamiliarizing the relations of local flaneurs and tourists to the monumental signs of the republic; by presenting carnivalesque democratic theatrics in the environs of an Atatürk statue; by underlining the dynamics of mutual apprehension in Kurds’ real or imagined attacks against Atatürk statues and the state’s violent reactions to them; and by giving monumental significance in the text to spaces punctuated with traces of past violence against Armenians. These textual performances ingeniously refract the historical nexus of terror and taboo onto the body of the two novels by means of the surreal and apocalyptic image, the phantasmagorical journey across “signs of the city,” the textual marginalization of the taboo figure or the taboo act, and the foregrounding of ephemeral evidence of past terror. Accordingly, Pamuk’s The Black Book and Snow enable a critical and ethical engagement with the politics of monumentalization and its relations to terror and taboo in twentieth-century Turkey and with monumentalization as an idea and an act whose political potential as a representation, vehicle, or object of violence emerges not only when it is materially realized or attacked but also, and more importantly, when it is thought, reimagined, and redefined in the literary text and the ethicocritical response to it.

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Postscript

Post-2011: Monumental Space and the Collapse of Arab Dictatorships

In April 2003, American troops, cheered by a crowd of Iraqis, toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos “Paradise” Square that faced the Palestine Hotel where journalists from around the world were staying. Later analyses of the event revealed that what appeared at first as a spontaneous attack against a deposed dictator’s iconic monumental representation was staged by an invading army and transmitted by the media to a worldwide audience as part of the strategic rallying of international opinion in support of the “war on terror.” In 2011, the “war on terror” has become a terrible conflict impacting both the region internally on geopolitical, religious, and economic levels, and the world, especially the United States, in relation to its role in democratizing and reforming a “New Middle East”—an expression introduced by then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. In 2011, Iraqis are looking back at Saddam Hussein’s legacy less in anger and more with critical reflection. Part of this legacy comprises the monuments, hundreds of which were destroyed after 2003 in an attempt to erase the dictator’s mark from the architectural landscape of the “new” Iraq. However, as the vision of the “New Middle East” fades, so the war on Saddam Hussein’s monuments has lost some of its impetus as Iraqis start to find new ways to reconfigure the significance of this legacy without eradicating it completely. As a March 2011 report issued by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) shows, a prime example of this new attitude is the plan to reconstruct the monument that reproduces, on a giant scale, the dictator’s hands holding two crossed swords. The BBC’s Jonathan Head says that Iraqis are divided on the question of whether this statue should be demolished because it is “a monument to one man’s vanity” or whether it should be repaired as a reminder that “Iraqis were cut down by these swords.”1 This division over the significance of a nationally and internationally contested monumental space reflects changing attitudes to the role of the current American occupation and the ongoing civil conflict as key elements in redefining the Iraqi nation after Saddam.

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At the start of 2011, monumental squares in Iraq and several other countries in the Middle East and North Africa were the stage for popular movements that aspired to envision new nations in a region that has almost always suffered under the dictatorial rule of corrupt presidents, ministers, and royal families. On February 22, 2011, Peter Hallward wrote in The Guardian: As the philosopher Alain Badiou points out in a recent editorial, “once they cross a certain threshold of determination, persistence and courage, the people can indeed concentrate their existence in a public square or avenue, in a few factories, or in a university. In the wake of a transformative event, the people are composed of those who are able to resolve the problems posed by this event”—for instance, the problems involved in defending a square, or sustaining a strike, or confronting an army. Buoyed by the assertion of their hard-won power, the people of North Africa and the Middle East are currently inventing means of solving such problems at a rate that already defies any sort of historical comparison at all.2 The uniqueness of the popular uprisings that occupied and revolutionized the monumental squares of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and other countries in North Africa and the Middle East in the early months of 2011 have fuelled an urge to redefine the practical and theoretical space of democracy in a post-imperial world in which even the United States’ neoimperialism has started to founder under the weight of foreign policy blunders. Astonished and confused, US and European governments watched the fall of dictatorships on which they had relied for decades in order to maintain a more or less docile region. Still, the unavoidable weight of “historical comparison” compelled Western powers to accept the fact that these uprisings exemplified the democratic ideal that they had struggled for centuries to establish and sometimes forcefully reinstate through revolution and reform across the West. Other similar comparisons are inevitable. Mohamed Bouazizi’s selfimmolation in December 2010 that inspired the Tunisian people’s uprising against President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s regime recalls similar events in the past: in 1965 when the Quaker Norman Morrison set himself ablaze under the Pentagon in an obvious antiwar public performance and in 1969 in Prague’s Wenceslas Square, when the student Jan Palach set himself on fire to protest the concessions made as a result of Soviet demands to curb the 1968 reforms. In February 2011, November 7 Square thus became Mohamed Bouazizi Square and set the monumental squares in the Arab world on

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Figure PS.1 Protests in Tahrir Square with Omar Makram statue in the background [February 2011]. Courtesy of Assmaa Naguib.

revolutionary fire, inaugurating what has been described as the Arab Spring. Encouraged by the Tunisian example, tens of thousands of Egyptians occupied Cairo’s Tahrir “Liberation” Square for weeks. In the process, the protesters’ demands and achievements reinvented the performative significance of the square as a site where the people’s political performance in public space mediates liberation on a democratic level (Figure PS.1). On February 12, 2011, thousands of demonstrators gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square in support of the Egyptian uprising that had succeeded a day earlier in forcing Hosni Mubarak to step down as president. While the juxtaposition of the British and Egyptian monumental squares in the context of a democratic world may appear paradoxical and even ironic given the postcolonial link, it reflects the unprecedented upheaval in a post-imperial world in which Western democracies and Arab dictatorships coalesced for decades in order to maintain uneven democratic development for security reasons and economic interests. As the popular uprisings broke many taboos and established paradigms, Arab dictators quickly discovered that governmental force is unsustainable and that totalitarian regimes are ineluctably broken from the inside.

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The influential role of the digital media that helped form a wide perspective on the people’s movements across the Middle East and North Africa was one important factor in halting the cycle of intimidation and fear by bringing an international audience in touch with a region that had been equated with terror and political stalemates, and embarrassing world leaders who had supported undemocratic regimes. Every day, satellite television and the internet broadcast historical performances that ranged from organized protests to the carnivalesque denigration of rulers and the commemoration of those portrayed as the daily “martyrs” of the revolutions. Speaking of the media’s role in changing the performance space of monumental squares in the twentieth century, Brian Osborne writes: The transition from public sculpture-as-viewed object to public-assculpted masses required nation-wide participation in the theatrics of ideology in appropriate spaces: thousands performed as on-site actors; more thousands served as on-site spectators; and millions more were incorporated as distanced participant voyeurs as listeners and viewers through national and international radio and film [sic].3 In 2011, millions of protesters and hundreds of millions of “distant participant voyeurs” were linked not only through satellite television but also by means of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and with the help of individuals described as hacktivists, who invaded the cyberspace of dictatorships and helped make a regional revolution international. In the process, onsite and off-site spectators witnessed symbolical violence practiced against monumentalized representations of oppressive regimes and watched brutal physical violence carried out by security forces and armies against protesters in and around monumental squares. But the fear and discipline that once defined the dynamics of Arab public spaces seem to have been overturned since, as Patrick Cockburn writes, in 2011 “the day of the classic Arab security state is surely over.”4 Although it seems to be dying, the classic Arab security state persists in employing violence to curb the uprisings, but international pressure and condemnation have taken their toll to prevent the repetition of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres in many of the Arab dictatorships. In this context, the dynamics of occupying, evacuating, and retaking the Arab monumental squares have overdetermined the balance of power between the state and the protesters. In this context, Mohamed Salmawy’s recent novel Agneht al-Farasha [Butterfly Wings] highlights the importance of occupying space and of the power dynamics between protesters and security forces. The novel anticipates the Egyptian uprising by presenting a revolution orchestrated by Cairo’s “digital youth” who use

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several media to campaign against the authorities and fuel the opposition’s protests in the streets.5 Nevertheless, in 2011, Arab government-controlled media were used in a reactionary manner to repress revolutions when some monumental squares became the space where counter-revolutionary demonstrations were organized by forces loyal to the dictators. During the demonstrations that erupted in the Syrian city of Deraa in March 2011, a Reuters correspondent reported that some protesters attacked the late President Hafez al-Assad’s bronze statue in the main square before they were stopped by policemen with automatic rifles.6 While the international media were repeatedly prevented from obtaining detailed independent reports on the events, Syrian television persisted in broadcasting live coverage of the tens of thousands of loyalists who gathered in the squares of Damascus in support of President Bashar al-Assad. This double dynamic was especially clear in Libya where, for weeks in February and March 2011, Libyan national television broadcast pictures of pro-Gaddafi demonstrations in Green Square, Tripoli while pro-Gaddafi forces bombed the east, which has fallen under the control of the rebels. Whether the participants spontaneously chose to demonstrate or were forced to do so is not the point at issue here. The aim was to present the “public-as-sculpted masses” and to perform the “theatrics of ideology” in front of hundreds of millions of “distanced participant voyeurs” in order to counterbalance the rebellion that occupied the squares and streets of Libya’s eastern provinces. Fortunately, the pro-Gaddafi propagandistic performances did not deter the United Nation from imposing a no-fly zone and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from targeting Gaddafi’s armed forces to help stop the massacre of Libyan rebels. One of the more interesting targets of the bombardment in April was the Bab alAzizia compound, part of which Gaddafi had transformed into a memorial marking the 1986 US bombing that presumably killed his daughter and that occurred in retaliation for the Berlin discotheque bombing the same year. Thus a memorial for the consequences of a dictator’s action against the Western world was further damaged in the process of curbing the same dictator’s aggression against his own people. Old interests and fears now bring old and new powers of the post-imperial world (Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States) into another military quagmire that will inevitably reshape a nation and a region, if not the entire world. The question is how the fight against a violent dictator can be maintained on different levels in order to bring about sustainable democracy and fundamental reform of the nation rather than triggering a violent civil war and/or the revival of dictatorship, whether in Libya or any other North African and Middle Eastern country caught in the fever of popular uprisings.

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While the uprisings were overtaking the Arab world, in England, on the margins of the March for the Alternative demonstration staged on March 26, 2011, in Trafalgar Square in response to the austerity measures in the 2011 UK budget announced a few days earlier, vandals defaced several monuments, including Nelson’s Column, with graffiti and placards. On the equestrian monument to Charles I, some protesters placed a sign that said “Hands off Libya.” Commenting on the protest generally, irrespective of the material damage caused by a small number of protesters, Brian Wheeler noted that “although there was a carnival atmosphere, with community choirs and fancy dress, there was also real anger.”7 Wheeler’s BBC report pointed out that: There was also a definite sense that this was a post Tahrir Square event— and not just in Trafalgar Square where members of the Education Activist Network were staging a 24-hour protest, in an attempt to replicate the “people power” sweeping the Middle East. Many banners called on the government to “Leave Libya Alone”—but some marchers detected a change in tactics by the police as a result of events in the Middle East.8 Concerning the issue of vandalism, if the placards and graffiti reflect the inalienable political heteroglossia that has continuously marked demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and the vulnerability of monuments to both subversive reinterpretation and physical attack (interestingly Charles I’s wars and repression of uprisings contributed to the popular and political opposition that cost him his life), they also underline the global impact of the events in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly Libya, on the public space of both peaceful and violent activism across the world. Whereas September 11 marks a crucial historical moment in the relation of the West to the Arab world and in the role of monumental space in commemorating this event, 2011 shifts the international political focus to the other history of violence that resides not in the hiding places of terrorist cells but in the heart of darkness of the Arab dictatorships that had been either directly financed and sustained by some Western powers or just ignored by others. If these major events require a twenty-first-century version of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” they also demand a new understanding of the role of monumental squares as public spaces in which revolutions and counterrevolutions are staged as political theatrics. Unfortunately, the desire for reform remains a popular drive with uncertain outcomes amid the dark possibilities of the radicalization of violence, civil war, fundamentalism, terrorism, and fledgling democracies that may fail to develop into fully fledged political, social, and economic

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systems. On March 9, 2011, Cairo’s squares became the stage of violent clashes that took on sectarian dimensions in what appeared to be or really was orchestrated as a conflict between Coptic Christians and some Muslim groups a week after the burning of a Coptic church. On April 1, 2011, a day that was designated as the Friday to Save the Revolution, thousands of demonstrators occupied Tahrir Square again in “an effort to show opposition to a recent proposed law which would criminalize protests. [. .] also an effort to re-assert the youth movement which drove former president Hosni Mubarak from power.”9 Some of the protesters realized that they had to grapple with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that seemed to stall the democratic process and to compete with the much more organized political parties, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, that would have better chances of success in the coming elections.10 As the leaders of the so-called prodemocracy movements face immense challenges in their campaigns to fulfill the aims of their uprisings, they recognize the need to reconfigure the political geographies of the cities that witnessed their movements. Just like November 7 Square that became Mohamed Bouazizi Square, many monumental spaces across the Middle East and North Africa will inevitably be renamed and reshaped according to the outcomes of the revolutions that continue to sweep over individual countries, the region, and the world. In the process, there must be a clear vision of how to represent the new forms of nationhood that would incorporate the rhetoric of the struggle for democracy within the framework of a reinvented postcoloniality that, like in Iraq these days, appropriates and refashions the monumental legacy of the past rather than rejecting it completely. A good example in this respect might be the monumental landscape in Mali’s capital, Bamako, (constructed between 1995 and 2002) that links the midcentury struggle against colonialism to the fight for democracy in the 1980s. The monuments in Bamako “promote a shared postcolonial national identity in the public imagination by valorizing and linking the heroes of Mali’s independence struggles with student leaders of Mali’s prodemocracy movement.”11 As a commemoration of the struggle to achieve democracy, The Martyrs Monument sits in the center of a boulevard that leads to a bridge linking parts of the city flanking the Niger River. It commemorates the sacrifice of Malian students who died in the prodemocracy protests in Bamako on 22 March 1991. A mosaic depicts a student protest march and looms over a heroically sized bronze statue of a mother mourning the body of her dead son. The mosaic and the bronze statue are oriented toward the bridge, now renamed Pont de Martyrs; the date 22 March

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1991, which marks the fall of the Traore regime, appears in large letters on the reverse side of the monument, facing the city center.12 Similar monumental landscapes that commemorate the 2011 prodemocracy uprisings within the cultural-geographical panorama of postindependence struggles will be constructed in time in Arab states. However, meaningful changes in public space will depend on the success of the leaders of the popular uprisings to reform the systems of government despite internal and external pressures to thwart their efforts and taint their visions. Even more interestingly, commentators will continue to explore the kinds of literary outpourings that will emerge in this new phase of the Arab world’s transformation across post-imperial history and that will be inflected by the different contexts and factors (religious, ethnic, economic, local, regional, and international) that have shaped the individual revolutions. After 2011, the monumental squares that have been the stages of the Arab people’s fight for democracy will be reinvented again not only materially and symbolically in the built environment but also imaginatively and textually in a nationally diverse range of novels and other literary texts that will be written by some of the Arabs, Europeans, Americans, Africans, and others who will have participated in the various revolutions and counter-revolutions as protesters, armed forces, reporters, and viewers. April 2011

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Notes

Chapter 1 1 2 3

4 5

6

7 8

9

10

11

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14 15

16 17

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984; London: Vintage, 2009), 11. Ibid., 189. Jen Harvie, Staging the UK (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 199–200. Ibid., 200. Mark Allen Peterson, Connected in Cairo: Growing Up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle-East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), x–xi. See James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis From Homer to Ashbery (1993; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 137. It is useful to compare Heffernan’s argument with respect to the ekphrastic tradition in poetry to the discursive space of the monument in the novel: “[T]he ekphrastic passage, which is commonly regarded as mere adornment of the epic text but which, as we have seen, is quite capable of revealing or prefiguring its most central themes.” My argument with respect to monumental space in the novel incorporates but also transcends thematic considerations. See my comments on Ann Rigney at the end of the chapter. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 222. Nicholas Andrew Miller, Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 24. D. J. Hopkins and Shelley Orr, “Memory/Memorial/Performance: Lower Manhattan, 1776/2001,” Performance and the City, eds D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga (Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 33–50 (p. 40). Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. edn, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2003), 22. Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004), 172. Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (1982): 21–51 (p. 21). Heffernan, 136. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, 6th edn, vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1993), 672. Hopkins and Orr, 36. M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

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David Atkinson and Denis Cosgrove, “Urban Rhetoric and Embodied Identities: City, Nation, and Empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome, 1870–1945,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88.1 (1998): 28–49 (p. 30). See Miller, 24. Karen E. Till, “Places of Memory,” Companion to Political Geography, eds John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerard Toal, Blackwell Companions to Geography (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2003), 289–301 (p. 297). Jonathan Huener, “Antifascist Pilgrimage and Rehabilitation at Auschwitz: The Political Tourism of Aktion Sühnezeichen and Sozialistiche Jugend,” German Studies Review 24.3 (2001): 513–32. Nuala C. Johnson, “Public Memory,” A Companion to Cultural Geography, eds James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson, and Richard H. Schein, Blackwell Companions to Geography (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004), 316–27 (p. 321). Ibid., 321. John Bodnar, “Public Memory in an American City: Commemoration in Cleveland,” Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 74–89 (p. 75). Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24 (p. 19). Ibid., 12. Ibid., 24. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 44. Ibid., 53–4. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 10. Ibid., 13. Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology: 1 (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2004), 21. George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3. Ibid., 5. W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Preface, Landscape and Power, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), vii–xii (p. xi). James E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today,” Art and the Public Sphere, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 49–78 (p. 66). Ibid., 61. Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 20. Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: Reaktion, 1998), 48. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corr. edn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 37. Roger Luckhurst, “Memory Recovered/Recovered Memory,” Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, eds Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks, Longman Studies in Twentieth Century Literature (London: Longman, 1999), 80–93 (pp. 83–4).

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Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, by Borges (1964; London: Penguin, 2000), 87–95 (p. 92). Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1994), x. Ricoeur, 456. Luisa Passerini, “Memories Between Silence and Oblivion,” Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, eds Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (London: Routledge, 2003), 238–54 (p. 252). Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Edna Longley, “Northern Ireland: Commemoration, Elegy, Forgetting,” History and Memory in Modern Ireland, ed. Ian McBride (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 223–53 (p. 231). Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half Past Nine, trans. Patrick Bowles (1961; London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1987), 145–6. Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006), 8. Adrian Forty, Introduction, The Art of Forgetting, eds Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (1999; Oxford: Berg, 2001), 1–18 (pp. 10–12). Jaś Elsner, “Iconoclasm and the Preservation of Memory,” Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, eds Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 209–31. Lefebvre, 221. Till, 295. W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing,” W. J. T. Mitchell, Art and the Public Sphere 29–48 (pp. 37–8). Böll, 146. Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone, trans. Arshi Pipa (1987; New York: Arcade, 2007), 165. See Duncan, Johnson, and Schein’s A Companion to Cultural Geography for a thorough investigation of the connections between these theories and new cultural geography. Richard H. Schein, “Cultural Traditions,” A Companion to Cultural Geography, eds James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson, and Richard H. Schein, Blackwell Companions to Geography (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004), 12–23 (p. 15). Don Mitchell, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001), 57. Yvonne Whelan, Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and the Politics of Identity (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003), 12. In two key chapters of the Handbook of Cultural Geography, Daniel Clayton and Brenda S. Yeoh examine the implications of reviewing geography and postcolonialism as interpenetrating and mutually qualifying fields on discursive and empirical levels. Postcolonial and imperial geographies are also key subjects in Agnew, Mitchell, and Toal’s A Companion to Political Geography and in Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (eds), Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York: Guilford, 1994). Whelan, 14. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, Introduction, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, Cambridge

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Studies in Historical Geography (1988; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–10 (p. 1). Cosgrove and Daniels, 1; Yvonne Whelan, “Monuments, Power and Contested Space—The Iconography of Sackville Street (O’Connell Street) Before Independence (1922),” Irish Geography 34.1 (2001): 11–33 (p. 12). Yvonne Whelan, “The Construction and Destruction of a Colonial Landscape: Monuments to British Monarchs in Dublin Before and after Independence,” Journal of Historical Geography 28.4 (2002): 508–33 (p. 509). Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), 85. Jane Urquhart, The Stone Carvers (2001; London: Penguin, 2003). Kay Anderson et al., “A Rough Guide,” Handbook of Cultural Geography (London: Sage, 2003), 1–35 (pp. 4–5). W. J. T. Mitchell, Introduction, Landscape and Power, 1–4 (p. 1). Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004), 39. Atkinson and Cosgrove, 46. Nuala C. Johnson, Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 9. Johnson, “Public Memory,” 322. Ibid., 322. Kim Solga, D. J. Hopkins, and Shelley Orr, “Pedestrianisms, or Remembering the City: Introduction,” Performance and the City, ed. D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga, Performance Interventions (Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–9 (p. 4). Ibid., 6. Loren Kruger, “Cold Chicago: Uncivil Modernity, Urban Form, and Performance in the Upstart City,” TDR: The Drama Review 53.3 (2009): 10–36 (p. 15). Dan Bacalzo, “Portraits of Self and Other: SlutForArt and the Photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi,” Theatre Journal 53.1 (2001): 73–94 (p. 80). Paul Allain and Jen Harvie, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2006), 100. Michael North, “The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament,” in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Art and the Public Sphere 9–28 (p. 18). Ibid., 14. Brian S. Osborne, “Constructing Landscapes of Power: The George Etienne Cartier Monument, Montreal,” Journal of Historical Geography 24.4 (1998): 431–58 (p. 435). An important link has been made, in performance studies, between readings of transgressive lived and theatrical spaces, on the one hand, and Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, on the other. See David Wiles, A History of Western Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 8–13. Wiles addresses Lefebvre’s notion of a “transgressive ‘counter-space’” in relation to Foucault’s heterotopia and also to fringe theaters. He discusses “Foucault’s invitation in 1967 . . . to link the theatre with heterotopias like the brothel or the oriental garden which represent, contest and invert other spaces in society,” and he sees that Lefebvre’s take on this thought emphasizes the role of the body that “walks, smells, tastes and in short lives a space.”

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Lefebvre, 223. Bodnar, 4–89; David Harvey, “Monument and Myth,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69.3 (1979): 362–81; Neil Jarman, “Commemorating 1916, Celebrating Difference: Parading and Painting in Belfast,” Forty and Küchler 171–95; Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Thomas W. Laqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” Gillis, Commemorations 150–67; Janice Monk, “Gender in the Landscape: Expressions of Power and Meaning,” Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, eds Kay Anderson and Fay Gale (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992), 123–38; Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Daniel J. Sherman, “Art, Commerce, and the Production of Memory in France after World War I,” Gillis, Commemorations 186–211. John R. Gillis, Introduction, Gillis, Commemorations 3–24 (p. 14). Osborne, 432. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, et al. Theory and History of Literature 76 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 31. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15, 35. Ibid., 15. Gillian Rose, “Performing Inoperative Community: The Space and the Resistance of Some Community Arts Projects,” Geographies of Resistance, ed. Steve Pile and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1997), 184–202 (pp. 188–9). Ibid., 201. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 26. Rita Sakr, “Monumental Space and the Carnivalisation of Power in Joyce’s Ulysses and al-Daif’s Ghaflat al-Turab,” Quest 4 (2007) http://www.qub.ac.uk/QUEST/ JournalIssues/Issue4Proceedings of the QuestConference 4. Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place (New York: New Press, 2001), 7. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–7 (p. 24). Ibid., 25. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 27. Tilley, 26. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Brian Morris, “What We Talk about When We Talk about ‘Walking in the City’,” Cultural Studies 18.5 (2004): 657–97 (pp. 681–2). Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, (2000; New York: Penguin, 2001), 287. Tilley, 26. Hopkins and Orr, 47. Ann Rigney, “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans,” Poetics Today 25.2 (2004): 361–96 (p. 369).

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Ibid., 383. Ibid., 389. Ibid., 389. Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 5. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archeology (London: Routledge, 2001), 153, 64. Tilley, 28. Ibid., 221.

Chapter 2 1

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This statement appears in a letter Joyce addressed to his brother Stanislaus on August 7, 1906, from Rome. The comment follows Joyce’s account of his and his wife, Nora’s, experiences in the Colosseum. The account reflects Joyce’s irritation at the attitude of tourists, guides, and postcard sellers who overrun monumental spaces. The sarcasm at the expense of self-monumentalization in the quote from Exiles is similar to what is expressed in Heinrich Böll’s Billiards at Half Past Nine, in which the eldest of three generations of architects, the grandfather Heinrich Faehmel, says: “[S]omewhere someday they will cast me in bronze and unveil me; you must stand nearby and laugh, Leonora” and then adds “spit on my statue, Leonora, tell them I bade you do it.” Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half Past Nine, trans. Patrick Bowles (1961; London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1987), 86, 88 (repeated on pp. 110, 209, 230). Though discussed in few essays, Joyce’s attitude to monuments and monumentalization has not been approached in depth. Some critics even seem to strongly downplay the cogent role of the architectural and monumental elements in Joyce’s urbanist vision. From this perspective, Joseph Nugent argues: “The Dublin Joyce describes is topographical rather than architectural, ideological rather than artistic.” He adds that ”[t]he youth who identified with Daedalus was likely to produce a vision panoramic and universalizing, a grand theatre of life observed from on high. Joyce went on to become a consummate maker of literary maps and an obsessive compiler of tiny details. It is the middle ground that’s missing.” Joseph Nugent, “Myopic Beauty, the Map, the Photograph, the Palimpsest, and Joyce,” Eire-Ireland 45.1–2 (2010): 266–76 (pp. 270, 273). Although this chapter is primarily concerned with monumentalization in Ulysses, it seems important to note that Finnegans Wake forms a fertile ground for exploring the material conditions of monument making across the intersecting histories of capitalism, imperialism, and urban planning. One particularly interesting area for investigation is the relation of HCE, as a property developer and as a figure of imperial power, to the architects and builders of monumental space. Connected with these issues are the political meanings of violence in and against monumental space in the Wake. In this respect, reading Finnegans Wake in dialogue with W. J. T Mitchell’s “The Violence of Public Art” allows us to look at how the

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literary text can be countermonumental: It uncovers the oppressive politics of monumentalization as a material practice and deconstructs it as a performative metaphor. Finnegans Wake creates a complex relation between differently coded political monuments within the text and the world. It sets up a dynamic indicative of the processes of countermonumentalization, specifically between, on the one hand, the Wellington and William III monuments and the O’Connell and Parnell monuments, on the other. In this web of relations, it is essential to look at how a certain monumental space functions contrapuntally in different historical and textual moments. But these questions should be left for a more extensive study that need not restrict itself to the interpretive approach of this chapter. Two exemplary articles, by Anne Fogarty and Andrew Thacker, have considered monumental space in Ulysses on the basis of some of Lefebvre’s theories. While both articles have engaged Lefebvre’s theorizations of space in general (“representation of space” in contrast to “representational space” in Thacker and “absolute space” in contrast to “abstract space” in Fogarty), my work here redirects attention to Lefebvre’s thoughts on monumental space specifically. Anne Fogarty, “ ‘Stone Hopes’: Statues and the Politics of Longing in Joyce’s Work,” Dublin James Joyce Journal 1 (2008): 69–83. Andrew Thacker, “Toppling Masonry and Textual Space: Nelson’s Pillar and Spatial Politics in Ulysses,” Irish Studies Review 8.2 (2000): 195–203. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 221. It is interesting to compare the quite different political meanings and events that emerged in the spaces around Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin and Nelson’s Column in London in the nineteenth century. Stephen Daniels notes the location of Nelson’s Column, which was completed in 1843, in Trafalgar Square that, “even when complete, . . . long continued to be a place of popular revelry and protest.” Daniels states that “[t]hroughout the nineteenth century Nelson was a radical hero” and that “his apotheosis is at the summit of the column during a demonstration against State power.” Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1993), 22. While Trafalgar Square remains a major stage for public protest in Great Britain, Nelson’s Column still occasionally gets disfigured with graffiti by vandals and anarchists (see my comments on the March 26, 2011, anticuts demonstrations in the afterword). For detailed information on the debate surrounding the proposed removal of Nelson’s Pillar, see The Irish Times March 18, 1873, January 2, 1874, July 19, 1890, and July 25, 1890 (the list is not exhaustive). See The Irish Times (March 14, 1966). The Spire of Dublin is popularly known as “the stiletto in the ghetto” and “the erection at the intersection,” and it is also referred to by various other nicknames. The history of the construction, maintenance, and destruction of Nelson’s Pillar can be studied through the committee’s report A Description of the Pillar with a List of the Subscribers. To Which Is Added, the Amount of the Funds, and the Account of the Expenditure Thereof (Dublin: John Chambers, 1846); in contemporary articles in History of the City of Dublin, 1818, The Irish Builder (especially the issues of July 15, 1890 and April 15, 1894), The Hibernian Magazine,

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and, later, The Irish Times. This historical information is expanded and critically supplemented in the cultural geographical work of Yvonne Whelan and less extensively in Judith Hill, Irish Public Sculpture: A History (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998). A Monument in the City: Nelson’s Pillar and Its Aftermath, ed. John O’Regan (Oysterhaven, Ireland: Gandon Editions, 1998), 52. Nuala C. Johnson, “Public Memory,” A Companion to Cultural Geography, eds James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson, and Richard H. Schein, Blackwell Companions to Geography (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004), 316. Yvonne Whelan, Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and the Politics of Identity (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003), 207. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 12–20 (p. 13). Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in “Ulysses” (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 206. Whelan, 69. Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf, Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15. Whelan, 57. Whelan, 58–64. See Report of the O’Connell Monument Committee, by very Rev. John Canon O’Hanlon (Dublin : James Duffy Co. Limited, 1888), lviii–lix and “The O’Connell Monument [letter] to the Editor of the Irish Times,” The Irish Times (December 17, 1875): 3. Report of the O’Connell Monument Committee, lxxvi. Brian S. Osborne, “Constructing Landscapes of Power: The George Etienne Cartier Monument, Montreal,” Journal of Historical Geography 24.4 (1998): 431–58 (p. 434). Whelan, 370. Franc McNally, “An Irishman’s Diary,” The Irish Times (April 28, 1987). Whelan, 70. Qtd. in History of Monuments: O’Connell Street Area, November 20, 2010, http:// www.dublincity.ie/SiteCollectionDocuments/history_monuments_oconnell_ st.pdf , 15. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24 (p. 22). See Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1996), 142–3. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–7 (p. 25). Foucault, 25. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 108. Ibid, 101.

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Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. and trans. Peter Connor, et al., Theory and History of Literature 76 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 17. Gillian Rose, “Performing Inoperative Community: The Space and the Resistance of Some Community Arts Projects,” Geographies of Resistance, eds Steve Pile and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1997), 201. The work of Christopher Tilley has been extremely influential in elaborating a phenomenology of place, landscape, and material culture. See Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1999) ; Material Culture: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 1 (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2004); and Interpreting Landscapes: Geologies, Topographies, Identities, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 3 (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010). Mary E. Daly, Dublin, the Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History 1860–1914 (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1984), 64–116. Karen R. Lawrence “ ‘Aeolus’: Interruption and Inventory,” JJQ 17.4 (1980): 389– 405 (p. 402). Mark Osteen, The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 205. Blanchot, 18. A Monument in the City, 15. Lefebvre, 224. A Monument in the City, 38. In a 1956 article titled “Dublin: Decline and Fall,” Ulick O’Connor writes: “Lately, even Admiral Nelson on his lovely Doric pillar in O’Connell Street has not been safe. The iconoclasts wanted to pull him down. Their cry was: ‘The one-eyed adulterer’. But then someone brought up the subject of the two-eyed adulterers on each end of the street, Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. So Nelson, I am glad to say, is still aloft on his lovely perch.” Ulick O’Connor, “Dublin: Decline and Fall,” The Listener (April 19, 1956): 445–6 (p. 445). Quoted in Frank McDonald, “A Bronze Joyce May Stand by His Anna Livia,” The Irish Times (December 5, 1987): 1. Declan Kiberd, “Not One of the Pillars of State,” Irish Times (May 12, 1987): 8. Robert Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus’s Nightmare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 130. Len Platt also points out the link between Nelson as the “one-handled adulterer” and Parnell as the “two-handled adulterer.” Len Platt, “Pisgah Sights: The National Press and the Catholic Middle Class in ‘Aeolus,’” JJQ 35.4 (1998): 735–46 (p. 738). R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972, (London: Penguin, 1989), 428. Jeri Johnson, Notes, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (1993; Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 817–18. Balfour, a British Conservative Party leader in the 1910s, firmly opposed the Third Irish Home Rule Bill and drafted the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which proposed the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Qtd. in Brian G. Caraher, “A ‘Ruin of All Space, Shattered Glass and Toppling Masonry’: Joyce’s Orientalism in the Context of 11 September 2001 and 1922,” Textual Practice 18.4 (2004): 497–520 (p. 511). Ibid, 512.

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Karen E. Till, “Places of Memory,” Companion to Political Geography, eds John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerard Toal, Blackwell Companions to Geography (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2003), 292. Colette Wilson, “City Space and the Politics of Carnival in Zola’s L’Assommoir,” French Studies 58.3 (2004): 343–56 (p. 347). Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (1877; Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), 106–7. Rita Sakr, “ ‘That’s New . . . That’s Copy’: ‘Slightly Rambunctious Females’ on the Top of ‘Some Column!’ in Zola’s L’Assommoir and Joyce’s Ulysses,” Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel, eds Finn Fordham and Rita Sakr, European Joyce Studies 19 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 160–80. In L’Assommoir, one of the characters, Boche, tries to frighten the women ascending the column by shouting that it will fall, and also, in a later chapter of the novel, another character named Bec-Salé is said to be able to transform the Vendôme Column into a pancake: “[I]l aurait fait une galette de la colonne Vendôme!” Zola, 106, 202. James E. Young,”‘The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today,” Art and the Public Sphere, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 61. Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1996), 145. “Vict’ry crown’d the day / But dearly was that conquest bought, / Too well the gallant hero fought, / For England, home, and beauty, / For England, home, and beauty, / He cried, as ’midst the fire he ran, / ‘England expects that ev’ry man / This day will do his duty.’” Qtd. in Jeri Johnson, 868. Rodney Mace, Trafalgar Square: Emblem of Empire (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 19. Jen Harvie, Staging the UK (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005). 60. Thomas Kinsella, “To the Coffee Shop,” The Pen Shop, Peppercanister 19 (Dublin, Ire: Dedalus Press, 1997), n.p. In this poem, Kinsella also mentions the statues of Sir John Gray, Smith O’Brien, and Daniel O’Connell. The Smith O’Brien lines are particularly interesting here: “By Smith O’Brien. Dead thirty years, to the day,/when Mr Bloom unclasped his hands in soft/ acknowledgment. And clasped them. About here.” Denis Johnston, The Old Lady Says “No!”, in Selected Plays of Denis Johnston, Irish Drama Selections 2 (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 1983), 37. A Description of the Pillar, 21. Margot Norris, “Joyce, History, and the Philosophy of History,” Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 203–26 (p. 219). See also Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London: Faber, 2009). Carnival and carnivalesque elements in “Circe” have been studied—extensively or briefly—in several critical works, including by Emer Nolan, Mark Osteen, Andrew Gibson, and Mark Wollaeger. Nolan’s and Osteen’s studies may be said to offer a less optimistic view of the subversive politics of carnival in “Circe” than Gibson’s and Wollaeger’s. Nolan reads the politics of carnival in “Circe” from the perspective of the theatricality and ultimate tragedy of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Emer

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Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995); Mark A. Wollaeger, “Reading Ulysses: Agency, Ideology, and the Novel,” James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Casebook, ed. Derek Attridge (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 129–54. Whelan, 70. Daniel Ferrer, “Circe, Regret and Regression,” Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 142. This drama of apocalyptic destruction and conflagration is consecrated in a line that appears in Nestor and that recurs more elaborately in “Circe”: “Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (U 15.4244–5). These images refract several historical moments of conflict in early-twentieth-century Europe and combine an apocalyptic vision of iconoclastic energies transcending geopolitical divisions (Dublin and London) and a political satire reminding us of the global material price of apocalyptic rhetoric. As James Fairhall, Emer Nolan, and Mark Wollaeger have noted, there are particular references here to the Great War, the anarchist bombings in Europe and the United States around the turn of the century, the Clerkenwell prison explosion in 1867 and the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (1993; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Steve Pile, “Opposition, Political Identities and Spaces of Resistance,” in Geographies of Resistance, eds Steve Pile and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1997), 30. Böll, 145, 152. Terry Eagleton, Umberto Eco, and other advocates of the “safety-valve model” argue that carnival, as an officially legitimized practice, only serves to reinforce existing rules, differences, and prohibitions. In contrast, proponents of group and gender rights, a number of political activists, postcolonial theorists, and popular culture critics endorse the view of carnival as a form of radical oppositional politics. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981). Umberto Eco, V. V. Ivanov, and Monica Rector, Carnival! (Berlin and New York: Mouton, 1984). Foucault, 27. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 36. Mikhail K. Ryklin assesses Bakhtin’s lack of attention to the difference of idealized abuse from real violence and he argues that, in Bakhtin’s work, “the reality of denunciation and convulsions of suffering bodies, confessing their guilt under torture, is replaced by the coming-into-being of speech body-giants, gazing as if from the sidelines at the sufferings of their chance individual incarnations.” Mikhail K. Ryklin, “Bodies of Terror: Theses Toward a Logic of Violence,” trans. Molly Williams Wesling and Donald Wesling, New Literary History 24.1 (1993): 51–74 (p. 54). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans: De la Chandeleur au Mercredi des Cendres 1579–1580 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979). Nolan, 122. James Moran, Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2005), 15. M. Lane Bruner, “Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State,” Text and Performance Quarterly 25.2 (2005): 136–55 (p. 148). Bakhtin, 207.

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See Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Third Series: Commencing with the Accession of William IV (London: Cornelius Buck, 1868), 1215–18 (p. 1216): “The public arrangements made by Superintendent Gerson, in pursuance of my directions, were to post a double patrol of two police constables, and three police constables were employed in plain clothes, all of whom were strictly instructed, together with section sergeants to keep close observation on all persons loitering round the prison walls, and to give immediate information to the inspector at King’s Cross Station should anything suspicious arise.” Gibson, 194. See the pamphlet in the National Library of Ireland: “Statement of the Proceedings Taken to Erect, and to Obtain a Suitable Site for Erecting Thereon, the Gough Equestrian Statue, by John H. Foley, Esq., R.A.” See, for example, Tom Corfe, The Phoenix Park Murders: Conflict, Compromise and Tragedy in Ireland (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1968) and M. M. O’Hara, Chief and Tribune, Parnell and Davitt (1919; Rpt. in BiblioBazaar LLC, 2009) (p. 213). There are several references to the Phoenix Park murders in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. A Monument in the City, 16. Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 37. W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Preface to Landscape and Power, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), xi. Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: Reaktion, 1998), 48. Lefebvre, 221. Pierre Nora, “The Era of Commemoration,” Rethinking the French Past: Realms of Memory, III, ed. Pierre Nora, English ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–8), 609–37 (p. 636). Fogarty, 70.

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Mishima’s statement from his diary entry of June 11, 1958, in Ratai to Isho (Nude and Costume) is translated and quoted in Reiko Tachibana Nemoto, “The Obsession to Destroy Monuments: Mishima and Böll,” Twentieth-Century Literature 39.2 (1993): 230–49 (p. 244). Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler in History (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984), 106. Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone, trans. Arshi Pipa (1987; New York: Arcade, 2007), 206–7. Mishima invested further in the title of his play by “posing for a poster featuring swastikas and characterizing the play as ‘an evil hymn to the dangerous hero Hitler, by the dangerous thinker Mishima’.” See Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (1979; Alexandria, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing, 1996), 275. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, “Body and Cosmos: Pasolini, Mishima, Foucault,” trans. Monique King, American Imago 61.2 (2004): 201–21 (p. 219); Edith

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Wyschogrod, “Killing the Cat: Sacrifice and Beauty in Genet and Mishima,” Religion & Literature 25.2 (1993): 105–19 (p. 109). Nemoto, 237. Lifton, 269. Peter Abelsen, “Irony and Purity: Mishima,” Modern Asian Studies 30.3 (1996): 651–79 (p. 663). Dennis Washburn, Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fictions and the Ethics of Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 225. Marguerite Yourcenar, Mishima: A Vision of the Void, trans. Alberto Manguel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 9. Gavin Walker, “The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the Autofictional Machine,” positions: east asia cultures critiques 18.1 (2010): 145–70 (p. 148). Helen J. Baroni, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Zen Buddhism (New York: Rozen, 2002), 112. David Young and Michiko Young, The Art of Japanese Architecture (North Clarendon, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 2007), 85. Qtd. in Nemoto, 230. Wyschogrod, 111. Lifton, 269. Qtd. in Nemoto, 244. Qtd. in Lifton, 269. Qtd. in Lifton, 270. Lifton, 270. Charles Bernstein, “War Stories,” Girly Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 149–54 (p. 152). Kadare, 207. Nemoto, 230. Jean Genet, “Four Hours in Shatila,” Journal of Palestine Studies 12.3 (1983): 3–22 (p. 11). Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. (1988; London: Fontana, 1992), 245–55 (p. 254). Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half Past Nine, trans. Patrick Bowles (1961; London and New York : Marion Boyars, 1987), 145–6. Nemoto, 234. Benjamin, 235. Orhan Pamuk, İstanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Knopf, 2004), 209–10. Washburn, 229. Ibid., 239. Wyschogrod, 117. Karen Tei Yamashita, “Traveling Voices,” Comparative Literature Studies 45.1 (2008): 4–11 (p. 6). Nemoto, 235–6. For discussion of postwar politics in regard to ultranationalist shrines, see Mark R. Mullins, “How Yasukuni Shrine Survived the Occupation: A Critical Examination of Popular Claims,” Monumenta Nipponica 65.1 (2010): 89–136. See pp. 100–2.

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Donald Richie and Alexandre Georges, The Temples of Kyoto (North Clarendon, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1995), 115–16. Nemoto, 231. Ibid., 233. Washburn, 214. Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006), 8. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 222. Nemoto, 233. Kadare, 165–6. Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology: 1 (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2004), 9. Ibid., 20. Nina Cornyetz, “Amorphous Identities, Disavowed History: Shimada Masahiko and National Subjectivity,” positions: east asia cultures critique 9.3 (2001): 585–609 (p. 601). Ibid., 607. Kadare, 237–8. Yamashita, 6. Ibid., 8. Noguchi Takehiko, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Ultranationalism in Japan,” trans. Teruko Craig, Journal of Japanese Studies 10.2 (1984): 437–54 (p. 453). John R. Wallace, “Tarrying with the Negative: Aesthetic Vision in Murasaki and Mishima,” Monumenta Nipponica 52.2 (1997): 181–99 (p. 194). Ibid., 182. Patrick O’Neill, “The Comedy of Entropy: The Contexts of Black Humor,” Dark Humor, eds Harold Bloom and Blake Hobby, Bloom’s Literary Themes (New York: Infobase, 2010), 96. Tilley, 10. Kadare, 249. Lifton, 278. Lefebvre, 221. Walker, 149. Washburn, 227. Qtd. in Lifton, 270. Abelsen, 662. See Bret W. Davis, “Zen After Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche and Buddhism,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 28 (2004): 89–138. Davis, 95. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “European Nihilism (1887),” The Nietzsche Reader, vol. 10, eds Keith Ansell-Pearson and Duncan Large (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2006), 386.

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The English translation of al-Daif’s statement is: “Then I realized that the only solution was literature because only literature can tell what happened and can express the madness that could not be conceptually apprehended and that was not governed by any rule or logic.” Rashid al-Daif, “Je ne veux pas être une minorité mais une nuance,” Travaux et Jours 75 (2005): 211–22 (p. 214). Rashid al-Daif is one of the most prominent and most prolific contemporary Lebanese writers. Some of al-Daif’s fourteen novels, which were originally published in Arabic, have been translated into English, French, and other European languages. The English translations include Dear Mr Kawabata, Passage to Dusk, This Side of Innocence, and Learning English. Translations of some of the other novels are forthcoming. Al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata (published in Arabic in 1995 under the title Azizi as-Sayyid Kawabata) has been one of the dramatic moments of postwar Lebanese literature. Having been selected as part of the European Cultural Foundation’s Mémoires de la Méditerranée series, it was immediately translated into English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Dutch. Brian S. Osborne, “Constructing Landscapes of Power: the George Etienne Cartier Monument, Montreal,” Journal of Historical Geography 24.4 (1998): 431–58 (p. 435). Ibid., 451. John Bodnar, “Public Memory in an American City: Commemoration in Cleveland,” Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 74–89 (p. 75). The function of Martyrs’ Square in al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata has elicited little critical attention. Starkey refers to the general significance of the square for the narrator on “personal” and “national” levels. Paul Starkey, “Crisis and Memory in Rashid al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata: An Essay in Narrative Disorder,” Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative, ed. Ken Seigneurie, Literaturen im Kontext 13 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert, 2003), 115–30 (p. 123). Salem reads the function of the square in the narrative more ambitiously as “serv[ing] a vital purpose of preservation in the face of obliteration.” Elise Salem, Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003), 197. Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, 3rd edn (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001); Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Samir Khalaf, Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict, History and Society of the Modern Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Craig Larkin, Memory and Conflict in Lebanon: Remembering and Forgetting the Past (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Tim Llewellyn, Spirit of the Phoenix: Beirut and the Story of Lebanon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010); Samir Kassir, La Guerre du Liban: De la Dissension Nationale au Conflit Régional (Paris: Karthala-Cermoc, 1994); Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988). Salibi, 55–6.

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Fisk, 96. The Arabic noun Burj signifies “tower.” The square was originally known as alMaidan, which means “a collective common ground,” then Place des Canons, which refers to the cannons that were used by the Russians (against the Ottomans) to destroy its medieval walls in 1772 and by the French in 1860. It was named Sahat al-Ittihad (the Unity Square), al-Hamidiyyah (to commemorate the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid), and Hadiqat al-Hurriyyah (the Garden of Freedom) by the Ottomans. Khalaf, Civil 181–90. The red light district in central Beirut is the reason why the Burj was also popularly known as Souk al-Awadem, that is, ironically, the “ ‘chaste’ or ‘reputable’ market” or “the Market of the Virtuous.” Samir Khalaf, Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj (London: Saqi, 2006), 153, 211. Ibid., 178. It is noteworthy that these binary oppositions were not maintained throughout the war. Rather, as Khalaf states, “much of the conventional characterization of the initial stages of civil unrest (i.e. ‘Christian versus Muslim,’ ‘right versus left’) became readily outmoded as internecine violence and factional turf wars became bloodier and more rampant.” Khalaf, Civil 234. Rawi Hage, De Niro’s Game (2006; New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). Saree Makdisi, “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere,” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (1997): 660–705 (p. 662). Ibid., 692. Nazik Saba Yared, Canceled Memories, trans. Nadine Sinno (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 14. Makdisi, “Laying” 691. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord distinguishes between the “concentrated spectacle” and the “diffuse spectacle.” In his later Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, he argues that spectacle has acquired a new form, which he calls the “integrated spectacle” and which combines the former two manifestations of spectacular power. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1994); Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1990). Debord, Comments 15. Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006), 162. Jalal Toufic, “Ruins,” Tamáss: Contemporary Arab Representations, Contemporary Arab Representations: Beirut/Lebanon 1 (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002), 19–25 (p. 22). Khalaf, Heart 133. It must be noted that Khalaf has not been as optimistic as this in his earlier comments on the project. Rita Sakr, “Negotiating Post-War Lebanese Literature: A Conversation with Rashid Al-Daif.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 43.3 (2007): 278–85 (p. 280). Khalaf, Heart 171. Ibid., 148. Elie Haddad, “Beirut: Between Memory and Desire,” Worldview: Perspectives on Architecture and Urbanism from Around the Globe, 2005, January 1, 2006, Khalaf, Heart 169.

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Francesca Polletta, “ ‘Free Spaces’ in Collective Action,” Theory and Society 28.1 (1999): 1–38 (p. 25). Ghassan Tueni and Fares Sassine (eds), El-Bourj: Place de la Liberté et Porte du Levant, 3rd edn (Beirut: Dar an-Nahar, 2003). Between December 2006 and May 2008, Martyrs’ Square was a barricaded space where the thousands of pro-Hariri and anti-Syria demonstrators assembled occasionally against the thousands of demonstrators who were protesting in the nearby Riad el-Solh Square against the economic and strategic policies of Hariri’s son and of his former minister of finance Siniora who, after the March 2005 events and the subsequent parliamentary elections, became prime minister. March 14 is commemorated by the pro-Hariri alliance in Martyrs’ Square. Syrian troops withdrew from Lebanon on April 26, 2005, after thirty years of military, political, and economic hegemony ultimately reinforced in the postwar (post-Taef agreement) years 1990–2005 (Salem 177–8). Syrian withdrawal followed a series of crucial events namely the assassination of former Lebanese (Sunni) prime minister Rafic Hariri with twenty other people including an MP in a tremendous car bomb on February 14, 2005. The assassination triggered massive popular demonstrations against Syria. The demonstrations were led by Lebanese opposition leaders. These events, along with international pressure, compelled Syria to comply with United Nations Resolution 1559, which dictated its complete withdrawal from Lebanon. Gillis, Introduction, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3–24 (p. 10). Khalaf, Heart 191. Bevan, 198. Saree Makdisi, “Beirut/Beirut,” Tamáss 26–39 (p. 31). Arthur C. Danto, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” The Nation (August 31, 1985): 152–5 (p. 152). Michael Rowlands, “Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacrifice in War Memorials,” The Art of Forgetting, eds Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (1999; Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001), 129–45 (p. 130). Pat Barker, Another World (1998; London: Penguin, 1999), 74. Nour Dados, “Revisiting Martyrs’ Square . . . Again: Absence and Presence in Cultural Memory,” Moment to Monument: The Making and Unmaking of Cultural Significance, eds Ladina Bezzona Lambert and Andrea Oschner [transcript], Cultural Studies 32 (Bielefeld, Germany: Verlag, 2009), 169–81 (p. 169). Ghassan Tueni, “From the Geography of Fear to a Geography of Hope,” Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City, eds Peter G. Rowe and Hashim Sarkis (Munich: Prestel, 1998), 285–95 (p. 291). Eddie Taylor, “A Conversation with Rawi Hage,” Nox (February 2007) rpt. in De Niro’s Game (2006; New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). Hoda Barakat, The Tiller of Waters, trans. Marilyn Booth (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2001). Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” Selected Writings, eds Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1996), 207–21 (p. 211).

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Charles Bernstein, “War Stories,” Girly Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 149–54 (p. 152). Salem, 154. Samira Aghacy, “The Use of Autobiography in Rashīd al Da’īf’s Dear Mr Kawabata,” Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature, eds Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor, and Stefan Wild (London: Saqi, 1998), 217–28; Ken Seigneurie, “Ongoing War and Arab Humanism,” Geomodernisms: ‘Race,’ Modernism,Modernity, eds Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 96–113. Mona Takyeddine Amyuni, “Style as Politics in the Poems and Novels of Rashid al-Daif,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28.2 (1996): 177–92 (p. 189). Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, 6th edn, vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1993), 672. Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rita Sakr, personal communication with Rachid al-Daif (December 2006 and March 2007). Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28. André Breton, “What Is Surrealism?” http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr. html (March 25, 2011). Qtd. in Phyllis Taoua, “Of Natives and Rebels: Locating the Surrealist Revolution in French Culture,” South Central Review 20.2–4 (2003): 67–110 (p. 79). Taoua, 72. Sakr, 279–80. Rashid, the narrator, states at the beginning of the “dream of the half-statue” that he had this dream at the beginning of the war in 1975. DMK 6. The narrator also points out that he is writing from a postwar perspective when he notes that the 1969 demonstration took place “twenty-two years ago.” DMK 11. Surrealists and critics of surrealism have had differing views on the function of surrealist activity, especially in its relation with revolutionary political activity. Johanna Malt notes that conventional psychoanalytic readings of surrealist works have tended to reductively categorize these as either “an objective expression of something really dreamed” or “a pale imitation of the ‘style’ of a dream” or “of the dream-work processes of condensation and displacement.” 100. Malt, 101–2. See Salibi for an in-depth discussion of the conflict between Lebanism and Arabism. On the one hand, Lebanism staunchly defended the historical validity of the state of Greater Lebanon that was created by the French Mandate in 1920. On the other hand, Arabism contested the legitimacy of this nation and instead advocated Arab nationalism and a united Arab identity superseding the independent Arab nations. It must be noted that, like al-Daif himself, Rashid the narrator is a Maronite Christian who fought on the communist and Palestinian sides during the early years of the war. Malt, 13. Taoua, 77. Ibid., 96.

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David Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 131–2. Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 76. Starkey, 121. The first demonstration remains unspecified in terms of date and particular purpose. The second is a major turning point in Lebanese history: the demonstration of April 23, 1969, that set the stage for the Lebanese Civil War. James L Gelvin, “Demonstrating Communities in Post-Ottoman Syria,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25.1 (1994): 23–4. See Khalaf and Polletta earlier in the chapter. Sakr, “Negotiating” 279–80. Nuala C. Johnson, Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6. Sakr, “Negotiating” 284. Ibid., 281. Saba Yared, 31. W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), “The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing,” Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 29–48 (p. 38). Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge, 1997), 51. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–7 (p. 27). Hetherington, 46. Ibid., 46. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1999), 494. Foucault, 26. Benjamin writes: “Love for the prostitute is the apotheosis of empathy with the commodity.” Arcades, 511. For studies that examine the politics of the gendering of monuments, refer to William Cohen, “Symbols of Power: Statues in Nineteenth-Century Provincial France,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31.3 (1989): 491–513; John R. Gillis, Introduction, Commemorations; Janice Monk, “Gender in the Landscape: Expressions of Power and Meaning,” Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, eds Kay Anderson and Fay Gale (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992), 123–38; Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Features (New York: Routledge, 1997); Daniel J. Sherman, “Art, Commerce, and the Production of Memory in France After World War I,” Gillis, Commemorations 186–211; Karen Till, “Places of Memory,” Companion to Political Geography, eds Katharyne Mitchell Agnew and Gerard Toal, Blackwell Companions to Geography (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2003), 289–301; and Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985). Mitchell, 36. George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4. Khalaf, Heart 153.

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220 89

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Hetherington and Nancy emphasize these characteristics with respect to heterotopia and inoperative community respectively. See Chapters 1 and 2 for a discussion of inoperative community. Margaret Kohn, “The Power of Place: The House of the People as Counterpublic,” Polity 33.4 (2001): 503–26 (p. 508). Till, 297. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000; New York: Penguin, 2001), 287. The French Mandate in Lebanon lasted from 1920 to 1943 when the independence of the Lebanese republic was proclaimed. Seigneurie, “Ongoing War and Arab Humanism” 109. Seigneurie, Introduction, Seigneurie, Crisis and Memory 11–29 (p. 2). Yasunari Kawabata committed suicide in 1972, two years after Yukio Mishima’s suicide. Saba Yared, 16–17. Dados, 175.

Chapter 5 1 2

3

4 5

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Andrew Mango, Atatürk (London: John Murray, 1999), 538. Orhan Pamuk, “A Selection from Interviews on My Name Is Red” Other Colours: Essays and a Story, by Orhan Pamuk, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber, 2007), 262–70 (p. 263). Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24 (p. 7). Ibid., 12. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 222. W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), “The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing,” Art and the Public Sphere, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 37–8. While “violence” and “terror” are not equivalent terms, there are numerous physical and psychological operations of violence that comprise terror in a strict sense. Gertrud Koch, “Between Fear of Contact and Self-Preservation: Taboo and Its Relation to the Dead,” trans. Rachel Leah Magshamrain, New German Critique 90 (2003): 71–83 (p. 74). The coup, which started on September 12, 1980, succeeded two preceding coups in 1960 and 1971. Asli Aydintaşbaş, “The Malaise of Turkish Democracy,” Middle East Report 209 (1998): 32. Refah won 18.8 percent of the popular vote in the 1994 municipal elections and 21.4 percent in the 1995 general elections. See Ben Lombardi, “Turkey— The Return of the Reluctant Generals?” Political Science Quarterly 112.2 (1997): 191–215, which discusses the rise of political Islam in Turkey and its conflict with Kemalist ideology. Mango, 182–357.

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Ibid., 536. Esra Özyürek, “Miniaturizing Atatürk: Privatization of State Imagery and Ideology in Turkey,” American Ethnologist 31.3 (2004): 374–91 (p. 382). Klaus Kreiser, “Public Monuments in Turkey and Egypt, 1840–1916,” Muqarnas 14 (1997): 103–17 (p. 109). For further discussion of Atatürk’s promotion of figural representation against the Islamic tradition that prohibited such practice, see Metin And, “Atatürk and the Arts, with Special Reference to Music and Theater,” Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, ed. Jacob M. Landau (Boulder, CO: Westview; Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1984), 228; and Mango, 411, 458. Qtd. in And, 228. Mango, 411. See Michael E. Meeker “Once There Was, Once There Wasn’t: National Monuments and Interpersonal Exchange,” Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 157–91 on the Atatürk Memorial Tomb and the Kocatepe Mosque. Ibid., 463. Ibid., 458. Ibid., 457. Ibid., 458. See Jerrold M. Post, “Narcissism and the Charismatic Leader-Follower Relationship,” Political Psychology 7.4 (1986): 675–88; and Vamik D. Volkan and Norman Itzkowitz, The Immortal Atatürk: A Psychobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Atatürk entered the political stage at a moment of ultimate historical crisis for the Turkish people, who crucially needed the powerful figure of a charismatic leader. According to Jerrold M. Post, such conditions of crisis enhance a charismatic leader-follower relationship. Post contends that “[t]hese relationships can be looked upon as peculiar aberrations, as cults, during times of relative societal repose. Microscopic in scale at first, in times of social crisis these powerful relationships can become the nuclei for powerful transforming social movements, as was the case with the revolutionary leadership of Atatürk and Khomeini” (686–7). Post explains that “[a]t moments of societal crisis, otherwise mature and psychologically healthy individuals may temporarily come to feel overwhelmed and in need of a strong and self-assured leader” (683). He refers to Volkan and Itzkowitz’s The Immortal Atatürk to make the case that charismatic leader-follower relationships “can [as in the case of Atatürk] also catalyze a reshaping of society in a highly positive and creative fashion” (686). However, despite its numerous positive contributions to the Turkish state, this leader-follower relationship did not embody a democratic model since, from 1923 to 1946, only one party, which is Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party, was active politically in the country. For an analysis of transformations in the production and consumption of Atatürk imagery, especially in the wake of the Islamist surge in the 1990s, see Ozyürek, 374–91. See, for example, p. 476.

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Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher (1979; London: Faber, 1996), p. 217. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 94–5. Adalet Agaoglu, Olmeye Yatmak [Lying Down to Die] (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 1998). Jale Parla, Don Kisot’an Bugune Roman [The Novel from Don Quixote to Today] (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2000). Sibel Irzik, “Allegorical Lives: The Public and the Private in the Modern Turkish Novel,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102.2–3 (2003): 551–66 (p. 553). Mustafa Kemal is said to have declared that the earlier Ottoman headdress, the fez, “sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, and fanaticism and hatred of progress and civilization.” Qtd. in Resat Kasaba, “Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities,” Bozdoğan and Kasaba, 25. Reflecting on the upstart behavior of some of his army comrades in the days after the establishment of constitutional rule in 1908, Mustafa Kemal stated in 1922: “The first measure that came to my mind to combat the evil was to apply the principle that the army should withdraw from politics”. Qtd. in Mango, 84. Özyürek discusses this phenomenon in “Miniaturizing Atatürk.” Orhan Pamuk, The New Life, trans. Güneli Gün (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), 193. Orhan Pamuk, Interview with Arminta Wallace, The Irish Times (April 1, 1999, city edn), 16. For commentary on gender relations in public statuary, see Janice Monk, “Gender in the Landscape: Expressions of Power and Meaning,” Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, eds Kay Anderson and Fay Gale (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992), 123–38 and Karen Till, “Places of Memory,” A Companion to Political Geography, eds John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerard Toal (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2003), 289–301. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984; London: Vintage, 2009), 11. Qtd. in Kasaba, 26. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 253. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981; London: Vintage, 1995), 93. Rashid al-Daif, Ghaflat al-Turab (Beirut: Riad el-Rayyes, 2001). George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15. Jim Paul, “The Coup,” MERIP Reports 93 (1981): 3. The Museum of Innocence contains detailed descriptions of the effects of the 1980 coup on social and political life in Istanbul. The narrator tells how while “watching the generals announce the coup, a recording played many times over, interspersed with old images of Atatürk.” See pp. 375–6. Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). See Lombardi, 205, 206, 208–9 and Paul, 3. Yvonne Whelan states that to commemorate the erection of King William III’s statue in College Green on November 4, 1701, every year on the same day, a procession would circle three times around the statue. After being repeatedly

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attacked, the statue was “badly damaged in an explosion” in 1928 and was removed the same year. Yvonne Whelan, Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and the Politics of Identity (Dublin: UCD Press, 2003), 35–6. Walter G. Andrews, “The Black Book and Black Boxes: Orhan Pamuk’s Kara Kitap,” Edebiyat 11.1 (2000): 105–29 (p. 116). Due to the limits of the present study, I will not address the implications of “Bedii Usta’s Children,” which deserves an entire critical essay to address its relevance to a critique of Turkish cultural modernity. On the one hand, Pamuk represents the spectacular space of political and commercial display in Istanbul, monuments in urban space and mannequins in shop windows, as endowed with the life of Western others. On the other hand, the underground space of a residual every day represented in Bedii Usta’s mannequins—an othered urban unconscious— claims a life of its own. Maureen Freely, “A Conversation with Orhan Pamuk,” Granta 93 (2006): 105–28 (p. 122). Lefebvre, 222. Ibid, 222. Talat S. Halman, “Orhan Pamuk: The New Life,” The Turkish Muse: Views and Reviews 1960s-1990s, ed. Jayne L. Warner (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 228–35 (p. 231). Hoda Barakat, The Tiller of Waters, trans. Marilyn Booth (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2001), 66. Benjamin, 248. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 79. Rebecca Schneider, “Patricide and the Passerby,” Performance and the City, eds D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga (Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 51–67 (p. 54). Mango, 458. Gavin D. Brockett, “Collective Action and the Turkish Revolution: Towards a Framework for the Social History of the Atatürk Era, 1923–38,” Turkey Before and after Atatürk: Internal and External Affairs, ed. Sylvia Kedourie (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 44–66 (p. 45). “May Day Rally in Istanbul’s Taksim Square Draws Thousands of Laborers,” Hurriyet Daily News (May 1, 2010), Due to the limits of this work, it is not possible to engage fully with the implications of such fertile Deleuzian concepts as schizoanalysis and the rhizome in relation to The Black Book. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1987; London: Athlone, 1988). D. J. Hopkins and Shelley Orr, “Memory/Memorial/Performance: Lower Manhattan, 1776/2001,” Performance and the City, eds D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga (Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 33–50 (p. 47). Sibel Bozdoğan, “The Predicament of Modernism in Turkish Architectural Culture: An Overview,” Bozdoğan and Kasaba 133–56 (p. 141).

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Walter Benjamin, “The Return of the Flâneur,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, eds Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1999), 262–7 (p. 263). Orhan Pamuk, Interview with Arminta Wallace, “A City of Constant Melancholy,” The Irish Times (April 23, 2005 [weekend review]): 113. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (1982; Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1999), 416. Ibid, 416. Benjamin, Arcades 21. Qtd. in Benjamin, Arcades 443. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 15. John Le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983), 63. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 222. The Unionists are the members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a centralist faction of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, a coup carried out by Ottoman officers with the aim of reestablishing the constitution and transforming the disintegrating empire into a modern state. Dankwart A. Rustow, “The Army and the Founding of the Turkish Republic.” Men Of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza Shah, ed. Touraj Atabaki and Erik J. Zürcher (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 164–208 (pp. 165–7). Qtd. in Rustow, 193. Qtd. in Mango, 84. Ibid., 400. Lombardi, 213. In his most recent work, The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, Pamuk says that Snow is “on the surface [my emphasis], the most political of all my novels.” Orhan Pamuk, The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, trans. Nazim Dikbaş (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010), 148. In both Other Colors: Essays and a Story and The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, as well as in many interviews, Pamuk reflects on the problematic relationship between literature and politics especially in non-Western countries. Undoubtedly, all of Pamuk’s novels have a certain political element. Still a more important issue is probably how Pamuk’s comments on the purpose and distinctive features of each of his novels sometimes clashes with readers’ impressions after reading these same novels. To cite a recent example, in The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, Pamuk describes The Black Book as “autobiographical” (185) like his first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons. Nergis Ertürk, “Those Outside the Scene: Snow in the World Republic of Letters,” New Literary History 41.3 (2010): 633–51 (p. 640). Ozyürek, 384. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10. Lefebvre, 222. Andrew Wilson, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 48.

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Bertolt Brecht, “On the Theatricality of Fascism,” Brecht on Art and Politics, eds Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles, part five edited by Stephen Parker, Matthew Philpotts and Peter Davies, trans. Laura Bradley, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn (London: Methuen, 2003), 195. Ertürk, 645. Mary Jo Kietzman, “Speaking to ‘All Humanity’: Renaissance Drama in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 52.3 (2010): 324–53 (p. 327). John E. McGrath, Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space (London: Routledge, 2004), 137–8. Ibid., 139. Maureen Freely, “A Conversation with Orhan Pamuk,” Granta 93 (2006): 108. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), 148. See also Kietzman; Irzik 560–4; and Sibel Erol, “Reading Orhan Pamuk”s Snow as Parody: Difference as Sameness,” Comparative Critical Studies 4.3 (2007): 403–32 for analyses of the theatrical trope and of the intersections between art/fiction/ theater and life in Snow. Bakhtin, 154. Özyürek, 374. Ibid., 375. Ibid., 378. Nora, “Era” 636. Özyürek, 377. Ibid., 388. Brian S. Osborne, “Constructing Landscapes of Power: the George Etienne Cartier Monument, Montreal,” Journal of Historical Geography 24.4 (1998): 431–58 (p. 435). Qtd. in Orhan Pamuk, “The Paris Review Interview,” trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber, 2007), 356. Fotios Moustakis and Rudra Chaudhuri, “Turkish-Kurdish Relations and the European Union: An Unprecedented Shift in the Kemalist Paradigm?” Mediterranean Quarterly (Fall 2005): 77–89 (p. 78). James Brown, “The Turkish Imbroglio: Its Kurds,” Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 541 (1995): 116–29 (p. 117). Lise Storm, “Ethnonational Minorities in the Middle East,” A Companion to the History of the Middle East, ed. Youssef M. Choueiri (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 462–85 (p. 474). Brown, 118–19. Storm, 474. Ibid., 474. Moustakis and Chaudhuri, 81. Ibid., 85–6. “Atatürk Statue in Diyarbakır Attacked,” Hürriyet Daily News (January 1, 2011; April 1, 2011), Koch, 74. Mango, 537. Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006), 17.

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226 108

109 110

111 112 113

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Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 500. Ibid., 500. In 1915, the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) leadership, which was in power in the Ottoman state, formally accused Armenians of betraying the Ottoman state through cooperation with Russia and the Allies. They ordered the deportation of Armenians to Syria and Iraq. There is a huge number of works on the Armenian massacres that accompanied the series of deportations and their possible genocidal dimensions. Some of the best-researched and most influential recent scholarly studies on the historical, political, and sociological complexities of this issue are: Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2004); A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, 4th rev. edn (Oxford, UK: Berghahn, 2003); and Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). Other works include Katia Minas Peltekian, Heralding of the Armenian Genocide: Reports in the Halifax Herald 1894–1922 (Halifax, Canada: Armenian Cultural Association of the Atlantic Provinces, 2000); Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Christopher de Bellaigue, Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). Ka’s journey into Kars can be compared in some ways to Bellaigue’s personal exploration of Varto in eastern Turkey as he attempts to unravel the silence enveloping the history of the massacres of Armenians and of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict by interviewing—while being followed by plainclothes policemen—a variety of people including a mistrustful mayor, a Turkish army captain, members of the PKK, and descendants of Armenian survivors of the massacres. Mango, 293–5. Patrick Kinross, Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation (London: Phoenix, 1995), 244. The references to Armenian houses, mansions, government buildings, and other architectural sites previously occupied by Armenians occur in Snow, pp. 9, 11, 20, 132, 163, 164, 166, 180, 412, 416, 422, 424. The documentary work The Armenians Remember discusses “the massacres of the monuments of art” whereby an “invaluable [Armenian] archeological heritage was lost from Kars”. Armenian Information Center in Beirut, The Armenians Remember . . . 1915: Fiftieth Commemoration of a Genocide (Beirut: Armenian Information Center, 1965), 43. Ricoeur, 89. Akçam, 217. See Chapter 7 “The Causes and Effects of Making Turkish History Taboo”, 208–25. Ibid., 211. Ricoeur, 500–1. See note 110.

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Jonathan Head, “Should One of Saddam Hussein’s Monuments be Repaired?” BBC News (28 February 2011), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east12594553. See W. J. T. Mitchell’s comments on the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in his most recent work Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Peter Hallward, “Arab Uprisings Mark a Turning Point for the Taking,” The Guardian (22 February 2011), http://www.guardian.co.uk. Brian S. Osborne, “Constructing Landscapes of Power: the George Etienne Cartier Monument, Montreal,” Journal of Historical Geography 24.4 (1998): 431–58 (p. 435). Patrick Cockburn, “Every Tyrant Makes the Same Mistakes in the Arab Uprisings,” The Independent on Sunday (27 March 2011) http://www.independent.co.uk/ opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-every-tyrant-makes-the-same-mistakein-the-arab-uprisings-2253951.html. Mohamed Salmawy, Agneht al Farasha [Butterfly Wings] (Cairo: Al Dar Al Masriah Al Lubnaniah, 2011). “Protests Spread Against Assad Rule in Syria,” Reuters (25 March 2011) http:// www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/25/us-syria-idUSTRE72N2MC20110325. Protesters were also reported to have attacked most of Assad family’s statues in Deraa. Brian Wheeler, “Anti-cuts March: Anger Amid the Carnival,” BBC News (26 March 2011), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12871759. Ibid. Ivan Watson and Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, “Thousands Demonstrate in Tahrir Square,” CNN (1 April 2011) http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/ 04/01/egypt.protests/index.html?hpt=T2 Ibid. Mary Jo Arnoldi, “Bamako, Mali: Monuments and Modernity in the Urban Imagination,” Africa Today 54.2 (2007): 3–24 (p. 13). Ibid., 14.

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Selected Bibliography

Abelsen, Peter. “Irony and Purity: Mishima,” Modern Asian Studies 30.3 (1996): 651–79. Aghacy, Samira. “The Use of Autobiography in Rashīd al Da’īf’s Dear Mr Kawabata,” Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature, eds RobinOstle, Ed de Moor, and Stefan Wild (London: Saqi, 1998), 217–28. Akçam, Taner. From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2004). —. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). Allain, Paul and Harvie, Jen. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Routledge, 2006). Amyuni, Mona Takieddine. “Style as Politics in the Poems and Novels of Rashid al-Daif,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28.2 (1996): 177–92. And, Metin. “Atatürk and the Arts, with Special Reference to Music and Theater,” Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, ed. Jacob M. Landau (Boulder, CO: Westview; Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1984). Anderson, Kay, et al., “A Rough Guide,” Handbook of Cultural Geography (London: Sage, 2003), 1–35. Andrews, Walter G. “The Black Book and Black Boxes: Orhan Pamuk’s Kara Kitap,” Edebiyat 11.1 (2000): 105–29. Arnoldi, Mary Jo. “Bamako, Mali: Monuments and Modernity in the Urban Imagination,” Africa Today 54.2. (2007): 3–24. Atkinson, David and Cosgrove, Denis. “Urban Rhetoric and Embodied Identities: City, Nation, and Empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome, 1870–1945,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88.1 (1998): 28–49. Bacalzo, Dan. “Portraits of Self and Other: SlutForArt and the Photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi,” Theatre Journal 53.1 (2001): 73–94. Barakat, Hoda The Tiller of Waters, trans. Marilyn Booth (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2001). Barker, Pat. Another World (1998; London: Penguin, 1999). Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984; London: Vintage, 2009). de Bellaigue, Christopher. Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (1982; Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1999). —. “The Return of the Flâneur,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, eds Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: BelknapHarvard University Press, 1999), 262–7. —. “Surrealism,” Selected Writings, eds Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1996), 207–21.

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—. “Public Memory,” A Companion to Cultural Geography, eds James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson, and Richard H. Schein, Blackwell Companions to Geography (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004), 316–27. Johnston, Denis. The Old Lady Says “No!” in Selected Plays of Denis Johnston, Irish Drama Selections 2 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1983). Joyce, James. The Critical Writings of James Joyce, eds Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1959). —. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, eds Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (New York: Penguin, 1976). —. Exiles (New York: Penguin, 1973). —. Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1939). —. Letters of James Joyce, vol. 2, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1964). —. Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986). Kadare, Ismail. Chronicle in Stone, trans. Arshi Pipa (1987; New York: Arcade, 2007). Khalaf, Samir. Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict, History and Society of the Modern Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Kiberd, Declan. Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj (London: Saqi, 2006). —. “Not One of the Pillars of State,” Irish Times (12 May 1987): 8. —. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London: Saqi, 2006). Kietzman, Mary Jo. “Speaking to ‘All Humanity’: Renaissance Drama in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 52.3 (2010): 324–53. Kinross, Patrick. Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation (London: Phoenix, 1995). Koch, Gertrud. “Between Fear of Contact and Self-Preservation: Taboo and Its Relation to the Dead,” trans. Rachel Leah Magshamrain, New German Critique 90 (2003): 71–83. Koshar, Rudy. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Kreiser, Klaus. “Public Monuments in Turkey and Egypt, 1840–1916,” Muqarnas 14 (1997): 103–17. Kruger, Loren. “Cold Chicago: Uncivil Modernity, Urban Form, and Performance in the Upstart City,” TDR: The Drama Review 53.3 (2009): 10–36. Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher (London: Faber, 1996). Laqueur, Thomas W. “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 150–67. Le Carré, John. The Little Drummer Girl (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983). Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1996). Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991). Lifton, Robert Jay. The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (1979; American Psychiatric Press, 1996). Lippard, Lucy R. On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place (New York: New Press, 2001).

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Lombardi, Ben. “Turkey—The Return of the Reluctant Generals?” Political Science Quarterly 112.2 (1997): 191–215. Luckhurst, Roger. “Memory Recovered/Recovered Memory,” Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, eds Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks, Longman Studies in Twentieth Century Literature (London: Longman, 1999), 80–93. Makdisi, Saree. “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere,” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (1997): 660–705. Malt, Johanna. Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004). Mango, Andrew. Atatürk (London: John Murray, 1999). McDonald, Frank. “A Bronze Joyce May Stand by His Anna Livia,” The Irish Times (December 5, 1987): 1. McGrath, John E. Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space (London: Routledge, 2004). Meeker, Michael E. “Once There Was, Once There Wasn’t: National Monuments and Interpersonal Exchange,” Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, eds Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 157–91. Michalski, Sergiusz. Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: Reaktion, 1998). Middleton, Peter and Woods, Tim. Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000). Miller, Nicholas Andrew. Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Mishima, Yukio. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, trans. Ivan Morris (1956 ; London: Vintage, 2001). Mitchell, Don. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.) Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). —. Introduction, Landscape and Power, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). —. Preface, Landscape and Power, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), vii–xii. — (ed.) “The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing,” Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 29–48. Monk, Janice. “Gender in the Landscape: Expressions of Power and Meaning,” Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, eds Kay Anderson and Fay Gale (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992). Moran, James. Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2005). Morris, Brian. “What We Talk about When We Talk about ‘Walking in the City’,” Cultural Studies 18.5 (2004): 657–97. Moustakis, Fotios and Chaudhuri, Rudra. “Turkish-Kurdish Relations and the European Union: An Unprecedented Shift in the Kemalist Paradigm?” Mediterranean Quarterly (Fall 2005): 77–89. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, et al. Theory and History of Literature 76 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

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Nemoto, Reiko Tachibana. “The Obsession to Destroy Monuments: Mishima and Böll,” Twentieth-Century Literature 39.2 (1993): 230–49. Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995). Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. — (ed.) “The Era of Commemoration,” Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. III, English ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–8), 609–37. Norris, Margot. “Joyce, History, and the Philosophy of History,” Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). North, Michael. “The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament,” in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Art and the Public Sphere 9–28. Nugent, Joseph. “Myopic Beauty, the Map, the Photograph, the Palimpsest, and Joyce,” Eire-Ireland 45.1–2 (2010): 266–76. O’Neill, Patrick. “The Comedy of Entropy: The Contexts of Black Humor,” Dark Humor, eds Harold Bloom and Blake Hobby, Bloom’s Literary Themes (New York: Infobase Learning, 2010). O’Regan, John. (ed.) A Monument in the City: Nelson’s Pillar and Its Aftermath (Oysterhaven, Ireland: Gandon Editions, 1998) Osborne, Brian S. “Constructing Landscapes of Power: The George Etienne Cartier Monument, Montreal,” Journal of Historical Geography 24.4 (1998): 431–58. Osteen, Mark. The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995). Özyürek, Esra. “Miniaturizing Atatürk: Privatization of State Imagery and Ideology in Turkey,” American Ethnologist 31.3 (2004): 374–91. Pamuk, Orhan. The Black Book, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber, 2006). —. İstanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Knopf, 2004). —. The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (New York:Vintage, 2009). —. The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, trans. Nazim Dikbaş (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010). —. The New Life, trans. Güneli Gün (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). —. Other Colours: Essays and a Story, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber, 2007). —. Snow, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Random, 2004). Parla, Jale. Don Kisot’an Bugune Roman [The Novel from Don Quixote to Today] (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2000). Pearson, Mike and Shanks, Michael. Theatre/Archeology (London: Routledge, 2001). Polletta, Francesca. “ ‘Free Spaces’ in Collective Action,” Theory and Society 28.1 (1999): 1–38. Post, Jerrold M. “Narcissism and the Charismatic Leader-Follower Relationship,” Political Psychology 7.4 (1986): 675–88. Punter, David. Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Richie, Donald and Georges, Alexandre. The Temples of Kyoto (North Clarendon, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1995). Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Riegl, Alois. “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (1982): 21–51.

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Rigney, Ann. “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans,” Poetics Today 25.2 (2004): 361–96. Rose, Gillian. “Performing Inoperative Community: The Space and the Resistance of Some Community Arts Projects,” Geographies of Resistance, eds Steve Pile and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1997), 184–202. Rowlands, Michael. “Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacrifice in War Memorials,” The Art of Forgetting, eds Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (1999; Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001), 129–45. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children (1981; London: Vintage, 1995). Ryklin, Mikhail K. “Bodies of Terror: Theses Toward a Logic of Violence,” trans. Molly Williams Wesling and Donald Wesling, New Literary History 24.1 (1993): 51–74. Sakr, Rita. “Monumental Space and the Carnivalisation of Power in Joyce’s Ulysses and al-Daif’s Ghaflat al-Turab,” Quest 4 (2007) http://www.qub.ac.uk/QUEST/ JournalIssues/Issue4Proccedings of the QuestConference 4. —. “Negotiating Post-War Lebanese Literature: A Conversation with Rashid AlDaif,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 43.3 (2007): 278–85. —. “ ‘That’s New . . . That’s Copy’: ‘Slightly Rambunctious Females’ on the Top of ‘Some Column!’ in Zola’s L’Assommoir and Joyce’s Ulysses,” Joyce and the NineteenthCentury French Novel, eds Finn Fordham and Rita Sakr, European Joyce Studies 19 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 160–80. Salem, Elise. Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). Salibi, Kamal. A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988). Salmawy, Mohamed. Agneht al Farasha [Butterfly Wings] (Cairo: Al Dar Al Masriah Al Lubnaniah, 2011). Saltzman, Lisa. Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in NineteenthCentury America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995). Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory, rev. edn, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2003). Schneider, Rebecca. “Patricide and the Passerby,” Performance and the City, eds D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga (Houndmills, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 51–67. Seigneurie, Ken. “Ongoing War and Arab Humanism,” Geomodernisms: ‘Race,’ Modernism,Modernity, eds Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 96–113. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandias,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, 6th edn, vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1993). Sherman, Daniel J. “Art, Commerce, and the Production of Memory in France after World War I,” ed. John Gillis, Commemorations, 186–211. Solga, Kim, Hopkins, D.J. and Orr, Shelley. “Pedestrianisms, or Remembering the City: Introduction,” in D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga (eds), Performance and the City, 1–9. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000; New York: Penguin, 2001).

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Spoo, Robert. James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus’s Nightmare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). Starkey, Paul. “Crisis and Memory in Rashid al-Daif’s Dear Mr Kawabata: An Essay in Narrative Disorder,” Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative, ed. Ken Seigneurie, Literaturen im Kontext 13 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert, 2003), 115–30. Storm, Lise. “Ethnonational Minorities in the Middle East,” A Companion to the History of the Middle East, ed. Youssef M. Choueiri (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). Takehiko, Noguchi. “The Aesthetics and Politics of Ultranationalism in Japan,” trans. Teruko Craig, Journal of Japanese Studies 10.2 (1984): 437–54. Thacker, Andrew. “Toppling Masonry and Textual Space: Nelson’s Pillar and Spatial Politics in Ulysses,” Irish Studies Review 8.2 (2000): 195–203. Till, Karen E. “Places of Memory,” Companion to Political Geography, eds John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerard Toal, Blackwell Companions to Geography (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2003), 289–301. Tilley, Christopher. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology: 1 (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2004). Toufic, Jalal. “Ruins,” Tamáss: Contemporary Arab Representations, Contemporary Arab Representations: Beirut/Lebanon 1 (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002). Tueni, Ghassan. “From the Geography of Fear to a Geography of Hope,” Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City, eds Peter G. Rowe and Hashim Sarkis (Munich: Prestel, 1998). Tueni, Ghassan and Sassine, Fares (eds), El-Bourj: Place de la liberté et porte du levant, 3rd edn (Beirut: Dar an-Nahar, 2003). Urquhart, Jane. The Stone Carvers (2001; London: Penguin, 2003). Van Boheemen-Saaf, Christine. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Volkan, Vamik D. and Itzkowitz, Norman. The Immortal Atatürk: A Psychobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Walker, Gavin. “The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the Autofictional Machine,” positions: east asia culture critiques 18.1 (2010): 145–70 (p. 148). Wallace, John R. “Tarrying with the Negative: Aesthetic Vision in Murasaki and Mishima,” Monumenta Nipponica 52.2 (1997): 181–99. Warner, Marina. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985). Washburn, Dennis. Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fictions and the Ethics of Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Whelan, Yvonne. “The Construction and Destruction of a Colonial Landscape: Monuments to British Monarchs in Dublin Before and after Independence,” Journal of Historical Geography 28.4 (2002): 508–33. —. “Monuments, Power and Contested Space—The Iconography of Sackville Street (O’Connell Street) Before Independence (1922),” Irish Geography 34.1 (2001): 11–33. —. Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and the Politics of Identity (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003).

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Index

al-Daif, Rashid Dear Mr Kawabata 12, 14, 35, 36, 107–9, 120–48 Ghaflat al-Turab 161 Arab uprisings 31, 116, 179, 193–200

Egypt Hosni Mubarak 3, 181, 195, 199 Tahrir Square 2–3, 132, 181, 195, 198–9 ekphrasis 10, 201

Bakhtin, Mikhail 30, 33, 34, 73–4, 177–8, 181, 211 see also carnival, carnivalesque Benjamin, Walter 36, 88, 90, 121, 139, 160, 166, 171–5, 180, 198 Böll, Heinrich 21–2, 23–4, 72, 89 Buddhism 91–3, 105–6

flanerie, flaneur 36, 171–5 Foucault, Michel 30, 34–5, 42, 55, 73, 138–9, 143

carnival, carnivalesque 3, 15, 30, 31, 33–4, 59, 64, 71–5, 112, 141, 177, 181, 192, 196, 198 see also Bakhtin, Mikhail cemetery 14, 35, 36, 46–7, 53–7, 60 Certeau, Michel de 35–6, 42, 55–6, 174 countermonument 3, 10, 15, 17–18, 20, 22–4, 29–31, 36, 40, 41–3, 45, 54–5, 58, 61, 64, 66–8, 70–2, 79, 90, 125, 150, 166, 170, 191 cultural geography 4, 6, 18, 25–39, 106, 113–14, 133 Daniels, Stephen 26, 207 gender 25, 26, 30–1, 73, 97, 117, 126, 141 Schama, Simon 16 see also Johnson, Nuala C. and Whelan, Yvonne demonstrations 2, 108, 113–14, 116, 129–40, 172, 181, 183, 197, 198 see also protests destruction of monuments 8, 10, 22–3, 28, 31, 37, 44, 53, 60, 66, 74–5, 82–106, 109, 151, 190 see also iconoclasm

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Harvie, Jen 12, 29 heterotopia 30, 34–6, 55, 72–3, 99, 137, 148, 167 iconoclasm 64, 79, 95 see also destruction of monuments Iraq Saddam Hussein 12, 184, 193–4, 199 Ireland Crampton, Sir Philip 49 Emmet, Robert 54–5, 69 Grattan, Henry 18, 68–9 Gray, Sir John 47–8, 51, 66 Mathew, Father Theobald 48, 51–3 Nelson’s Pillar 42–79 O’Connell, Daniel (and street and monument) 43–4, 48, 50–1, 63, 68, 76 Parnell, Charles Stewart 48, 51–3, 56, 61–3, 81 Smith O’Brien, William 48, 49–50 Whelan, Yvonne 25, 43, 45, 50 Johnson, Nuala C. 12–13, 27, 45, 62, 134 Joyce, James “The Dead” 163, 170 Exiles 41 Finnegans Wake 44–5, 46, 50, 206–7n.3 Ulysses 4, 5, 14, 19, 35, 36, 41–79, 97

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Kadare, Ismail 24, 87, 96–7, 102 Kundera, Milan 23, 89, 157–8

139, 143–5, 148, 181, 194–200 see also demonstrations

Lebanon civil war 4, 12, 107–31 Martyrs’ Square and Martyrs’ Statue 36, 107–48, 215n. 6 Yusuf Karam statue 161 Lefebvre, Henri 4–6, 22, 30 Libya Bab al-Azizia 197 Muammar Gaddafi 179, 197

Ricoeur, Paul 13, 16, 19–20, 128, 166, 188, 190–1 Rushdie, Salman 160–1

Mali Martyrs’ Monument 199–200 Mishima, Yukio The Temple of the Golden Pavilion 4, 14, 19, 22, 81–106 Mitchell, W. J. T. 17, 23, 27, 42, 43, 72, 77, 137, 141, 151, 184

taboo 21, 23–4, 96–7, 100–2, 149–56, 158, 161–92 terror 5, 18, 36, 43, 76–7, 94–5, 120, 138, 149, 150–2, 156, 158, 164–5, 176, 179, 181, 184–8, 191–3, 196, 198 Till, Karen E. 11, 63, 145 Tilley, Christopher 35–6, 39, 57, 97 tourism 12, 28, 31, 36, 68, 111, 130, 144–5, 148, 167–8, 171–4, 190–2 trauma 20, 21–4, 29, 48–9, 90, 114, 119, 123–4, 127–9, 146, 149, 171, 190–1 triumphalism 2, 51, 60, 64, 67, 119, 126, 159 Turkey Armenian issue 2, 19, 24, 128, 149–56, 186–92 Ataturk (statue) 19, 24, 86, 102, 149–87, 191, 192 Kurdish issue 24, 102, 152–6, 176, 178, 184–8, 192 Taksim square, monument 132, 134, 155, 167–71, 174

Nancy, Jean-Luc 31, 42, 56, 70 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 46–7, 92, 101, 105–6 nihilism 85, 100, 105 Nora, Pierre 3, 13–16, 20, 42, 54, 72, 78, 149–50, 183 Pamuk, Orhan The Black Book 4, 12, 19, 23, 24, 36, 86, 89, 149–52, 156–76, 191–2 Istanbul 90–1 The Museum of Innocence 155–6, 163 The New Life 23, 156, 159, 165–6 Snow 4, 14, 21, 23, 24, 128, 149–52, 156, 176–92 postwar 4, 12, 22, 24, 82–3, 87–95, 99–100, 105–6, 107, 109, 112, 118–24, 126, 128, 146 protests 2, 3, 30–4, 36, 57, 68, 74, 98, 108–9, 113–15, 132–4,

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Saba Yared, Nazik 112, 120, 136, 146–7 surrealism 15, 16, 18–19, 25, 43, 71–4, 77–8, 87, 101, 121–9, 148, 156–8, 164–5, 167, 192 Syria 111, 116, 129, 133, 184, 194, 197

Urquhart, Jane 26 Young, James E. 17–18, 42, 66

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