Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu’s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin 9781644694435

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Excavating Memory Bilge Karasu’s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin

Ottoman and Turkish Studies Series Editor Hakan T. Karateke (University of Chicago)

Other Titles in this Series The Ottoman Twilight in the Arab Lands: Turkish Memoirs and Testimonies of the Great War Selim Deringil  Disliking Others: Loathing, Hostility, and Distrust in Premodern Ottoman Lands Edited by Hakan T. Karateke, H. Erdem Çıpa, and Helga Anetshofer Waiting for Müteferrika: Glimpses of Ottoman Print Culture Orlin Sabev Investigating Turkey: Detective Fiction and Turkish Nationalism, 1928–1945 David Mason For more information on this series, please visit: academicstudiespress.com/ottomanandturkishstudies

Excavating Memory Bilge Karasu’s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin ÜLKER GÖKBERK

BOSTON 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gökberk, Ülker, 1947- author. Title: Excavating memory : Bilge Karasu’s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin / Ülker Gökberk. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2020. | Series: Ottoman and Turkish studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020019141 (print) | LCCN 2020019142 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644694428 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644694435 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Karasu, Bilge--Criticism and interpretation. | Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940--Criticism and interpretation. | Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature. | Beyoğlu (Istanbul, Turkey)--In literature. | Berlin (Germany)--In literature. Classification: LCC PL248.K33 Z64 2020 (print) | LCC PL248.K33 (ebook) | DDC 894/.3533--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019141 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019142 Copyright © 2020 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 9781644694428 (hardback) ISBN 9781644694435 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644694442 (ePub) Book design by Lapiz Digital Services Cover design by Ivan Grave On the cover: Tan Oral, “Balıkçı ve Kediler” (Fish Vendor with Cats), an illustration for Bilge Karasu’s “Beyoğlu Üzerine Metin” (“Text on Beyoğlu”), from the book and exhibit “Beyoğlu’dan Esintiler,” 2008. Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

To my beloved family

Contents

Acknowledgmentsx Introduction1 1. Beginnings: Reading Memory 19 2. From Berlin’s Old West to Istanbul’s Beyoğlu: Narratives of Memory, Narratives of Lost Topographies

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3. Incompleteness as Anti-Autobiography: The Production and Publication Histories of Benjamin’s and Karasu’s Memory Narratives

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4. Bilge Karasu in Historical Context: Identity Formation in the Shadow of “Turkification”

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5. Forgetting, Remembering, and the Workings of Collective Memory: Survival and the Retrieval of Memory Traces

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6. “Dialectical Images” in Beyoğlu’s Black Waters: The Photograph as Testimony

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7. Remembering as Distortion: Visual and Aural Traces of Alterity

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8. Spatiality as the Inscription of the Past

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9. Crazy Meryem as the Saint of Beyoğlu’s Marginalized: Toward a Final Reading of Difference

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Conclusion246 Addendum: Biographical Notes on Bilge Karasu 257 References260 Index271

Beyoğlu’nun sayısız sokaklarının herbirinde görüldüğü, görülebileceği gibi, burada da kediler. . . sokağa inerler, balıkçının ardından yürüyen kediler ordusuna katılırlar sessizce. Hiçbiri saldırgan değildir. Balıkçı bir kapının önünde durdu mu hepsi durur, kıçını yere kor, sıralandığı çembersel çizgiden balıkçının ellerine diker gözlerini.

(As they are seen, can be seen in each of the countless streets of Beyoğlu, so here, too, cats. . . they go down the street, they join quietly the army of cats walking behind the fish vendor. None is aggressive. When the fish vendor stops at a door they all stop, put their ass down, forming a circle they fix their gaze on the fish vendor’s hands.)

—Bilge Karasu, “Beyoğlu Üzerine Metin” (“Text on Beyoğlu”)

So zittert durch durch die schmetterlingserfüllte Luft das Wort “Brauhausberg.” Auf dem Brauhausberg bei Potsdam hatten wir unsere Sommerwohnung. Aber der Name hat alle Schwere verloren, enthält von einem Brauhaus überhaupt nichts mehr und ist allenfalls ein von Bläue umwitterter Berg, der im Sommer sich aufbaute, um mich und meine Eltern zu behausen. Und darum liegt das Potsdam meiner Kindheit in so blauer Luft, als wären seine Trauermäntel oder Admirale, Tagpfauenaugen und Aurorafalter über eine der schimmernden Emaillen von Limoges verstreut, auf denen die Zinnen und Mauern Jerusalems vom dunkelblauen Grunde sich abheben. (Thus, through air teeming with butterflies vibrates the word “Brauhausberg,” which is to say, ‘Brewery Hill.’ It was on the Brauhausberg, near Potsdam, that we had our summer residence. But the name has lost all heaviness, contains nothing more of any brewery, and is, at most, a blue-misted hill that rose up every summer to give lodging to my parents and me. And that is why the Potsdam of my childhood lies in air so blue, as though all its butterflies— its mourning cloaks and admirals, peacocks and auroras—were scattered over one of those glistening Limoges enamels, on which the ramparts and battlements of Jerusalem stand out against a dark blue ground.)

—Walter Benjamin, “Schmetterlingsjagd” (“Butterfly Hunt”)

Acknowledgments

This study grew out of my interest in the representation of “lost places.” I was was especially intrigued by narratives of Istanbul’s Beyoğlu, penned by its Turkish, local minority, and Levantine authors, and depicting a culturally diverse past. Walter Benjamin’s evocation of the vanished bourgeois culture under the motto “a past become space” inspired me to employ a cross-cultural framework, which would include memory narratives in both German and Turkish contexts. Benjamin’s construction of memory, based on a topographical model and largely informed by psychoanalysis, became the guide for exploring Bilge Karasu’s unique expression of an ethno-culturally repressed past in his Beyoğlu collection. From the initial concept of a broader “Beyoğlu project” to the publication of the present book on Karasu and Benjamin, colleagues, students, family members, and friends have supported my research and writing. I am indebted to the editors at Academic University Press, to Senior Editor Alessandra Anzani for walking me through the publication process from the beginning to the end, to Hakan Karateke, Editor of Ottoman and Turkish Studies, for his insightful comments and collaboration on the final manuscript, and to Stuart Allen for his meticulous copy edits. I would like to express my gratitude to Nigel Nicholson, Dean of the Faculty and Walter Mintz Professor of Classics, Reed College, who made the publication of this book possible by his generous support through the Stillman Drake Foundation Awards. I am also thankful to staff members at the Dean of the Faculty’s Office for their assistance. Throughout my work in progress I have received editorial assistance from Bennett Gilbert, Portland State University. I would like to thank Bennett for his steadfast engagement in this project, his valuable input, and all his encouragement. I am appreciative of Damien Jack

Acknowledgments

(Reed College, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, Class of 2020) for his interest at the beginning stages of the study. The conversations we had on Karasu and Benjamin have been a memorable source of inspiration. James Cranston (Reed College, Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, Class of 2016) assisted me with the preparation of the final manuscript through his work on citations, formatting, and more. I am thankful to James for his encouraging, thoughtful interaction and his expertise in computing matters. I would like to extend a very special thank you Scott Jenkins (Reed College, Class of 2014). Scott was an invaluable source of knowledge about Freud and psychoanalytic theory. He summarized the findings of our collaborative research project by focusing in particular on Freud’s terms “distortion” and “memory trace” in an illuminating essay titled “Reading the Space of Memory: Excursus on Freud.” I feel fortunate having had continuous support and encouragement of my family, especially Nilüfer Tapan, Professor Emerita of Istanbul University and Mete Tapan, Professor Emeritus of Istanbul Technical University. I am thankful for their attentiveness, for accompanying me to forgotten streets of Beyoğlu, taking photos, explaining architectural details, and for helping me secure Tan Oral’s wonderful drawing “Fish Vendor with Cats” (“Balıkçı ve Kediler”) on the cover of Excavating Memory. I also would like to thank Tan Oral and and Elif Aydoğdu for their kind permission for the use of Mr.  Oral’s design. Nazan Aksoy of Istanbul’s Bilgi University remained a strong supporter of the study from the start to finish. I appreciate very much her collegiality and friendship. I would like to thank my colleagues, friends, and students at Reed College who contributed to the research and writing of this book. I especially extend my gratitude to Barbara Amen, Katja Garloff, Harold Nevis, Paul Silverstein, and Steven Wasserstrom. I also owe a great deal to the Reed students and German language scholars who helped me as research assistants, and to all my Reed students for their engagement in our courses exploring urban space and memory. I am thankful to my colleagues at Portland State University, Evguenia Davidova and Gerald Sussman, for always being there for me with assistance, insight, and the exchange of ideas. By providing me his essay on the Pera Arcades Brian Elliott offered a vital resource. I would like to recognize Molly Major for her support in matters of computing.

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Kira Nemirovsky and her team at Academic Studies Press provided valuable assistance with the production process. I would like to extend my appreciation for their collaboration in finalizing the book. A special thank you also to Jenna Colozza, Marketing Department, at Academic Studies Press. Finally, I would like to honor the memory of Füsun Akatlı as the editor of Bilge Karasu’s posthumous writings. It is due to Akatlı’s untiring work that the reader holds today the Beyoğlu collection in book form. Esin, Lukas, Defne, thank you for being the joy of my life.

Ü.G. Portland, Oregon, 2020

Introduction

Reminiscences of Karasu I became acquainted with Bilge Karasu in 1973 in Ankara. At the time, our friendship was on the warmer side of polite: he addressed me with “siz,” the formal “you” in Turkish. Karasu’s social circles included a small group of rising poets and writers. These disciples had great respect for Karasu and his authorship, and they admired his approach to writing. Rather than following the prevalent trend of the day—social realism— they found inspiration in Karasu’s hermetic prose, rich in experimental narrative techniques. Like those young friends who venerated Karasu, I used to feel slightly nervous when going up the stone stairway of that old apartment building in Tunus Street. The author lived there with his mother, Madam Aspasya, a displaced native of Istanbul’s Greek-Orthodox (or Rum) community. Karasu’s tomcat, Bibik, used to show up for guests. However, following Karasu’s warnings, we did not dare to touch this big cat that seemed to be an altogether different creature from all the cats we knew. One day, Madam Aspasya invited me, with my infant daughter, for tea. The year must have been 1975. I recall that Madam gave me the recipes for the cake and the savory pie she had prepared for us. Since then, so much has been lost and vanished. Strangely, however, the two recipes of Madam Aspasya have survived many a move and are still in my possession. At tea, she responded to my questions about her son’s childhood in Istanbul by offering up some fragmented memories: they used to live in Taksim Square; Bilge started his piano lessons at the age of three. Madam spoke Turkish with the melodic accent of Istanbul’s Rums, thus evoking her lost home. Unlike Madam Aspasya’s native Pera-Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, a place of diverse languages and cultures, as the cultural center and capital of the nation state, Ankara signified the homogeneous space

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of “Turkishness.”1 Thus, as I will show in this study, like the mother figure in Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives, moving to the steppe of Ankara from her native Pera meant for the author’s Greek-Orthodox mother a dislocation. Her nonbelonging constituted her alterity, pointing her entire being to an elsewhere. I last saw Bilge Karasu in the spring of 1994 when he extended a lecture tour in the US to Portland, Oregon. Karasu had recently been awarded the Pegasus Prize for Literature; his novel Night (Gece) had just been published by Louisiana State University Press with Güneli Gün’s translation.2 Having accepted an invitation by Reed College, where I was a faculty member, on May 4 the author presented his narrative “A Medieval Monk” to a small audience.3 After his previous experiences of crowded and intense reading events during his US visit, Karasu seemed to welcome this more relaxed atmosphere. I recall that he remained engaged in the question and answer session and did not mind responding to the usual, cliché-ridden comments, such as comparisons of “A Medieval Monk” to Kafka or Borges. Those who knew Bilge Karasu are also well aware that, contrary to the deep philosophical dimensions of his oeuvre and the piercing gaze he directed toward the individual psyche, Karasu avoided such weighty topics in everyday life. The darkness defining his fiction did not enter his conversation, which remained life-affirming, gentle, and sunny. During his visit to Portland I witnessed again how he avoided the weightiest matters, preferring instead to focus lovingly on everyday life. On a May morning, we bid farewell at the airport. Karasu was on his way to Boston, where he was to give a seminar at Harvard University. He left Portland looking happy and youthful, just as he had on arrival. I didn’t know that

1 This study introduces the hyphenated designation Pera-Beyoğlu, in order to convey, both the former, Levantine, designation, and the common Turkish name of the neighborhood. I use the dual form alternatingly with the Turkish designation, Beyoğlu, and the old name of the district, Pera. 2 The Pegasus Prize for Literature was given to authors whose works were seldom translated into English. It was founded by the Mobil Corporation in 1977. The awardwinning works were translated into English and published by Louisiana State University Press. 3 This narrative, titled in the original “Bir Ortaçağ Abdalı,” is included in Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi (1991), The Garden of Departed Cats (2003).

Introduction

this would be the last time I would see him. Karasu died in the summer of 1995.4

Questions, Themes, and Method This book brings into dialogue two representative writers of the twentieth century—Walter Benjamin and Bilge Karasu—traversing their distance in time and space. Given their respective cultural and historical contexts, they seem to be unlikely partners at first. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) grew up in the Wilhelmine Empire and Weimar Germany as the son of a wealthy, assimilated German Jewish family and died in Portbou, Spain, while trying to escape Nazi-occupied France. He is regarded as one of the most important philosophers and critics of modernity. Bilge Karasu (1930-95), on the other hand, was a child of the new Turkish Republic. Primarily a fiction writer, and celebrated as a master of Turkish prose, Karasu is revered for the philosophical depth and formal innovation of his art. He lived in Istanbul and Ankara and was never forced to leave his home country. Yet, although Karasu did not experience exile like Benjamin, his writing is permeated with a sense of displacement and difference. My inquiry follows this pervasive mood of displacement, or evocation of alterity, in Karasu’s writings, through a particular example—his constellation of narratives depicting the Istanbul neighborhood Beyoğlu. This predominantly non-Muslim enclave was also called Pera (in Greek “beyond,” “on the other side”) in its bygone cosmopolitan days. Excavating Memory moves Karasu into a new critical arena by exploring the poetics of memory—as well as the formal and thematic manifestations of difference—that inform the Beyoğlu narratives. Several of the stories contained in the volume, which was published posthumously by Füsun Akatlı under 4 Among many personal reminiscences with Bilge Karasu, Deniz Göktürk’s essay “Imagining Europe as a Realm of Transfiguration” resonates well with my above personal account. As the translator into German of Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats, Göktürk met the author in Ankara in the early 1990s to discuss her translation. They also participated in a bilingual reading at the German Consulate in Istanbul. She states that their plans to meet in Berlin again were cut short by Karasu’s death. In reference to Murathan Mungan’s portrayal of Karasu at the conference “Reading Bilge Karasu,” Göktürk emphasizes not only Karasu’s sense of humor, but also “his meticulousness in all realms of work—while he was plucking parsley leaves or editing a translation” (2014, 131).

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the title Lağımlaranası ya da Beyoğlu (Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu, or literally, Mother of Sewage or Beyoğlu, 1999), previously appeared in literary journals.5 In Karasu’s conception they were the building blocks of a larger book on Beyoğlu, a work in progress that extended over Karasu’s career. However, the “magnum opus” never materialized, leaving Karasu’s discourse on the neighborhood where he spent his childhood years incomplete. The reception of Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives in Turkish literary criticism has been next to nonexistent, except for Turkish author and literary critic Enis Batur’s illuminating comments, based on his conversations with Karasu (1997, 160-63). As I will discuss in greater detail in chapter 3, Batur pinpoints two aspects of the projected Beyoğlu book; first, that it is, due to its nature, bound to remain unfinished; and second, that the author’s hesitation to bring the book to completion may be related to Karasu’s secret minority background. Batur’s comments shed light on the framework of my analysis. The concept of incompleteness is the decisive starting point insofar as it connects Karasu’s unfinished, open-ended model of memory with Benjamin’s paradigm of remembering. By employing Benjamin’s theory of memory, as laid out in his “autobiographical” work, as a heuristic tool, I examine how Karasu conjures up differential or minority identities through a nonchronological rendering of remembering, marked by disruptions and silences. The major tenets of identity that shaped the author’s life and work, his homosexuality and his minority background, indicate Karasu’s conflict with the norms of the mainstream Turkish culture of his time. My reading of Black Waters in light of the category of alterity situates the Beyoğlu book in the context of the author’s continuing treatment of this overarching subject. I argue that sexually and ethno-culturally defined indicators of otherness are actually dispersed all over Karasu’s oeuvre, even if the author officially withheld autobiographic references from public perception. While same-sex male desire is represented more explicitly in Karasu’s writings, ethno-cultural difference remains as a hidden theme. It is inscribed in Karasu’s works but not yet sufficiently explored in literary criticism. Hercules Millas’ essay, titled “Constructing Memories of ‘Multiculturalism’ and Identities in Turkish Novels” is an exception, in that he includes 5 I have abbreviated the title to Black Waters. All translations from Lağımlaranası ya da Beyoğlu are mine.

Introduction

Karasu among the Turkish novelists who portray multiculturalism. This critical approach has provided inspiration and a strong ally for the argument presented in Excavating Memory, even if Millas’ reference pertains to Uzun Sürmüş Bir Günün Akşamı (A Long Day’s Evening), with its narratives set in Byzantium. Millas proposes several categories to describe the representation of multiculturalism and non-Muslim identities in Turkish novels, both prior and after 1980: the “Ottomanists,” the “Nationalists,” the “Marxists,” the “Anatolianists,” and the “Humanists,” among others. In Millas’ framework, Karasu belongs to this last group. Drawing on discourse analysis and ideology critique, Millas illustrates how the depiction of minority identities are determined by various standpoints, how affirmative and negative connotations are established, and how the concept of nostalgia for the lost diversity differs according to the novelist’s perspective.6 However, along with differences, Millas points out affinities and transitions between the groups. Thus, Millas’ reflection on Karasu in the context of multiculturalism deserves critical attention. Further aspects of the “Humanists” and their treatment of multiculturalism will be addressed in my conclusion. The central position that the trope Beyoğlu occupies in Karasu’s intellectual biography has remained largely neglected. This may be due to the incomplete nature of Karasu’s collection of Beyoğlu stories, to the meticulous yet unavoidably tentative editorial compilation of the pieces after the author’s death, or to the obscure rendering of remembrance in Black Waters. As mentioned earlier, Karasu is celebrated today for his avant-gardism in Turkish prose fiction, but not as a major chronicler of Beyoğlu. This is all the more surprising because a close examination of his output reveals that the role of childhood remained a continuing subject for Karasu. The author revisits this theme again and again, beginning with his early fiction of the 1950s and 60s, such as Troya’da Ölüm Vardı from 1963 (Death in Troy, 2002), up to his last prose fragments Altı Ay Bir Güz (Six Months One Autumn, 1996). Why did Karasu persistently, even if in a fragmented way, return to the representation of this enclave of Istanbul? I argue that the author’s perpetual involvement with a particular cityscape is related to the question of selfhood, albeit projected in Karasu’s work through the filter of multilayered distortions.

6 Millas 2009, 88.

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Karasu’s hermetic rendering of oppression and desire has drawn particular attention in Turkish literary criticism and among his international readership (see Parla 2011, Seyhan 2008).7 Thus, while these themes have been sufficiently addressed in scholarship, another essential tenet of Karasu’s oeuvre, the construction of ethno-cultural identities still requires critical assessment. Do Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives attest to the author’s own minority identity as the son of a mixed marriage of non-Muslim parents, a Jewish father and a Greek-Orthodox mother? Considering the ideological climate in the early decades of the nation-building process in the Turkish Republic, it is likely that Karasu had to construct his public persona from the multiple differences in his “identity,” including his non-Muslim background and his homosexuality. How can Karasu’s Beyoğlu as a mnemonic space, construed through such narrative strategies as displacement, distortion, and a nonchronological rendering of childhood scenes, be placed in an historical reading? Exactly how does Black Waters evoke Beyoğlu’s vanished community of ethnic and religious minorities through narrative silences? As will be discussed in chapter 1, “Reading Historically,” the method that critic Gerhard Richter explores with regard to Benjamin, proves useful in thinking through this question. Reflecting on Black Waters in light of Benjamin’s interrelated categories of “now-time” (Jetztzeit) and “dialectical image” (dialektisches Bild) will illustrate how we can discern concrete historicity in Karasu’s non-referential narrative. The present study unpacks the Beyoğlu texts neither as autobiographical documents nor solely as fiction, but as a practice of writing and reading memory. In this regard, my approach does not fully comply with the remark Karasu once made on his Beyoğlu project: objecting to biographical interpretations, he insisted that what he was writing was a novel (Mungan 2008, 237). My reading brings to the center the configurations of difference, (non-)identity, and belonging, as they emerge from Karasu’s representation of Beyoğlu as a site of otherness. By mediating between two methodological frameworks, one based on the formal-rhetorical tenets of inscribing memory, as displayed in Benjamin’s model, and the other on historicity, my analysis aims at approximating 7 Deniz Göktürk notes that “Karasu was said to be a difficult and mysterious author.” To counteract this cliché, she refers to Akşit Göktürk’s statement “that Karasu’s text resists the expectations of lazy readers who are looking for linear causality in a story” (2014, 130).

Introduction

the subject matter of Karasu’s place-based memory fragments. In the literary medium of Black Waters, this “truth-content” (Wahrheitsgehalt), to use a term from Benjamin, transpires not in referential relations but in the network of fragments presented. Thus, Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives offer a unique ground for simultaneously validating a postmodernist and a historical-critical reading.

Bilge Karasu in the Context of World Literature English translations of Karasu’s major works are available in the award-winning renderings of Aron Aji. Karasu has also been translated to other languages, such as German and French. Yet, he hasn’t reached the global fame that, for example, the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has enjoyed. While the two authors have different artistic projects, they are the foremost representatives of modern Turkish literature. It has been argued that Western readers have been attracted to Pamuk because of his treatment of questions pertaining to Turkish identity, whereas such thematization in Karasu is missing. My critical intervention aims at underscoring precisely this allegedly absent dimension in Karasu. In my view, it is time to present Karasu to the world readership as an equally intriguing master of identity construction as his fellow novelist Pamuk. Through his nonreferential and ambiguous renderings of memory in Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu, Karasu gives unique expression to Turkish ethno-cultural difference. In her assessment of the changing reception of Karasu’s fiction among the Western readership, Deniz Göktürk offers pertinent insights into the shifting interest in modern Turkish literature in general. Referring to the difficulties of finding a publisher for her German translation of The Garden of Departed Cats, Göktürk states that in the 1990s Turkey was primarily associated in the reading public’s imagination with a mosque or a Turkish bath (2014, 129-30). Despite the interest in migrant literature from the same decade, foreign readers were still relatively unaware of the rich literary corpus of Turkish modernity. Göktürk pinpoints the emergence of German publishing’s increasing interest in Turkish literature at 2006, the year in which Pamuk won the Nobel Prize; and, furthermore, at 2008 at the Frankfurt Book Fair where Turkey was honored as the guest country (132). This analysis of the recent reception and circulation history of Turkish literature in the

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West well explains the growth in numbers of Karasu’s fiction in English translation. Actually, Aji’s translations start at the outset of the millennium, earlier even than the above dates. Likewise, Göktürk’s translation, Der Garten entschwundener Katzen, was published in 2002. However, the fact that Aji’s latest translation of Uzun Sürmüş Bir Günün Akşamı, Karasu’s book of three interrelated narratives, came out in 2013 under the title A Long Day’s Evening indicates the continuing interest of publishers and readers in Karasu’s output. It is important to note that other prime examples of modern Turkish literature—such as Sait Faik’s short stories and poems, compiled as Sleeping in the Forest in Talat S. Halman’s translation, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace (Huzur), translated by Erdağ Göknar—were also released in the first decade of the millennium. Turkish Jewish writer Mario Levi’s epic saga Istanbul was a Fairy Tale (İstanbul Bir Masaldı), depicting the lives of a Jewish family over generations, became available to English-speaking readers with Ender Gürol’s translation in 2012. At the same time, Pamuk continued to sell, and scholars repeatedly wrote about his work. Each of his texts has appeared in English translation shortly after publication of the Turkish edition. In light of this growing attention to Turkish writing as a whole, this study aims to contribute to commentary on modern Turkish literature, especially, but not only, in translation. My comparative analysis of Karasu and Benjamin offers a differentiated critical reading, thereby widening the scope of scholarship on Karasu at the intersection of Turkish and German Studies.

The Evocation of Mnemonic Places Looking at Karasu through the lens of Benjamin’s writings amplifies the significance of the German Jewish philosopher’s paradigm of remembering. Through a comparative framework, I demonstrate the ways in which Benjamin’s memory model can be transposed to narratives outside the Western canon. In his Berlin memoirs, including his unfinished A Berlin Chronicle (Berliner Chronik, 1932), its transformed version, Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, 1932-38), and his seminal work, The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk, 1928-40), Benjamin explores the intrinsic relationship between memory and cityscapes, especially architectural relics of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. His archeological allegory of remembering-as-excavation evades

Introduction

mimetic-historicist reconstruction, accentuating instead the process of remembering. By uncovering the fragments of meaning in the remains of a recent past, Benjamin evokes departed eras. Space functions as a repository of memory; Benjamin’s profound interest in reading and writing the past thus centers on sites as containers of mnemonic traces. The following chapters address the sense of displacement which governs Benjamin’s construction of remembering, and the way he conveys the contents of memory through interruptions, gaps, and absences more than presence. Recent Benjamin scholarship has emphasized the importance of Sigmund Freud’s memory model for Benjamin’s representation of remembering. In Freud’s paradigm of memory, what is remembered resurfaces in consciousness as a “trace” that is legible but incomplete and distorted. Benjamin’s memory fragments in his Berlin texts seem to display a kindred process of remembering, presented as a self-reflexive writing of memory. In my analysis, I draw on exemplary psychoanalytic readings of Benjamin’s memoirs. These approaches focus especially on the incomplete nature of memory in Freud’s theory. Thus, critics working with rhetorical-poststructuralist methods find an engaging approach to reading Benjamin in Freud’s view that it is impossible to fully reconstruct memory. Along with these more abstract readings, I also discuss historical interpretations that contextualize Benjamin’s Berlin writings in multiple temporal frameworks. By bringing Benjamin’s topographically defined concept of remembrance into dialogue with Karasu’s poetics of memory, I establish a surprising intercultural simultaneity pertaining to the representation of two disparate moments of twentieth-century modernity— one at its very outset, around 1900, the other in the early to mid-twentieth century. My comparative approach aims at mapping out the interconnectedness between place, memory, selfhood, and literary representation. To unravel Karasu’s memory work in his Beyoğlu book, I draw on the critical vocabulary that informs Benjamin’s theories of memory and history. These include concepts such as “dialectical image,” “sudden illumination,” memory as “snapshot,” “now-time,” “past become space,” remembering as “excavation,” “threshold,” and “redemption.” The notion of a “rescuing critique,” or “redemptive criticism” (rettende Kritik), that underlies Benjamin’s thinking from his early work in literary criticism to his last writings on the philosophy of history, and that is closely related to the above-mentioned terms, offers a further critical tool for exploring the narratives of memory (Habermas 1979; Weigel 1997, 59, 95; Isenberg

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1999, 131). These categories will help clarify how Benjamin and Karasu configure historical knowledge in their recall of the past. Benjamin’s historico-critical terminology has been interpreted in diverse directions in scholarship, including the reading of his thought in light of Jewish tradition, and in particular, the Jewish messianism that inspired his perception of the past. Noah Isenberg’s insightful study on the philosopher-critic’s construction of memory in relationship to his Jewish identity offers a good example of this approach. By way of connecting Benjamin’s notion of memory to the Jewish commandment to remember (zakhor), Isenberg argues that Benjamin’s search for redemption in the past places his project of remembering in the context of messianic thought (1999, 125). While Isenberg reads Berlin Childhood in light of the Jewish concept of remembrance, he emphasizes the tension between Jewish motifs and the experience of modernity, as represented through the big city, in Benjamin’s Berlin narratives (132-39). The examination of Benjamin’s memory model through the question of Jewish identity constitutes an engaging critical background and points to affinities between Karasu’s and Benjamin’s texts of remembrance, which manifest various modes of displacement in their formal and thematic fabric. Although the integration of the Jewish element in Benjamin’s autobiographical work transcends the scope of my analysis, it is a compelling point of reference for exploring the ethno-cultural component as alterity in Karasu. The trope of “lost places” in Benjamin and Karasu’s narratives remains an ongoing concern of my investigation. In Black Waters, Karasu enacts a childhood that spans the 1930s and 1940s (the early era of the Turkish Republic) spent in the culturally diverse enclave Beyoğlu. Benjamin’s autobiographical Berlin writings, while bearing witness to an individual childhood, reflect on the lost world of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie in the imperial capital. The borough of was the former center of Frenk (European), that is, Levantine, culture and commerce and home for the local Christian and Jewish minorities of the Ottoman Empire. Although distant from Benjamin’s Jewish Berlin, Beyoğlu shares a similar predicament with Berlin’s West End, the affluent neighborhood in the Charlottenburg district at the turn of the twentieth century. Like the latter, Beyoğlu too lost its previous cultural signification through radically transformative events of twentieth-century history. The policies and civic ideals of the new Turkish Republic, founded under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk in 1923, aimed above all at the formation of a new,

Introduction

Westernized, secular, and uniformly defined notion of “Turkishness.” Consequently, social milieus that represented a cosmopolitan lifestyle outside the Turkish majority culture gradually lost their established identities as multiethnic sites. The former Pera-Beyoğlu stands out as the best known, most celebrated, but also the most contested multiethnic environment of Istanbul. An important outcome of Tanzimat, the Ottoman reform movements in the nineteenth century (1839-76) which aimed at modernizing the empire, was the granting of equal rights to non-Muslim minorities. As a result of this, Pera-Beyoğlu flourished and became a uniquely Westernized part of Istanbul. The diverse socio-cultural mix of the neighborhood, with its Europeanized lifestyle, commerce, and banking, as well as its development into a major arts and entertainment district in the late nineteenth century, have inspired the literary imagination as no other place in the city. When representing “lost places,” both Benjamin and Karasu evade any referential narration which would convey a coherent life story. Instead, akin to the Freudian “trace,” remembrances surface as fragments and are thus bound to remain incomplete. Karasu’s textualized Beyoğlu discloses itself in ambiguity, paradox, contradiction, deferral, and inconclusiveness. However, through this narrative opacity indicators of ethno-cultural difference appear and reappear in the form of songs, linguistic musings, and vaguely rendered religious rituals. In Black Waters, these signs point towards a vanished social topography and function as the permeation of the past into the process of writing. Childhood recollections point toward an ethnic minority household, but only allusively. Thus, the reader encounters a text in which historicity is embedded in a memory model that resists chronological and mimetic representation. Nevertheless, as I argue, the vanished past reemerges in the Beyoğlu narratives as memory traces. Accordingly, it can be salvaged through an act of reading that recognizes these traces as such. Excavating Memory aims to engage the reader in exactly this critical venture of reading memory. In conjunction with this mode of reading I situate Karasu’s strategies of referential uncertainty into the socio-historical context of his biography. This offers to aid understanding of Karasu’s memory model in light of the oppressive Turkish nationalist ideology. To this end, I draw in chapter 4 on scholars such as Rıfat Bali, Ayhan Aktar, and Çağlar Keyder, who have amply demonstrated the impact of Turkish-nationalist ideology on ethnic minorities from the beginnings of the republic to the 1960s and 70s, the

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Introduction

decades in which Karasu was working on his Beyoğlu project. My analysis shows that in Black Waters Karasu evades and at the same time attests to this ideology by way of offering glimpses of the past, just like Benjamin’s method of seeing the past through “dialectical images.” My inquiry explores how Karasu hides, and at the same time reveals, through his mnemonic landscape minority identities typical for the old Pera-Beyoğlu. The fact that in Black Waters ethno-cultural self-identification is ostensibly missing brings to light the repression decisive in the author’s construction of selfhood in these narratives. At the same time, the topography of alterity that Karasu sketches becomes legible precisely through this absence. His Beyoğlu is construed as a differential place inhabited by the “others,” albeit unspecified, of Turkish nationalist space. Karasu’s remembered child in Black Waters partakes in this difference by way of belonging to this place, historically the multiethnic habitat of the non-Muslim minorities and the Levantines. What I hope to show in this study is how Benjamin’s and Karasu’s remembered sites contain an element of unfulfilled redemption. In Karasu’s case, his mnemonic Beyoğlu emerges as a place hinting at the unredeemed promise of Turkish modernity: cultural plurality. The notion of modernity implied here is be understood more in tandem with the cosmopolitan Pera of the late nineteenth century. Thus, it has to be distinguished from the nationalist, top-down implementation of a Western-oriented, progressive society after the foundation of the republic. In Karasu’s narratives, childhood memories of the 1930s still carry forth some features of Pera’s urban past, although they are through and through permeated with a sense of decline. The figure of the arcade, introduced in chapter 2, will further explore the theme of decline. Here, Brian Elliott’s essay “Dream Places: The Pera Arcades as Heterotopias” (2011), in which he argues that Benjamin’s representation of the Parisian arcades can be transferred to Istanbul’s Pera district, serves as reference. In light of “Dream Places,” I look comparatively at the Parisian and Pera arcades as spatial signifiers of the past, addressing themes such as modernity, redemption, and loss.

Summary Remarks The inquiry on memory, site, and identity that forms the subject matter of this book unfolds through an interdisciplinary approach that is informed by diverse scholarly fields such as, world literature, comparative literature,

Introduction

German Studies, Turkish Studies, and cultural theory. In order to explicate my authors’ representations of memory, I refer to multiple paradigms, including those found in Freud, Ricoeur, Bergson, and Barthes, and in various studies of collective memory. My primary and secondary sources are taken from three languages—Turkish, German, and English. By mediating between these languages through translation, I aim to produce a cross-cultural reflection. Moreover, my inquiry presents a critical framework that proves relevant for studies in postmemory. Karasu’s exploration of matrilineal history and the role of the family photographs establish express points of connection to the field of postmemory. The genesis and publication histories of Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and Karasu’s Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu render critical work on them complex, since both of these texts were published posthumously. Benjamin’s memoirs, having gone through multiple versions, were arranged and rearranged by the author and different editors. Similarly, Karasu’s unfinished Beyoğlu book, parts of which had been published in literary journals, lacked a final organization when Füsun Akatlı was given the fragments. We owe the cohesiveness of the print version of Black Waters to Akatlı’s sensible and meticulous editorial work. Unlike the majority of Karasu’s fiction that is available in English translation, the Beyoğlu narratives can at present only be read in the original. Thus, to mediate Karasu’s writing in Turkish to readers unfamiliar with the language has been a crucial task of my study. I hope that, through the translation of passages and through close readings, I have been able to give a sense of Karasu’s narrative universe. Translating Black Waters into English would be an enticing project for the near future. Today, the trope of “lost place” deserves particular interest. While the meaning of Benjamin’s Old West Berlin has changed multiple times from 1900 to our day, Karasu’s Beyoğlu has lately undergone yet another transformation: in the recent past, starting with the Taksim Gezi Park protests of summer 2013, and due to terror incidents and political unrest in the years that followed, the Beyoğlu district has been in the process of shutting itself off. The gentrification movement of the 1990s succeeded in reviving Pera-Beyoğlu’s erstwhile humming lifestyle, even if the neighborhood’s cultural diversity had long vanished. Now, however, cafés and major businesses are leaving the site what once was Grand’rue de Péra, and crowds that filled the main street have diminished. In its place, the port district Karaköy is emerging as the center of a new urban renewal

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movement. Although, as of late, Beyoğlu has been spared terror attacks, the rapidly increasing Islamicization of social life in Istanbul has hollowed the district of much of its earlier identity. Beyoğlu is, once again, an empty cipher, carrying the traces of its past as a site of remembrance. At the same time, the reconstruction of Taksim Square, the heart of the borough of Beyoğlu, points to a resignification process. Taksim has been transformed into a wider empty space, which has decentered the Atatürk Monument and made the square conducive to surveillance. Along with contested plans to rebuild the Ottoman military barracks (Topçu Kışlası) at Gezi Park, the construction of the stately new mosque vis-à-vis the historic Greek-Orthodox Aya Triada Church indicate the plans of Turkey’s current administration not only to replace Taksim’s secular modern identity, emblematic of the republican era, but also its cosmopolitan past, with new Turkish-Islamic symbolism. However, perhaps we can also reflect on the future from a more open perspective. As Brian Elliott suggests in his conclusion to “Dream Places,” as architectural sites of memory the Pera arcades continue to project the much-debated question of Turkey’s Western identity, or, in Elliott’s words, “Turkey’s ‘European destiny’” (unpublished manuscript, 24). May this “destiny” appear ever so out of reach in today’s political climate, when read as “dialectical images,” the Pera arcades transport us to the past and project a future that carries the promise of redemption. The outline of my chapters follows.

Chapter 1—Beginnings: Representing Memory This chapter introduces the memory narratives of my primary authors, laying out the major tenets of their poetics of memory. I underscore the problematic underlying Karasu’s Black Waters as an implied (self-) representation of minority identity through the figure of Beyoğlu. The chapter connects Benjamin’s model of remembering, via selected critical readings, to Freud’s theory of memory, especially his concept of “distortion.” I also interpret Benjamin in light of historicizing readings which explore the Berlin memoirs through the lens of a hermeneutics of temporality. The chapter looks at Karasu in light of these paradigms and by

Introduction

employing Benjamin’s categories, such as “dialectical image” and “sudden illumination.”

Chapter 2—From Berlin’s Old West to Istanbul’s Beyo˘g lu: Narratives of Memory, Narratives of Lost Topographies This chapter discusses the affinities between Benjamin’s and Karasu’s constructions of memory through their textual poetics and the shared topos of “lost place.” It includes a comparative analysis of the figure of the arcade, embodying Benjamin’s model of the past as space. The chapter also offers a detailed discussion of the locality Beyoğlu and highlights Karasu’s unique position in the corpus of “Beyoğlu literature.” I read selected sections from Berlin Childhood in conjunction with their counterparts from Black Waters.

Chapter 3—Incompleteness as Anti-Autobiography: The Production and Publication Histories of Benjamin’s and Karasu’s Memory Narratives The chapter focuses on the question of incompleteness that defines both authors’ representations of remembering. Through discussions of the critical literature on Benjamin and Karasu, I explore the idea of “excavation” as allegory. The publication histories of the primary works by my authors shed light on biographical contingencies as well as the underlying theories of memory.

Chapter 4—Bilge Karasu in Historical Context: Identity Formation in the Shadow of “Turkification” This chapter looks at Karasu in the context of Turkish Republican policies from its foundation in 1923 through the 1960s. I argue that Turkey’s national narrative has been constructed on silence and forgetting, and examine the seeming absence of ethnic alterity in Karasu’s oeuvre in connection with these other “lacks.” I raise the question as to what Karasu’s construction of a childhood in the particular topography of Beyoğlu reveals about the oppressive practices at work in the early periods of nation-building, and what it conceals.

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Chapter 5—Forgetting, Remembering, and the Workings of Collective Memory: The Survival and the Retrieval of Memory Traces This chapter explores Karasu’s memory narratives in light of Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenology of memory and through studies in collective memory that take an intersubjectivist approach to remembering. I offer close readings of selected narratives from Black Waters in connection with these frameworks.

Chapter 6—“Dialectical Images” in Beyo˘g lu’s Black Waters: The Photograph as Testimony In order to explicate Karasu’s historicization of memory, this chapter traces the embedded signs pointing toward the Levantine past of Pera-Beyoğlu. Furthermore, in my reading of matrilineal history in Black Waters I employ Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, addressing questions of authenticity and truth conveyed through the photographic medium.

Chapter 7—Remembering as Distortion: The Visual and Aural Traces of Alterity This chapter addresses the demise of the nineteenth-century Pera bourgeoisie through Karasu’s representation of absent father figures. My close reading of the narrative “Courtyard of Death” reveals a patricidal imaginary and proposes potential connections to the author’s Jewish father. The chapter goes on to perform an in-depth analysis of syncretic representations of bereavement, as demonstrated in the double movement of covering and uncovering mirrors. Linguistic allusions to Spanish/Ladino, as presented in associative memory, establish a further component of Karasu’s codes of ethno-cultural difference.

Chapter 8—Spatiality as the Inscription of the Past Through examinations of the bourgeois interiors in Berlin Childhood and Black Waters, this chapter investigates Benjamin’s idea of “a past become space.” A close reading of imagery, such as light and darkness, thresholds, and smells conjures up the sunken world of nineteenth-century bourgeois

Introduction

culture. I map out the categories that pertain to Benjamin’s mnemonic landscape. Moreover, the chapter focuses on the bifurcation of narrative voice in Black Waters. I show how Karasu leads us into deeper layers of remembering, evoking a past that reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century. Borrowing Andreas Huyssen’s critical vocabulary, my analysis follows the transformation of the dark Pera passages into “spaces of anxiety,” leading to “dreams of anxiety” (Huyssen 2007, 38). The chapter illustrates how the historical manifests itself through spatial imagery.

Chapter 9—Crazy Meryem as the Saint of Beyo˘g lu’s Marginalized: Toward a Final Reading of Difference The chapter focuses on Karasu’s ultimate cipher of alterity, the abject female character Crazy Meryem. As an embodiment of the marginalized, this figure has a wide range of connotations that help us define Karasu’s Beyoğlu. We can look through her—as we would through a palimpsest—and see the marginalized, the human become “animal.” A threshold figure, she leads the reader toward Beyoğlu’s pluricultural past, from which she herself is an outcast, a defective child of the Pera bourgeoisie. This primordial figure arguably encompasses the diminished ethnic minorities of the locale. Her allies are the others of Beyoğlu, not only the old (Christian) widows in black and the street cats, but also the narrator as the remembered child.

Conclusion The closing chapter highlights major tenets of the analysis presented in this study. Based on my reading of Karasu’s memory narratives, I examine the author’s position in the context of multiculturalism, emphasizing Karasu’s discourse on difference through the remembered space Beyoğlu. The conclusion connects Karasu’s allusive representation of ethno-cultural minority identities to the concept of being a Beyoğlulu, a term used throughout the book to signal both belonging and difference. The conclusion expands on the representation of various modes of difference in Karasu’s oeuvre, illustrating through examples the wide scope of Karasu’s treatment of alterity. Based on the above, the final discussion includes suggestions for new trajectories in Karasu studies.

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Addendum—Biographical Notes on Karasu (Based on Füsun Akatlı’s Testimony) This section conveys little known aspects of Karasu’s biography, such as his family history, including: his childhood years in Beyoğlu, his multilingual skills, and his burial, rendered through editor Füsun Akatlı’s reminiscences. Akatlı had obtained these fragments of information as Karasu’s lifelong friend and literary collaborator, which she communicated in our 2007-9 interviews in Istanbul.

Chapter 1

Beginnings: Representing Memory

Comparative Paths Walter Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur in The Arcades Project is a prime example of a topographically defined paradigm of remembering. Benjamin bestows on his flâneur a new mode of cognition that is closely connected to sensory perception. Far from the positivist approach of the historicist scholar, aiming at reconstructing the past as it has been, the flâneur’s cognitive talent is visceral. As the epitome of the metropolis in the nineteenth-century literary imagination, the flâneur obtains, by way of strolling the city streets, intuitive knowledge that is bound to the site. Benjamin compares the flâneur’s “illustrative seeing” to the colportage genre that juxtaposes text and image (2002, M1a,3 and M2,2, 418-19). Consequently, the flâneur experiences the past not as succession but simultaneity. Benjamin writes on this palimpsest-like vision of flânerie as follows: “We know that, in the course of flânerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment” (M2,4, 419).1 Furthermore, the archeological allegory of remembering-as-excavation points to the process of

1 “Bekannt ist, wie bei der Flanerie Länder- und Zeitenfernen in die Landschaft und in den Augenblick eindringen” (Benjamin, 1991d, M2,4, 528). According to Benjamin, this simultaneous perception of the tableaux of the past, as they emerge in the present, leads the flâneur to a state of intoxication that Benjamin likens to the influence of hashish (2002, M2,3, 419 and M4a,1, 425).

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discovery itself rather than to the findings. Like Benjamin’s writing itself, remembering captures the past in and as fragments, not in continuity. The rhetorical and narrative strategies underlying Black Waters point toward a process similar to Benjamin’s spatially defined construction of remembering. Rather than tell stories about the past, Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts seem to be concerned with the representability of memory and remembering. The examination of this theme leads expressly to a major question of my inquiry—whether and how Karasu establishes his Beyoğlu as a place of alterity without resorting to a mimetic representation of the past. I use the term “alterity” (or “otherness”) here as synonymous with “difference.” Beyoğlu’s alterity, in my analysis, encompasses first the non-Muslim religious and ethnic minorities of Turkey, the bygone collective of PeraBeyoğlu; and secondly, as elsewhere in Karasu’s oeuvre, alterity may imply multiple layers of difference, marginality, or displacement. Therefore, reading Karasu’s Beyoğlu as the cipher of a differential place establishes a connection to other modes of alterity in his work. We should recall that Benjamin’s Berlin memoirs attest to a childhood in another space of alterity, the Old Berlin-West of the upper German Jewish bourgeoisie. It is also important to emphasize that the representations of Istanbul and Berlin rest on different temporalities and historical moments. Moreover, each author writes from a different vantage point. Karasu worked on his “magnum opus” almost through his entire career, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Benjamin penned various versions of his Berlin Childhood in the 1930s (1932-38), when he was abroad and knew he would not be able to return to his native Berlin. Yet, the intertextual reading offered in Excavating Memory aims at bringing my authors into proximity by virtue of their models of remembering. Furthermore, their discourses of memory invoke a sense of displacement, indicative of the standpoint of an internal or external exile. This chapter explores through selective critical literature how Benjamin’s Berlin memoirs can be read in light of a psychoanalytic model, informed by Freud’s theory of memory as inscription or trace. In this framework, topography relates both to the intertwinement of place and remembering and to the spatial conception of the psyche and the workings of memory. In addition to these readings, the chapter includes approaches to Benjamin’s Berlin texts that focus on temporality and the socio-historical context. The question of historicity pertains to both critical paths. Consideration of Karasu’s construction of remembering in

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Beginnings: Representing Memory    CHAPTER 1

his Beyoğlu narratives, then, will lead us to touch on the main themes expanded upon throughout Excavating Memory.

Distortion, Rhetorics, and Historicity In her study Entstellte Ähnlichkeit (Distorted Similarity), Sigrid Weigel compellingly argues that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory was a major influence on Benjamin’s topographical conception of memory. Weigel’s starting point is the affinity between Freud’s theories of memory and remembering, and Benjamin’s own thought figures on this subject. The dream structure, the topographic structure of memory, and the dialectic of the unconscious and the conscious were the main Freudian topoi Benjamin appropriated and reworked for his own theory (1997, 20). As Weigel demonstrates, the Freudian definition of memory as inscription or writing (Schrift) is fundamental to Benjamin’s own thinking. Weigel situates this paradigm within a practice of reading, or the legibility of memory as an imagistic text (Bilderschrift), a concern central to Benjamin’s construction of the past. In conjunction with the topographically formulated concept of memory and its definition as script, Weigel focuses on the category of “distortion” (Entstellung) that problematizes the unmediated, complete transcription of an “original” content (34-35). Hence, the Freudian “distortion” captures the nonmimetic, nonlinear construction of childhood memories in Benjamin’s autobiographical work, especially in Berlin Childhood. I employ this concept in a comparative fashion in order to decipher Karasu’s representation of Beyoğlu, in which an “original” content seems to be altered through narrative disfigurement and displacement. Reading Black Waters in light of distortion uncovers the ways through which Karasu complicates the question of belonging. In Black Waters the motif of return to the native environment serves as the trigger of memory work, and its rendering, as inscription. However, Black Waters conveys the implications of belonging nonmimetically by way of distorting the referential context. Since in Freud’s paradigm the memory traces themselves are already inscriptions of an inaccessible originating event, their legibility rests on interpretation, not on the recovery of the primal stimulus. If we follow the hypothesis that representation in Black Waters operates with distortion rather than with the use of mimetic narration, how then does Karasu construct Beyoğlu as a place of difference? A fertile problematic is at work here: approaching Black Waters in light of formal-rhetorical

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questions on the one hand and resituating Karasu’s disjointed mnemonic texts in an historical context on the other establishes a framework with methodological tensions. I employ these seemingly irreconcilable trajectories as a dual strategy of unpacking Black Waters. The argument here is that, in Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives, these interpretive paths are complementary and that we can consider Freudian distortion as the junction between the formal-rhetorical and the historical configurations of remembering. The following chapters explore these dimensions and negotiate between them. Thus, Excavating Memory offers a reading that addresses historicity, cultural context, and autobiography in tandem with formal questions pertaining to the textual representation of memory. Gerhard Richter presents a forceful example of examining Benjamin’s work at the junction of rhetorical and historical dimensions. In his commentary on Benjamin’s major autobiographical texts, Richter argues that Benjamin’s thoughts on politics and history are not conveyed in closed, completed form: [A]ny understanding of Benjamin’s sense of the political, and the history to which it belongs, cannot be found in unified concepts and fully deducible theses that might simply be verified or refuted. That is, instead of reading Benjamin’s sentences literally, we must follow the shifting movements of language itself. Because for Benjamin the political can only become legible in and as something else, it is most itself when it is read through a series of deferrals and mediations, in short, figuratively. (2000, 12)

For Richter, this figurative mode manifests itself performatively, through Benjamin’s use of language: instead of explaining his political concepts, the philosopher stages them (14). Richter sees in Benjamin’s writings the enactment of a “perpetual confrontation with the politics of German fascism. Fascism belongs to the image-space of the famous Benjaminian alarm clock that rings for sixty seconds every minute” (19). Benjamin’s suicide in 1940 while escaping National Socialism was the final form of this confrontation. Thus, Richter emphatically points to the central place that the political and the historical occupy in Benjamin’s thought. However, by laying out Benjamin’s rejection of the historicist-positivist method as mimetic realism, Richter concludes that politics and history are articulated through textual strategies rather than as closed meanings. As Benjamin writes in “The Task of the Translator,” understanding language only through its

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Beginnings: Representing Memory    CHAPTER 1

function of transmitting content pertains to a bürgerlich (bourgeois) view of language (30). In what ways would “the perpetual tension between the textual event, on the one hand, and history and politics, on the other,” that Richter (2000, 25) registers in Benjamin’s writings, illuminate Karasu’s undertaking in Black Waters? Through Karasu’s strategies of distortion, Beyoğlu emerges as a differential space, the otherness of which is given as a network of textual associations and not as a direct reference to Beyoğlu’s cultural heterogeneity in the past. The evasion of stable, signified contexts attests to the kinship between the mode of narration in Black Waters and the psychoanalytic model of remembering. Moreover, the referential uncertainties as well as the lack of a coherent factual account render Karasu’s Beyoğlu project close to postmodernist paradigms. Indeed, reading Karasu’s texts as postmodern has been a common approach among scholars (see Aji 2012, 9; Seyhan 2008, 5, 9, 123). At the same time, studying historical context leads toward a deeper understanding of the elusive gesture expressed in the Beyoğlu narratives—for the implied historicity pertains not only to the cultural indices of difference that Karasu evokes in the childhood reminiscences, but also to the larger socio-cultural climate in the early decades of the republican era. There is no mention in Black Waters of the official ideology that aimed at creating a homogeneous Turkish identity. Nevertheless, both the imagery of light and darkness, and that of pervasive gloom, serve as the harbingers of the pending decline of the neighborhood in the mid-twentieth century. My introduction has already underscored the importance of the ethno-cultural identity construction (and its repression) in Karasu’s oeuvre. I also noted that this subject, decisive for the author’s intellectual autobiography, has remained unexamined. Black Waters, as the story of Beyoğlu, the quintessential site of ethno-cultural diversity, is especially compelling in our exploration of this question. Could the workings of the Freudian distortion in the Beyoğlu narratives indicate, beyond their theoretical function in the formation of the trace, the author’s assimilated Turkishness? In other words, was the author evading referential representation because of his internalization of nationalist pressures? Was Karasu silent about his non-Muslim minority identity because he was a private man, or because he chose not to reveal publicly his ethno-cultural background, in order to be integrated in the state-imposed majority culture? To what extent was the author compelled in his self-fashioning as a master of Turkish prose to

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repress the tenets of difference? As I will discuss in greater detail in chapter 4, Karasu’s changing his name around the age of eighteen from “Israel” to the neutral Turkish name “Bilge” (meaning “The Wise One” and implying gender ambiguity) is telling in our context. However, the reading I pursue in this book not only looks at the referential absences, indicative of such an anxious silence, but also brings to light Karasu’s endeavor as a self-confrontation with his suppressed identity as an erstwhile local of Beyoğlu. Karasu breaks through his silence by inviting an act of reading that would decipher the markers of difference. This textual lifting of repression is comparable to Benjamin’s “rescuing critique.” By following Richter’s remarks regarding the tension between text and history, in other words the figurative construction of history and politics, we may conclude that Benjamin’s method of representing memory reveals an entwinement of form and substance. In the vignette “The Otter” in Berlin Childhood, for example, the path to the otter’s cage at a remote end of the Zoological Garden is described as a “prophetic corner” (“prophetischer Winkel”): “In such places, it seems as if all that lies in store for us has become the past” (Benjamin 1996a, 365).2 The otter is remembered more through its absence than its presence: “And so time and again I would remain, endlessly waiting, before those black and impenetrable depths, in order somewhere to catch sight of the otter” (366).3 The empty grotto of the otter points to the missing referential content, the description of the actual otter that emerges from water only for a split second. Instead, the otter accompanies the child in his imagination, embodying in his mythic form both the past and the future.

Problematizing the Autobiographical Subject As in The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s involvement with the past in his autobiographical work centers on bygone cityscapes in their mnemonic function; consequently, no coherent life story emerges from the narrated urban experience. In the opening sentence of A Berlin Chronicle, a compilation of Benjamin’s loosely connected recollections of his native city, the author writes: 2

“An solchen Orten scheint es, als sei alles, was eigentlich uns bevorsteht, ein Vergangenes” (Benjamin 1991c, 407). 3 “Und so blieb ich häufig, endlos wartend, vor dieser unergründlichen und schwarzen Tiefe, um irgendwo den Otter zu entdecken” (ibid.).

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Beginnings: Representing Memory    CHAPTER 1

Now let me call back those who introduced me to the city. For although the child, in his solitary games, grows up in closest proximity to the city, he needs and seeks guides to its wider expanses, and the first of these—for a son of wealthy middle-class parents like me—are sure to have been nursemaids. (1996a, 595) (Da will ich mir die zurückrufen, die mich in die Stadt eingeführt haben. Denn gerade das Kind, dem seine einsamen Spiele die nächste Nähe zur Stadt wachsen lassen, braucht und sucht sich Führer in deren weitere{m} Umkreis und die ersten sind wohl-für ein wohlgeborenes Bürgerkind, wie ich eines war, die Kinderfräulein gewesen.) (1991b, 465)

By conjuring up the guide figures (here, with an ironic twist, the nursemaids, instead of the parents or teachers) leading him into the city, Benjamin embeds his personal past in the city’s topography. He emphasizes at the outset his concern with the urban space as the constitutive element of memory. Benjamin was commissioned to write A Berlin Chronicle by the journal Die literarische Welt, and he worked on it during the spring and summer months of 1932 while staying on the Spanish island of Ibiza (Skoggard 2010, 178). Benjamin started labor on his second memory-text, Berlin Childhood around 1900—which holds sections incorporated from the unfinished A Berlin Chronicle—in the increasingly critical climate of the period before Hitler’s rise to power. Both texts anticipate the impending loss of the native space and their author’s permanent displacement. The opening sentence of A Berlin Chronicle clearly puts people such as family members or friends into a secondary role, thereby enunciating the city’s central position in the reminiscences. Those close to Benjamin in this childhood world enter the two memory narratives sparingly. Instead, the topographical concept of “Schauplätze” (arenas, stages) helps to define Benjamin’s method of configuring memory spatially. As will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 3, Benjamin uses the term Schauplätze in his allegory of remembering-as-excavation. The concept originates from Freud’s theory of memory, and it has played a pivotal role in Benjamin scholarship for the explication of the philosopher’s self-reflexive practice in his autobiographical writings.4 In the excavation piece Benjamin lays the emphasis on unearthing the stage of memory, in other words, on performance 4 Carol Jacobs aptly emphasizes Benjamin’s term “arenas” as memory images of places: “Benjamin is here all but woven out of the city’s remembrances—woven out while woven in” (1996, 101).

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or production, just as is the case with writing down remembrances. Even though Benjamin establishes the remembered child, or “the Benjaminian child” (Skoggard 2010, 172), as the subject of his study, he also denies to his Berlin Chronicle the mode of autobiography, stating that “[r]eminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography” (1996a, 612).5 Whereas for Benjamin autobiography is related to the “continuous flow of life,” his chronicle, in his words, deals with “space, with moments and discontinuities.” The inscription of the city space, the child, and the remembered moment thus make up the building blocks of Benjamin’s construction of memory, as he lays them out in these two posthumously published Berlin texts.6 Benjamin’s rejection of constructing a self-identical autobiographical subject has generated a pervasive interest among postmodernist critics. Richter describes Benjamin’s strategy of decentering the subject as follows: The body of Benjamin’s autobiographical subject is useless. It is always in retreat, unemployable by ideologies and programs that rely on presence, stability, closure, and self-identity. In its withdrawal from stable meaning, the corporeal subject belongs to those Benjaminian words that approach us in the image of what does not yet have a name and always remains still to come. (2000, 22)

Richter sees the retreat of the confessional self in Benjamin’s autobiographical writings, including Moscow Diary, A Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood around 1900, as a move toward decentering the grammatical subject.7 Referring to an oft-quoted passage from A Berlin Chronicle in which Benjamin proudly declares his avoidance of the 5

“Erinnerungen, selbst wenn sie ins Breite gehen, stellen nicht immer eine Autobiographie dar” (Benjamin, 1991b, 488). Carol Jacobs’ translation of this sentence captures the meaning of the verb “darstellen” better: “Memories even when they go on extensively do not always present [darstellen] an autobiography” (1996, 95). 6 On the intersections and difference between A Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood, see Eiland 2006, vii-viii. Emphasizing that Benjamin constructed the latter in vignettes, instead of the chronicle format, Eiland states: “It was part of his general gravitation, after One-Way Street, toward the dialectical method of montage, with its simultaneous isolation and assemblage of materials” (viii). On a comparative analysis of A Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood, see also Jacobs 1996; Skoggard 2010, 177-80. 7 See Nazan Aksoy’s discussion of the “confessional self,” as represented in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. Aksoy examines the confessional genre in reference to Paul de Man’s categories of the cognitive and the performative dimensions of autobiography in de Man’s reading of Rousseau (2009, 17-20).

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pronoun “I” except in letters, Richter concludes that such displacement calls into question “the grammatical subject as the sovereign ruler of discourse” (34).8 Even though Karasu does employ the first-person singular pronoun, his remembered child lacks any specific identity traits. As in Benjamin’s work, narration in Black Waters occurs from the point of view of a first-person narrator, a voice that enacts the memories and moves between the past and the present. Karasu’s narrator shares several identifying indications with the author but remains nameless. The discontinuous memory fragments in Black Waters and the incompleteness of the project as a whole invite the reader to examine the workings of memory instead of finding a coherent life story. The remembered childhood surfaces episodically and as embedded in the past topography of an Istanbul neighborhood. A brief look at the genesis of Black Waters may reveal further layers of Karasu’s involvement in this project, never to be finished.

Karasu’s Beyo˘g lu: An Avant-garde of Distortion Karasu’s work in progress on Beyoğlu goes back to the 1960s, long before the start of the Beyoğlu revival. This trend of the late 1980s and 1990s attempted to restore the neighborhood’s bygone cosmopolitan flair through urban gentrification. Accompanying the renewal movement, a boom of “Beyoğlu literature,” triggered by nostalgia for the old Pera, emerged on the literary scene. Seen in this context, Karasu’s early engagement with Beyoğlu renders him an unrecognized pioneer of this diverse body of literature. In “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the second story in Black Waters, Karasu’s narrator leads back the genesis of his Beyoğlu narrative to the late 1950s, stating that “[i]n fact, I have been carrying for many years this narrative on Beyoğlu I was planning to write somewhere in my mind, in my heart.”9 The narrator further informs the reader that he revised these pieces in 1968, only to push them aside again.

8 Benjamin uses the “I” in A Berlin Chronicle, which suggests a greater proximity to the autobiographical genre, even if the narrative in A Berlin Chronicle is fragmented. He also employs the “I” as subject in Berlin Childhood. However, it remains here more distant to the author. 9 “Gerçekte, Beyoğlu üzerine yazmağı tasarladığım bu metni yıllar yılıdır kafamın, gönlümün bir yerlerinde taşıyorum” (Karasu 1999b, 45).

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The composition history of Black Waters reveals several parallels between this chronological account and Karasu’s own ongoing work in progress on Beyoğlu. The retrospective passage above indicates that the district had been for a long, yet unspecified, time a topos of utmost importance for the narrator, evident in his carrying of the unwritten text in his mind, in his heart. Karasu’s narrator neither gives away the reasons of this persistent attachment nor his incapability to complete the early drafts. Reading this enigmatic confession in light of the dual framework of our inquiry, exploring both the formal construction of remembrance and uncovering a repressed psycho-social background evocative of Pera’s minorities, will open up the above utterance. From a theoretical vantage point, connected to both Benjamin and the psychoanalytic concept of memory, the narrator’s incapability to bring his work in progress to a closure suggests the impossibility of representing remembrance in a coherent, linear narrative. As in Benjamin’s autobiographies, through such devices as discontinuity, nonlinear arrangement of the segments, and the lack of a coherent life story, Karasu’s narratives turn self-reflexively on the question of representation itself. Thus, they disappoint any reader who seeks to find a lucid account of childhood in the Beyoğlu texts, for, as we know, Benjamin places a high distinction between “autobiography” and “reminiscences.” As we have realized through Benjamin’s words, “reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography” (1996a, 612). The encoded references in Black Waters to the rites and languages of the lost multiethnic community of Beyoğlu merely imply the bygone socio-cultural texture. Moreover, these allusions appear displaced and distorted, rather than expressly relating to the lives of non-Muslim minorities. Freud’s description of distortion in Moses and Monotheism illuminates well Karasu’s textual practice in his Beyoğlu narratives: In its implications the distortion of a text is not unlike a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces. We might well lend the word ‘Entstellung [distortion]’ the double meaning to which it has a claim but of which to-day it makes no use. It should mean not only ‘to change the appearance of something’ but also ‘to put something in another place, to displace’. Accordingly, in many instances of textual distortion, we may nevertheless count upon finding what has been suppressed and disavowed hidden away somewhere else, though changed

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and torn from its context. Only it will not always be easy to recognize it. (Freud 1994, 23:43)10

In Karasu’s mnemonic topography a similar distortion is at work. While Beyoğlu’s differential identity as a minority space remains, in Freud’s formulation, as the suppressed and disavowed material, the traces offered by the text enable their recognition through the process of critical reading. Clearly, Karasu’s pioneering stance within Beyoğlu literature pertains not only to his early focus on this urban enclave, where he was born and grew up, but also to his unique strategies for capturing its otherness in figurative language. The child figure in Black Waters is conveyed through double alterity: it is placed in the narrated space of Beyoğlu as a native and yet also displaced from its ethno-cultural identity by a constant deferral of enunciation, reminiscent of the otter figure in Benjamin’s vignette that is marked through absence. Thus, along with the formal assumption of incompleteness, the unnamed otherness of Beyoğlu constitutes the foundation of Karasu’s discourse on memory. Considered together, these ideas explain both the narrator’s—and by inference, the author’s—preoccupation with Beyoğlu and the impossibility of completing the work in progress. In contrast to Mario Levi (1957–), for example, one of the most prolific and acclaimed representatives of Turkish minority literature from the next generation, Karasu does not explicate the minority identity of his narrator or of the remembered child. To be sure, Levi too experiments with memory, offering a subjectivist and nonlinear model with multiple intersecting temporal layers and stories. However, Levi’s protagonists, such as those in his collection of short stories Madam Floridis Dönmeyebilir (Madam Floridis May Not Return, 1991), are identified as members of the Christian and Jewish minority communities of Beyoğlu. His autobiographical family epic Istanbul Bir Masaldı was first published in 1999 and came out in English translation, as mentioned in the introduction, with the title Istanbul was a Fairy Tale in 2012. In this novel, Levi tells the saga of a Jewish family 10 The original passage is as follows: “Es ist bei der Entstellung eines Textes ähnlich wie bei einem Mord. Die Schwierigkeit liegt nicht in der Ausführung der Tat, sondern in der Beseitigung ihrer Spuren. Man möchte dem Worte ‘Entstellung’ den Doppelsinn verleihen, auf den es Anspruch hat, obwohl es heute keinen Gebrauch davon macht. Es sollte nicht nur bedeuten: in seiner Erscheinung verändern, sondern auch: an eine andere Stelle bringen, anderswohin verschieben. Somit dürfen wir in vielen Fällen von Textentstellung darauf rechnen, das Unterdrückte und Verleugnete doch irgendwo versteckt zu finden, wenn auch abgeändert und aus dem Zusammenhang gerissen. Es wird nur nicht immer leicht sein, es zu erkennen” (Freud 1986, 16:144).

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in the environs of Beyoğlu. The intertwined fates of his characters span the entire history of the twentieth century. By way of depicting how these Jewish inhabitants of Beyoğlu became dispersed in global constellations, Levi explores themes of communal bonding as well as isolation, displacement, and exile. Born in 1957, Levi wrote in a time of greater freedom of minority representation. In his persuasive reading of the history of narrative representations of Beyoğlu, Eldem attributes the proliferating literature on the neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s to political and socio-economic factors: There is little doubt that the process of liberalization—particularly economic—initiated in the 1980s in the wake of the 1980 military coup was one major driving force, especially when coupled, from the 1990s on, with the concretization of the first steps of the dream of accession to the European Union. (2006b, 22-3)

Eldem sees in the nostalgic revival of the old cosmopolitan Pera also a liberal reaction to the nationalism of the Kemalist doctrine and an attempt to reread the past from a new angle. Seen in this context, Levi’s critical reflection on and self-identification with the lives of Istanbul’s ethnic minorities defines his literary authorship. Karasu’s work, on the other hand, does not display any “coming out.” Nevertheless, by dispersing ethno-cultural identity markers throughout his Beyoğlu narratives, Karasu initiates a discourse that has difference and marginality as its subject at a much earlier date than the advent of Turkish minority literature in the 1980s. He thus delivers a groundbreaking work on Beyoğlu. Yet, how does Karasu convey his Beyoğlu as a place of alterity without employing a narrative about the socio-historical context? We will explore this question through Gerhard Richter’s analysis of historicity in Benjamin’s memory texts.

“Reading Historically” The Benjaminian concept “now-time” is to be differentiated from the “present,” which is nothing but a transitory phase. “Now-time,” on the other hand, emerges as a “standstill” and reveals, through a sudden, lightning-like illumination, a “dialectical image” (Weigel 1997, 75-9).11 In contrast to the 11 Weigel underscores the interconnectedness of Benjamin’s “now-time” (Jetztzeit), his messianic view of history in “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“On the Concept of History”), and his use of distortion. In this context she views distortion as “Benjamin’s

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concept of the “archaic image” (archaisches Bild), Weigel understands the “dialectical image” as an image that has been read (ein gelesenes Bild)—in other words, an image constructed in language. In Weigel’s reading, the “dialectical image” is closely connected to Benjamin’s theory of language, his theses on history, and to psychoanalysis. Weigel points out that the years 1932-38, when Benjamin was working on A Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood, also mark his production of “On the Concept of History” (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte”). In a similar vein, Richter compares “now-time” to a photographic image that implies multiple historical trajectories. He writes: Now-time, by contrast [to the “present”] takes the form of a historiographic snapshot, a frozen quasi-photographic image that depicts the unique historical conditions of a particular moment in time in its relation to the past. How one thinks about the present moment, then, has important consequences for the ways in which the subject makes sense of its own history.  .  .  . Now-time, embedded in the larger present, contains those elements of the present that refer to historical events and that allegorize history by giving rise to dialectical images. (2000, 39-40)

In this framework the subject constitutes an unstable identity, instead becoming itself a “dialectical image.” Richter sees here “[a] fleeting image. . . brought to a momentary standstill” (40). It is through this image that traces of history resurface in the “now-time.” In Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives, the recurrent motif of mother and child strolling through the streets and passages of the neighborhood, the primordial house at Sakızağacı, glimpses into religious rituals, foreign words and places, and, last but not least, the figure of Crazy Meryem (“Deli Meryem”), a staple of the bygone Pera-Beyoğlu, constitute such “dialectical images.” Hence, to read historically does not mean to search for mimetic representation in the texts or, in Richter’s words, “the material content necessary for the confirmation of what we already believed to be true of their historical moment” (26). Instead of such a historicist-positivist historiography, Benjamin proposes a materialist psychoanalytic reformulation of the messianic” (“Benjamins psychoanalytische Reformulierung des Messianischen”) (Weigel 1997, 75). As I will discuss in the following, Benjamin’s concept of “now-time” is intrinsically linked to Freud’s theory of memory. Benjamin’s “now-time” and the “dialectical images” that flash up in such a moment sum up to what Benjamin has called “Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit” (the now-time of recognition) that enables the legibility of “dialectical images” as cryptic traces of the past (see Weigel 1997, 40-41).

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historiography that captures the traces of the past through the images of a “standstill,” in which the traces of history are embedded. “[T]o read historically in this way means to read in and through the historicity of a text the obscure constellations that traverse our own time” (26); here, Richter posits a model that reveals historicity in Benjamin’s writings through a dialectical interplay of distancing and approximation. In the act of reading that resists “mimetic temptation,” past and present initially appear to be disconnected from their context (26). By moving through these disjunctions, the act of reading encounters the cultural and historical context as “obscure constellations” that have entered the temporality of meaning. When we apply the paradigm of “reading historically” to Karasu’s Black Waters, we discern the following temporal layers: 1. The point in time, from which the narrator looks back to Beyoğlu’s past and recounts his many visits to the neighborhood as an adult. In Benjamin’s categories, this narrative strand corresponds to the “present.” 2. Childhood memories. Due to their recurrent, nonchronological presentation, they resemble stills or snapshots. Frequently, their resurgence is formally signaled by indentation. These tableaux evince a temporality akin to Benjamin’s “now-time”: the narrator who inscribes remembrance no longer stands in the “present,” but partakes in “now-time.” 3. The moment in which the reader of Black Waters resides. In the process of actualization, the temporal layers of the frame narrative as well as the “now-time” of childhood are incorporated into the reader’s time. In Karasu’s stories the past crystallizes foremost in architectural sites that function as the embodiment of history. The Crimean War, for example, is mentioned in relation with the construction date of the house at Sakızağacı. Material landmarks of Beyoğlu serve here as carriers of the historical. Thus, the act of reading appropriates the text’s historicity that contains Beyoğlu’s past, spanning from the late Ottoman Era to the beginnings of the Turkish Republican history and the later decades of the twentieth century. From today’s perspective, we conclude that, even though Black Waters does not explicitly refer to Beyoğlu’s erstwhile minorities, it presents them to us through mnemonic tableaux. These snapshots contain “dialectical images,” and their legibility establishes a trajectory for historical interpretation.12 12 See also Rolf Tiedemann’s explication of Benjamin’s “dialectical image” in light of the philosopher’s Exposés of 1935 and 1939. Tiedemann refers here to Adorno’s criticism of Benjamin’s idiosyncratic use of historical materialism, the redefinition of the flow of

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The Legibility of Memory Traces The model of “reading historically,” as put forth in Richter’s thesis of the figurative representation of history in Benjamin, stands in close connection to Weigel’s view of Benjamin that is informed by Freud’s memory theory. Weigel’s critical approach proves useful for further understanding of our authors’ poetics of memory. It also enables a closer look at the problematic of Black Waters, a seeming narrative impasse, simultaneously avoiding and revealing ethnic minority identities. As illustrated earlier in this chapter, Weigel takes as her point of departure Freud’s model of memory as script or text, and thus, the hypothesis that this script is legible. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung, 1900) delivers fundamental insights into his theory of memory as text, both with regard to the representability of dream experience and to the mode of its representation. Regarding the dream as an inscription of images, Weigel writes: [t]his inscription corresponds to the form of a distorted representation. This moment of distortion characterizes for Freud the structure of the unconscious and is also significant for other phenomena besides the dream, for other languages of the unconscious. This is the case for example, when Freud recognizes the hysterical or physical symptom as a memory symbol, thus as a bodily memory trace that should not be understood as engram or imprint. (1997, 35)13

In Freudian theory, symptoms are viewed as signs for a return of the repressed. As such, they are assessed as the outcome of a psychic process and understood as analogous to distortion in dreamwork (36). As Weigel explains, symptoms point toward a past experience that has left its traces in the unconscious. These traces become legible when they resurface in the form of symptoms. However, this visible representation is distorted. dialectic as a “standstill,” which, according to Benjamin, entails a utopian element (2002, 943). 13 “[d]iese Schrift [entspricht] der Form einer entstellten Darstellung. Dieses (3) Moment der Entstellung ist für die Struktur des Unbewußten bei Freud kennzeichnend und wird auch für andere Phänomene als den Traum, für andere Sprachen des Unbewußten bedeutsam. So etwa, wenn Freud das hysterische oder leibliche Symptom als Erinnerungssymbol begreift, als leibliche Gedächtnisspur also, die nicht als Engramm oder Abdruck zu verstehen ist” (Weigel 1997, 35). Translations of quotes from Entstellte Ähnlichkeit are mine.

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In Freud’s theory, the permanent traces themselves remain illegible, that is, the psychic event or stimulus cannot be reconstructed. Thus, Freud understands the symptoms of neurosis, as well as dream images, as signs of a distorted representation. The thesis that such representations are legible connects them to permanent (memory) traces in the unconscious. Legibility as such is understood as a task of interpretation, rather than the mimetic reconstruction of the originary excitation. In the context of The Interpretation of Dreams, we noted that, in Freud’s view, the latent or originary content of the dream is not directly available; instead, the manifest content of the dream appears as a kind of script that has distorted the original content which has to be explored through interpretive work. Benjamin’s deciphering of the traces of the past through material urban relics, remainders, ruins, and fragments, evinces a process akin to Freud’s reading of manifest signs in dreams or neuroses as the articulation of memory symbols. The concept of “threshold” (Schwelle), a central trope in Benjamin’s thought, also indicates Benjamin’s familiarity with the topographical construction of memory in Freud (Weigel 1997, 33). Benjamin’s appropriation of Freud’s concept of memory can be seen most notably in his Arcades Project.14 Freudian categories, such as “facilitation” (Bahnung), “the unconscious,” “repression,” “innervations” (Innervationen), and “distortion” were pivotal for Benjamin’s construction of memory. In this text Benjamin reads the past of the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie topographically as an inscription of collective memory, the residues of which he finds in architectural ruins of the past century. However, as Weigel emphasizes, Benjamin’s method here is not a deciphering of the past as it has been, but a reading of the manifestations of memory traces, which themselves are, following Freud, to be understood as distorted representations. The collective memory of the bygone bourgeoisie can only be accessed through the legibility of these traces as distortions.

14 Weigel notes that during the second, major work phase (1934-40) on The Arcades Project, Benjamin studied the psychoanalytic theory of memory systematically. However, already between the first drafts of The Arcades Project in 1927-29 and the later work on it, Benjamin was exploring Freud, even if in a less systematic fashion. Weigel argues that it is these early readings that helped shape the concept of memory in The Arcades Project. In this context Weigel points to Benjamin’s Baudelaire essay, where the philosopher reiterates the main premise of Freud’s theory of memory, namely that “consciousness occurs instead [in place] of the memory trace” (“das Bewußtsein entstehe an der Stelle der Erinnerungsspur”) (1997, 37-38).

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Freud centers memory and remembering on the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, thus grounding his theory of memory in the epistemology of the psyche. Weigel convincingly demonstrates how Benjamin transposed Freud’s theory to the realm of history (1997, 40). Here we return to the Benjaminian categories of the “now-time” and “dialectical image.” Benjamin’s reading of the past presupposes a “now-time of recognition” (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit). Like Freud, Benjamin seizes the traces of the past from his contemporaneous perspective, for the images of the past become legible only at this particular time-point (40).15 Weigel describes this process of cognition as a coinciding of what has been with the “now,” a lightning-like event that occurs in language. Cognition (Erkenntnis) here is conveyed through the “dialectical images” that flash up in such an experience. Far from being mimetic presentations of the past (Abbilder), these images are constituted in language. Although they cannot be reduced to mere tropes, “dialectical images” are images that have been read, akin to dream images in psychoanalysis that are understood as the inscription of the dream language (41). The linguistic status of “dialectical images” renders them fleeting rather than as fixed representations of the past. However, it is precisely through their transience that Benjamin seizes what has been. His historical method, then, unfolds as capturing the meaning (truth) of a bygone moment in its brief flashing up in the “now-time” of cognition— that is, the time of Benjamin’s critical perception and inscription of this moment. The model of this historical reading is inspired by Freud’s theory of memory insofar as remembering occurs within the dialectic of the systems of the conscious and the unconscious, revealing the language of the unconscious, analogous to the fugitive moment when “dialectical images” convey in their lightning-like mode the knowledge of history. Freud’s fundamental hypothesis sees an exclusionary relationship between consciousness and memory. The perceptual system of consciousness constantly receives a flow of stimuli (Reize), which are then stored as traces of experience in memory (the unconscious) in order to make space for new stimuli in consciousness. In her explication of Freud’s theory of memory, Weigel emphasizes the incompatibility between these two systems of the psyche (psychisches Apparat), perception-consciousness and the unconscious, in their way of functioning. The dialectical relationship 15 See Habermas’s explication of “now-time” as past moments when the continuum of time came to a halt; they need to be recognized as such from the vantage point of redemption (1979, 38).

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between these two systems, as exemplified in Freud’s statement that “consciousness arises instead of the memory trace” (“das Bewußtsein entstehe an der Stelle der Erinnerungsspur”) (Weigel 1997, 37; see also Freud 1994, 5:538-40), illuminates the transposition of Freud’s memory model into historicity in Benjamin: In this process, in place of assumes the meaning of instead as well as at the place, namely in such a way that consciousness flashes up and vanishes in the very moment, in which, due to a cathexis of the system W-Bw [perceptionconsciousness] that occurs discontinuously, a connection between permanent trace and perception comes about. While thus the “permanent traces [are described as] the foundation of memory,” and while their legibility [is described] as tied to certain preconditions, here Freud depicts memory traces as script—but a script that as such is never fully legible. For its legibility is structured through the dialectic of consciousness and memory traces and described in the mode of a momentary flashing up, i.e., becoming visible. (Weigel 1997, 34-5)16

Let us now turn to Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives in light of this dialectic between consciousness and memory traces, a fleeting flaming up and passing away of the latter in the perception-consciousness system. We should recall that Karasu’s narrator is engaged in a work in progress, an essayistic study on the neighborhood Beyoğlu. He plans to draft his writing from a subjective perspective, focusing first and foremost on the history of his maternal family. However, as discussed earlier, this statement is accompanied by the narrator’s enigmatic confession, giving away both his attachment to the project and his incapability to make progress. The writer’s block does not lift until the narrator returns to his childhood milieu. At this decisive turning point, upon the news of his aunt’s death, everything for the narrator suddenly falls into place. Read in the framework 16 “Dabei kommt dem an Stelle sowohl die Bedeutung von anstatt als auch von am Ort zu, in der Weise nämlich, daß das Bewußtsein aufleuchtet und vergeht in dem Moment, in dem aufgrund einer diskontinuirlich sich ereignenden Besetzung des Systems W-Bw eine Verbindung zwischen Dauerspur und Wahrnehmung entsteht. Werden dabei die ‘Dauerspuren als Grundlage des Gedächtnisses’ bezeichnet und wird deren Lesbarkeit an bestimmte Voraussetzungen gebunden, so entwirft Freud hier die Gedächtnisspuren als Schrift—als eine Schrift allerdings, die niemals als solche und niemals vollständig lesbar ist. Ihre Lesbarkeit nämlich ist durch die Dialektik von Bewußtsein und Erinnerungsspuren strukturiert und im Modus eines momentanen Aufleuchtens bzw. Sichtbarwerdens beschrieben” (Weigel 1997, 34-35).

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of Freud’s consciousness-trace dialectic, the site functions as a “dialectical image,” making visible and legible the momentary glow of memory traces. Memories thus released do not emerge in form of an orderly narrative, but rather as momentarily illuminated images, as in Freud’s Bilderschrift. By inscribing these images, the narrator reads them as “dialectical images,” for, as in psychoanalytic theory, these are images that are read. Weigel likens the Benjaminian “dialectical image” to a vanishing point of a crossover of image and script.17 It is important to remember that this script is legible only from the point of a “now-time.” We should also recall here Richter’s argument regarding the “obscure constellations” of a text that traverse our own time in the act of “reading historically” (2000, 26) and his definition of “now-time” as a sort of historiographic snapshot (39-40). The narrator of Black Waters recognizes “dialectical images” in a similar frozen “now-time.” It is as if Black Waters carries out two textual projects: the first one is the essayistic study of Beyoğlu’s past and present, including a family history; the second consists of the textualized memory traces. Like the Freudian flashing up and vanishing of traces in consciousness, Karasu’s memory traces explode out from their repressed state in the unconscious, formally intersecting and interrupting the flow of the first project. They constitute, as I have noted, the second temporal layer of the Beyoğlu texts, corresponding to Benjamin’s “now-time.” Often, if not always, the inscribed traces form a separate embedded narrative.18 Beyoğlu’s alterity, its identity as a locus of displacement, manifests itself in these traces. They are legible, that is, the reader of Karasu can decipher them interpretively. Because, according to the Freudian model of memory, the traces themselves are distorted inscriptions of an originary event, itself inaccessible, writing and reading alterity in Karasu does not result in mimetic reconstruction. Rather, alterity is to be discerned through the manifold intertwinements of the symbolic relations (Zeichenbeziehungen), as in Freud’s reading of the dream text. A key passage from Benjamin’s A Berlin Chronicle illustrates further the connection between Freud’s theory of memory traces that flash up and vanish in consciousness and Benjamin’s “now-time” and “dialectical image”

17 “Vielmehr muß Benjamins Begriff des dialektischen Bildes gleichsam als Fluchtpunkt einer Überkreuzung von Bild und Schrift betrachtet werden” (ibid., 41). 18 Karasu uses this technique of multiple embedded narratives in his other writings, too. See, among others, Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi (The Garden of Departed Cats).

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as historical categories. Here, Benjamin uses the metaphor of the photographic plate to examine the workings of memory: Anyone can observe that the length of time during which we are exposed to impressions has no bearing on their fate in memory. Nothing prevents our keeping rooms in which we have spent twenty-four hours more or less clearly in our memory, and forgetting others in which we passed months. It is not, therefore, due to insufficient exposure time if no image appears on the plate of remembrance. More frequent, perhaps, are the cases when the half-light of habit denies the plate the necessary light for years, until one day from an alien source it flashes as if from burning magnesium powder, and now a snapshot transfixes the room’s image on the plate. It is we ourselves, however, who are always standing at the center of these rare images. Nor is this very mysterious, since such moments of sudden illumination are at the same time moments when we separated from ourselves, and while our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by the shock, as is the little heap of magnesium powder by the flame of the match. It is to this immolation of our deepest self in shock that our memory owes its most indelible images. (1996a, 632-33) (Jeder kann sich Rechenschaft davon ablegen, daß die Dauer, in der wir Eindrücken ausgesetzt sind, ohne Bedeutung für deren Schicksal in der Erinnerung ist. Nichts hindert, daß wir Räume, wo wir vierundzwanzig Stunden waren, mehr oder weniger deutlich im Gedächtnis halten, und andere, wo wir Monate verbrachten, ganz vergessen. Es ist also durchaus nicht immer Schuld einer allzukurzen Belichtungsdauer, wenn auf der Platte der Erinnerung kein Bild erscheint. Häufiger sind vielleicht die Fälle, wo die Dämmerung der Gewohnheit der Platte jahrelang das nötige Licht versagt, bis dieses eines Tages aus fremden Quellen wie aus entzündetem Magnesiumpulver aufschießt und nun im Bilde einer Momentaufnahme den Raum auf die Platte bannt. Im Mittelpunkte dieser seltnen Bilder aber stehen stets wir selbst. Und das ist nicht so rätselhaft, weil solche Augenblicke plötzlicher Belichtung gleichzeitig Augenblicke des Außer-Uns-Seins sind und während unser waches, gewohntes, taggerechtes Ich sich handelnd oder leidend ins Geschehen mischt, ruht unser tieferes an anderer Stelle und wird vom Chock betroffen wie das Häufchen Magnesiumpulver von der Streichholzflamme. Dies Opfer unseres tiefsten Ichs im Chock ist es, dem unsere Erinnerung ihre unzerstörbarsten Bilder zu danken hat.) (1991b, 516)

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It is this “sudden illumination” that befalls Karasu’s narrator during his visit to his aunt’s home in Beyoğlu. The memory plate, which, in Benjamin’s words above, has been denied “the necessary light for years,” suddenly shows fixed images, resurfacing from their repressed status in the unconscious. As explained above, Karasu’s memory narratives seem to be bifurcated, in that one trajectory transmits this Bilderschrift as if authored by a “deeper self,” whereas the “waking self ” pursues an essayistic study of Beyoğlu in the present time of narration. The capturing of Beyoğlu’s pluricultural past through mnemonic images that suddenly light up at the same time shows the relevance of Benjamin’s “rescuing critique” (rettende Kritik), implied in Karasu’s seemingly apolitical account. Benjamin’s method of such a “rescuing critique” corresponds to his concept of memory and can be discerned in his representation of phenomena at the moment of their historical disappearance. In “On the Concept of History,” the product of Benjamin’s formulation of a materialist theology, Benjamin depicts this moment as follows: The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again. “The truth will not run away from us”: this statement by Gottfried Keller indicates exactly that point in historicism’s image of history where the image is pierced by historical materialism. For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image. (1996d, 390-91; see also Weigel 1997, 59) (Das wahre Bild der Vergangenheit huscht vorbei. Nur als Bild, das auf Nimmerwiedersehen im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit eben aufblitzt, ist die Vergangenheit festzuhalten. “Die Wahrheit wird uns nicht davonlaufen”—dieses Wort, das von Gottfried Keller stammt, bezeichnet im Geschichtsbild des Historismus genau die Stelle, an der es vom historischen Materialismus durchschlagen wird. Denn es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit, das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich nicht als in ihm gemeint erkannte.) (1991j, 695)

The reminiscences of a matrilineal history in Black Waters salvage from the vanished social topography of Beyoğlu the memory of its “others,” of the seamstresses and apprentice girls, whose ethno-cultural identity is left ambiguous. It is important to note that Karasu’s “others” in Black Waters are not only ethno-culturally “other,” but mostly also from the lower classes.

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A brief anticipation of the conclusion will help elucidate this context: the eccentric figure of Crazy Meryem, an outcast of the old Pera’s bourgeois class that Karasu labels as the “Spartans,” and last but not least, her army of stray cats, complete the picture of the subaltern of Turkish-nationalist ideology. Thus, Karasu’s narrative constitutes a countercurrent to the dominant nationalist trend of homogenizing ethno-cultural difference. In section VI of his “On the Concept of History,” following the above-quoted passage, Benjamin illustrates the function of remembering in historical reflection: Articulating the past historically.  .  . means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. (1996d, 391; quoted in Weigel 1997, 76) (Vergangenes historisch artikulieren.  .  . heißt, sich einer Erinnerung bemächtigen, wie sie im Augenblick einer Gefahr aufblitzt.) (1991j, 695)

Examined in view of Benjamin’s model, Karasu’s Beyoğlu stories reveal a similar moment of crisis that illuminates the past and drives the narrative forward. What is in danger of disappearing, and therefore in need of rescue, is the cultural heterogeneity that used to define the old Pera-Beyoğlu. When Karasu’s narrator returns as an adult to the neighborhood where he grew up, the diversity of Pera’s society, comprising local Greeks (Rum), Jews, Armenians, and Levantines, along with Muslim Turks, had long been suppressed by the doctrine of Turkish homogeneity. As those lives sink into oblivion, they flash up on the photographic plate of memory, triggering Karasu’s narrator to overcome his writer’s block. At this point it should be remembered that, in Benjamin’s theory, seizing a memory does not mean possessing it: Benjamin depicts the “now-time of recognizability” (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit) through metaphors of illumination, borrowed from photography. As his description of memory as “snapshot” indicates, images of the past are legible only at a certain moment, and, as Weigel has proposed, for Benjamin they are legible only as fragments of a world of dreams and wishes (Weigel 1997, 76-79). For Karasu’s narrator the site of the deceased aunt’s home in the late 1970s opens up the path to the past, but only consisting of fragments. The inscribed “dialectical images” in their “standstill” invite the reader to discern the meaning contained in the past, just as it is about to sink into forgetting. The relevance of Freud’s memory model for Benjamin scholarship is exemplified once again in Nicolas Pethes’s comprehensive study, Mnemographie: Poetiken der Erinnerung und Destruktion nach Walter

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Benjamin. Like Weigel’s focus on the legibility of memory, Pethes views the medium of literature itself as a central metaphor for memory: When Freud describes the work of the unconscious as “condensation” and “displacement” and Lacan reads them as metaphor and metonymy, then the work of remembering is always already understood as rhetorical: as the belated imaginary staging of a past in the medium of language. (1999, 68)19

For our inquiry it is interesting to note that, for Pethes, remembering always entails a referential context as well, transcending the merely rhetorical. His argument here rests on the Freudian premise that memory “is” inscription. When rendering this inscription as a literary text, remembering simultaneously writes itself. In Pethes view, the mnemonic literature refers to itself and not exclusively to a past life that it seems to recapture (68). Seen in this light, both Benjamin’s autobiographical work and Karasu’s Black Waters manifest a mode defined here as a self-reflexive process. As for the substance of what is being remembered in a literary text, the temporal difference, indicating the impossibility of a repeat or replication, has to be taken into account. Pethes sees autobiography as a genre that displays literary remembering as a process of reading, thus offering a useful paradigm to investigate the structure of a “poetics of remembering” (69). Reading Karasu’s Beyoğlu collection as an example of mnemonic literature in Pethes’ definition requires uncovering its self-referential or self-reflexive trajectories rather than seeking for an orderly representation of childhood. Self-reflexivity is closely connected with the Benjaminian category of “now-time,” the moment that opens up like lightning the path to remembering. Pethes describes this process in Benjamin’s theory as follows: Therefore this Now[-time] is the place of an “explosion” and thus emphatically not thought of in terms of a metaphysics of presence, but as self-differentiating: as the breaking of the static time of narration and opening of the horizon of remembering. The writing that remembers effects 19 All translations of the quotes from Pethes are mine. Original quotes are given in footnotes. “Wenn Freud die Arbeit des Unbewußten als ‘Verdichtung’ und ‘Verschiebung’ beschreibt und Lacan diese als Metapher und Metonymie liest, dann ist die Arbeit Erinnerung je schon rhetorisch verfaßt: als nachträgliche imaginäre Inszenierung einer Vergangenheit im Medium der Sprache” (1999, 68). However, Pethes states that not all literary texts manifest this mnemonic (mnestisch) feature. Rather, remembering is to be understood as a figure of specific texts, and the employment of rhetorical tropes of memory pertains to these specific literary examples.

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a non-coherent intertwinement of past and present that allows the breaking in of the past into the present of writing. (71)20

Pethes’ analysis of temporality and writing complements my reading in the introduction: Karasu’s signs of difference in Black Waters, which point towards the lost social topography of the Pera-Beyoğlu environs, can be discerned as such a breaking in of the past into the process of writing. Instead of naming the familial cultural background through referential representation, Karasu disperses these pointers of difference into the reminiscences. The “now-time” that erupts into the diegesis of Black Waters transmits images through which this vanished past can be salvaged in a critical act of reading. Thus, the socio-historical background Black Waters seems to avoid resurfaces through, and as, “dialectical images.” By revealing momentarily fragments of cultural heterogeneity, these images depict another past other than the one projected by homogenizing nationalism. As Richter aptly points out in the conclusion of his Benjamin book, “the decisions that the reader must make in the act of reading are to be wrested from the act of experiencing an aporetic moment of something that cannot be decided, something that can neither be given in advance nor once and for all” (2000, 232; my emphasis). Let us reiterate here our research questions: Did Karasu refrain from representing his minority background in his account of Beyoğlu, the quintessential space for Istanbul’s ethno-religious minorities, because he felt forced to repress it? In other words, do the ambiguous allusions to difference in Black Waters speak of a hesitation to “come out”? Or do they, instead, indicate the author’s treatment of memory in a manner akin to that model which complicates original and absolute meaning, as in Freud and Benjamin? The mirror at the maternal grandmother’s deathbed in Black Waters provides a conspicuous example of such an aporetic moment in the text itself. While the mirror is described as covered (according to Greek-Orthodox, and, possibly, Jewish traditions) in one passage, another section retracts this claim by stating that the mirror was not covered. Reading Karasu in light of this aporia will be our task in the following chapters. As Benjamin stated, “[f]or the true critic, the actual 20 “Deshalb ist dieses Jetzt Ort einer ‘Explosion’ und damit bei aller Emphase nicht präsenzmetaphysisch, sondern selbstdifferenzierend gedacht: als Aufbrechen der Statik der Erzählzeit und Eröffnung des Horizonts der Erinnerung. Das erinnernde Schreiben bewirkt eine nicht einheitliche Verschränkung von Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, die den Einbruch der Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart des Schreibens erlaubt” (ibid., 71).

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judgment is the ultimate step—something that comes with a struggle after everything else, never the basis of his activities” (1996g, 546).21

Hermeneutic Readings of Remembrance The question of meaning in Benjamin’s autobiographical work has also been explored convincingly through hermeneutic theory. Critics such as Peter Szondi, Bernd Witte, and Burkhardt Lindner read Berlin Childhood on the basis of what I will call a hermeneutics of temporality, situating Benjamin’s writing of remembrance expressly in historicity. My study adopts the hermeneutics of temporality as a complementary critical venture to examine Benjamin and Karasu. The methodological tensions between postmodern approaches, such as those of Weigel, Richter, and Pethes, and these more “traditional” readings prove of heuristic value for my framework. The categories that these referential readings of Benjamin’s autobiographical work employ intersect at several instances with the critical concepts used by rhetorical or figurative readings of Benjamin’s writings on memory. In his seminal essay “Hope in the Past” (“Hoffnung im Vergangenen”), Szondi argues that Benjamin’s notion of history is based on the dialectic of future and past. In Szondi’s view, Benjamin’s endeavor in Berlin Childhood was diametrically opposed to Proust’s memory work in his Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu). In contrast to Proust, whose evocation of the past actually serves to escape time altogether, Benjamin strives for historical experience and knowledge. However, in Szondi’s reading, Benjamin does not attain such knowledge through a historicist approach to the past, by seizing the past in its closed meaning, but rather by seeing it as an open-ended process that entails the future: “Benjamin’s tense is not the perfect, but the future perfect in the fullness of its paradox: being future and past at the same time” (2006, 19).22 The future that is implied in Benjamin’s recollections entails promise and catastrophe at the same time. In reference to Benjamin’s vignettes, Szondi writes:

21 “Beim wahren Kritiker ist das eigentliche Urteil ein letztes, das er sich abringt, niemals die Basis seines Unternehmens” (Benjamin 1991f, 172; Richter 2000, 232). 22 “Benjamins Zeitform ist nicht das Perfekt, sondern das Futurum der Vergangenheit in seiner ganzen Paradoxie: Zukunft und doch Vergangenheit zu sein” (Szondi 1991, 285).

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The zoo, the larder, the reading boxes: in these Benjamin detected omens and early traces of his later life. Yet his recollective glance encountered other things, too, in which it was not his own profile but rather his historical and social environment which first became recognizable. This environment in turn acted upon Benjamin himself and became an object of his conscious reflection. . . . Once again [in the vignette “Society”] metaphor is accorded a special role: the comparison brings together the present and the future, the premonition of the child and the knowledge of the grown man (2006, 16-17)23

The future that flashes up in the remembered childhood, in Benjamin’s words, “like a muff that someone has forgotten in our room” (20; cited from “News of a Death” [“Eine Todesnachricht”] in Berlin Childhood),24 carries the collective and personal destruction that National Socialism will cause, but at the same time it affirms the utopian potential of early technology that will remain unfulfilled. Szondi connects this historical vision, laid out in Berlin Childhood, with Benjamin’s philosophy of history in his “On the Concept of History.” He defines Benjamin’s approach to history in the latter as “the dialectic of future and past, of messianic expectation and remembrance” (2006, 28-29).25 In light of Benjamin’s concepts of “now-time” and “dialectical image,” Szondi’s statement suggests that discerning a “dialectical image” to gain historical insight occurs only when the flow of chronological time is brought to a standstill in the act of reading/writing the past. This takes us back to Pethes’s definition of “now-time” as an “explosion” that erupts into 23 “Tiergarten, Speisekammer, Lesekasten—an ihnen erkennt Benjamin Vorzeichen und erste Spuren seines späteren Lebens. Doch sein erinnernder Blick trifft auch solches, in dem nicht die eigene Gestalt, sondern die historisch-soziale Umwelt zum erstenmal erkennbar wurde, eine Umwelt freilich, die dann auf Benjamin selbst einwirken und zum Gegenstand seines Denkens werden sollte.  .  .  . Wiederum [in der Vignette “Gesellschaft”] fällt der Metaphorik eine besondere Rolle zu: der Vergleich bringt Gegenwart und Zukunft, die Ahnung des Kindes und die Erkenntnis des Erwachsenen zusammen” (Szondi 1991, 284-85). 24 Szondi refers here to the 1934 version of Berlin Childhood around 1900. The editors of the Selected Writings state that Benjamin cut the beginning section, including the above quote, from his Final Version (see Benjamin 1996f, 3:389-90). The phrase in the original from the 1934 version reads: “wie ein vergessener Muff in unserm Zimmer” (1991h, 4.1:252). 25 Szondi’s full sentence reads as follows in the original: “Benjamins neuer Geschichtsbegriff gründet in der Dialektik von Zukunft und Vergangenheit, von Messianismus und Eingedenken” (1991, 291).

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the static time of narration. With remembering, brought about by “nowtime,” the past breaks into the present. Furthermore, from the perspective of “now-time” traces of the future, buried as promise and omen in childhood, become legible. In this context, Szondi refers to the bleak interpretation of the mnemonic spaces conjured up in Berlin Childhood in Adorno’s 1950 “Afterword” to the volume: “A deathly air permeates the scenes poised to awaken in Benjamin’s depiction. Upon them falls the gaze of the condemned man” (cited in Szondi 2006, 22-23).26 Szondi’s socio-historical reading thus contextualizes the childhood memories, both with respect to the turn-of-the-century bourgeois culture and the foreboding destructions brought about in the twentieth century by wars and fascism. Benjamin lucidly illustrates the dialectical entanglement of memory with prophesy in a statement in Einbahnstrasse (One-Way Street): Like ultraviolet rays, memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text. (Benjamin 1996e, 483; Szondi 2006, 21) (Wie ultraviolette Strahlen zeigt Erinnerung im Buch des Lebens jedem eine Schrift, die unsichtbar, als Prophetie, den Text glossierte.) (1991g, 142; quoted in Szondi 1991, 287)

Benjamin’s statement shows, at the same time, how remembering is conveyed through the metaphor of writing. This leads us back to the theme of redemption that I addressed in the introduction. In Szondi’s argument the meaning of Benjamin’s search for the lost time can be uncovered as a search for the lost future. Remembering carries a token of the future that is both a future with its unrealized promise and the premonition of destruction. Can we read the function of memory in Karasu’s Black Waters in similar terms? In the 1930s, Benjamin composed his memories in Berlin Childhood accompanied by the consciousness of the demise of his age. Does the recollection of a childhood in Karasu’s Beyoğlu of the 1930s and 1940s carry a similar dual symbolism concerning what is to come? Indeed, it might be argued that a comparable dual perspective is at work here: the examination of the figure of the arcade in chapter 2 suggests such 26 “Die Luft um die Schauplätze, welche in Benjamins Darstellung zu erwachen sich anschicken, ist tödlich. Auf sie fällt der Blick des Verurteilten” (Adorno 2006, 288).

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ambiguity, exemplified in Karasu’s narratives through the eeriness of the decaying Pera arcades. Moreover, the unredeemed promise found in the past relates to the lives of Beyoğlu’s modest working households, like the aunt’s tailoring atelier. Their redemption would have entailed the fulfillment of their dreams for a better life. Because these households intimate the bygone cultural diversity of Beyoğlu with its Christian and Jewish minorities, then still existing, the redemptive aspect also implies the vision of a pluricultural society for the future. However, a tune (or Vorklang) as the harbinger of destruction resonates in this imagined past, enunciating the final perishing of the heterogeneous Pera-Beyoğlu after the September 1955 pogroms and the influx of Turkish labor migration from Anatolia. Excavating Memory brings to light this redemptive dimension (albeit understood as secular), implied in Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives, by way of examining the themes and techniques through which the bygone Pera-Beyoğlu emerges. This trajectory of reading, then, looks for a subtext of political critique where there seems to be silence, for the salvaging of a place in the narrativization of its ancient stories. My objective is to recapture the representation of diversity in Black Waters, hinted at by multifaceted markers, including linguistic, religious, and other culturally defined evocations, as they become legible in distorted mnemonic traces. The past that Karasu’s narrator evokes is not so distant. Burkhardt Lindner aptly examines Berlin Childhood and The Arcades Project in light of Benjamin’s category of the “most recent past” (das Jüngstvergangene) (Lindner 1984). As Szondi and others have emphasized, these two works, along with “On the Concept of History,” comprise Benjamin’s historico-philosophical thought. The childhood book as well as the Paris book thus belong into the context of the “primal history of the nineteenth century” or, in Adorno’s words, to the “the primal history of modernity” (“Urgeschichte der Moderne”) (quoted in Szondi 2006, 111). Lindner sees in Benjamin’s account of the dying out of the nineteenth century the historical precondition of a process, in which the residues of the past century are released as elements of a children’s- and dream-world (1984, 27). Underpinning the unconventional mode of Berlin Childhood as autobiography, Lindner notes that instead of stages of a life, Benjamin’s memories present a ruined world of objects and images. They refer to places, objects, and recurring situations instead of establishing personal closeness. Benjamin’s anamnesis pertains to a world that Lindner describes as

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“the disposal site of the unconscious and the forgotten” (“die Deponie des Unbewußten und Vergessenen,” 29).27 In a vein similar to Benjamin’s remembered world of objects and places, marked by impending decay, the topography of childhood in Karasu presents recurrent images of streets and arcades and depictions of the dark interiors of old Pera-Beyoğlu. As in Benjamin’s upper-bourgeois interiors, the Beyoğlu dwellings are stuffed with heavy furniture and drapery from an earlier era, giving them a sinister atmosphere. Lindner sees in Berlin Childhood the historical end of the upper-bourgeois life of the big city.28 In this context, Brian Elliott points to Benjamin’s critical interest in processes of decay and its connection in Benjamin’s thought to the Marxian concept of commodity fetishism.29 To be sure, the historical caesura signaling the end of old Beyoğlu in the mid-twentieth century is not equivalent to the catastrophic vanishing of Benjamin’s German Jewish Berlin. Nevertheless, the images conjured up by Karasu’s narrator belatedly bring to surface a sense of decline. The loss intimated here begs even more pressingly for interpretation than Benjamin’s Berlin because the causes are not spelled out in Black Waters. Karasu presents memory images that carry the signs of decomposition and seem to reemerge from their repressed state. Both authors perform an act of reading by way of working with the mnemonic content as text. It is precisely in these performances that biographic residues surface (Lindner 1984, 32). The “most recent past” (das Jüngstvergangene) that Benjamin calls up includes the world of the parents; the not-so-distant past evoked in Berlin Childhood is thus the world of parents at the fin de siècle. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin extends his inquiry to the entire nineteenth-century bourgeois collective. Benjamin puts his paradigm of dream and awakening 27 Translations of quotes from Lindner’s “Archäologie des ‘Jüngsvergangenen’” are mine. 28 Lindner states: “The fragments construct a big-city-topography that is marked by decay. Even before it disintegrates in reality in fascism, their foundations already show tears and traces of decomposition.” (“Die Fragmente konstruieren eine Großstadt-Topographie, die vom Verfall gezeichnet ist: Noch bevor sie im Faschismus tatsächlich verfallen ist, zeigen ihre Fundamente bereits Risse und Verwitterungsspuren” [1984, 31]). 29 Elliott highlights here the connection between memory and material environment in Benjamin’s writing, and through this connection, the social and historical dimensions of recollection. He writes: “Benjamin was particularly sensitive to processes of decay and obsolescence within the physical environment. In his mature work in the 1930s he came to analyze the process in terms of the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism” (2011, 12-13).

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to work. Understanding the not-so-distant past would lead to awakening from the parents’ dream state: We have to wake up from the existence of our parents. . . . How we free ourselves from the world of our parents through cunning. . . . Only with cunning, not without it, can we work free of the realm of dream. (2002, 908, 907) (Wir haben aus dem Dasein unserer Eltern zu erwachen. . . . Wie wir uns durch List von der List unserer Eltern loslösen. . . . Mit List, nicht ohne sie, lösen wir uns vom Traumbereich los.) (Cited in Lindner 1984, 43; Benjamin 1991d, 1214, 1213).

The dream-state arises from commodity fetishism, as a result of which whole social strata remain arrested by phantasmagoria, instead of seeing the reality of market capitalism.30 Benjamin’s “most-recent past” provides a compelling model for reading Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts. The past recalled relates precisely to the world of the parents and grandparents, as Karasu’s narrator articulates in a key statement: “What I wanted to do is offer a subjective, personal ‘history’ of my matrilineal family” (1999b, 79). Consequently, the return to the “most-recent past” constitutes the basis of Karasu’s construction of Beyoğlu’s history. The temporal framework, encompassing a past that just withered away and was retained in familial memory, offers a micro-historical account instead of a grand narration of the neighborhood’s collective history over large time spans. Lindner explains the connection between the not-so-distant past and historical reflection as follows: Each person should be able to notice with her/himself that the time frame of the past, experienced through family stories, namely the world of parentsgrandparents, is qualitatively different from times that preceded it. Here, the faculty of historical imagination is intertwined with one’s own social origin in a completely different way than is the case with the imagination of epochs that lie further in the past and their struggles. And here, I am referred in a very different fashion, that is, through childhood, to the deceptive idea of the past as the “good old days.” Childhood is the seismograph for the most-

30 See, among the rich array of critical essays, Buck-Morss’ (1983; 1995) and Cohen’s (1989) readings of Benjamin’s notion of commodity fetishism.

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recent-past: Not in itself, but through its actualization in autobiography and historical writing. (Lindner 1984, 45)31

Seen in this light, the child in Berlin Childhood functions as a threshold figure around 1900, a figure between childhood and manhood, upper bourgeoisie and proletariat, the archaic and the reality principle (41). Benjamin’s “primal history of the nineteenth century,” which defines the concept of his Arcades Project, illustrates the status of this century as a “privileged object of knowledge” (45) with regard to the insights it provides for understanding our own times. Childhood, configured as a threshold experience, shares this privileged status. Thus, as illustrated above through Lindner’s argument, writing childhood and writing history are interconnected practices. In Freud’s theory, too, childhood has a privileged epistemological status, for it makes it possible to understand the formation of the psyche and the workings of memory. In his essay “Das Interesse an der Kindheit” (“The Interest in Childhood”), Lindner refers along these lines to the poetic tradition that incorporates childhood as a metaphor and as a site of poetry.32 This hypothesis about childhood will guide our reading of Karasu’s return to the “most-recent past” (das Jüngsvergangene) of Pera-Beyoğlu. The world of parents and grandparents in Karasu’s Beyoğlu is depicted in a twofold way. On the one hand, it is the bourgeoisie of the past that Karasu codifies as the “Spartans.”33 Like their namesake in antiquity, the Spartans in Black Waters represent rigid order. As in Benjamin’s statement about dreaming and awakening, the Spartans’ world is an oppressive one, a dream-state from which we have to wake up. Seen in light of a father/ 31 “Jeder wird an sich bemerken können, daß der durch Familienerzählungen erfahrene Zeitraum des Vergangenen, also die Eltern-/Großelternwelt, von davor liegenden Zeiten sich qualitativ unterscheidet. Hier ist das geschichtliche Vorstellungsvermögen ganz anders mit der eigenen sozialen Herkunft verwickelt als bei der Vorstellung zurückliegender Epochen und ihrer Kämpfe. Und hier bin ich ganz anders, nämlich durch die Kindheit, an die trügerische Vorstellung des Vergangenen als ‘guter alter Zeit’ verwiesen. Kindheit ist der Seismograph für das Jüngstvergangene: Nicht an sich selbst, sondern darin, daß sie durch Autobiographik oder durch Geschichtsschreibung aktualisiert wird” (Lindner 1984, 45). 32 Lindner gives here several examples of the notion of childhood in poetic imagination, such as projections of a natural state, as in Greek childhood, the Romantic discourse on primal history, and the surrealist recapturing of the marvelous (Lindner 1981, 123). 33 Here, I use the term “bourgeoisie” as a vague allusion, characterizing the lifestyle of Beyoğlu’s well-to-do inhabitants, perhaps including Levantine merchants, and businessmen and bankers from the upper strata of local minorities. A Turkish bourgeois class in the strict sense did not emerge until after the mid-twentieth century.

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mother dichotomy, the Spartans stand for the world of the father. This leads to the second trajectory of the not-so-distant past, the calling up of the world of the maternal world. The anamnesis of the maternal world functions as an escape from the Spartan/paternal realm and even as a resistance to it. Karasu’s matrilineal women reveal a universe of work, situated in the tailoring atelier of the aunt. On the subject of Berlin Childhood, Bernd Witte convincingly speaks of the “humanization of labor under the mark of the mother’s world” (“Vermenschlichung der Arbeit im Zeichen der Mutterwelt”) (1984, 586). Witte’s characterization shows that the auspices of the matrilineal household stand distant from the Spartan-patriarchal world, functioning instead as a bridge to the underprivileged. The realm of the upper-bourgeois maternal family in Benjamin’s memoirs gives “work” richer associations than the modest sewing atelier of Black Waters. However, the remembered child’s solidarity with servant figures is common to both. Witte refers to the stately figure of the old servant in Berlin Childhood, who welcomes the child in the hallway of Aunt Lehmann’s home, as an archaic, maternal figure whose blessing is more authentic than that promised by the allegorical fresco of work at the front façade of the villa.34 A parallel figure to the old servant, though probably much younger, is the character Adile in Black Waters, who welcomes Karasu’s remembered child at the hallway of the dark house in Sakızağacı and helps him up the steep stairway. Benjamin’s representation of the upper-bourgeois world of Berlin includes abundant references to the underprivileged in bourgeois society. Witte highlights how Benjamin implicitly undermines the social significations that have been transmitted through the classical tradition of German letters and have been held as immutable and sacrosanct. Through such undermining, [t]he child always sides with the underdog and the defeated, and by doing this, defies the canonized notions of value. In the text “A Christmas Angel” the Christmas tree becomes an intimate object for the child, who stands in empathetic understanding with the poor inhabitants of the court, only when 34 Witte refers to the vignette “At the Corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner,” an episode depicting the remembered child’s visits to his aunt’s ostentatious apartment. Here, the metaphor of work is not only conveyed through the old servant woman Stütze, but also through a miniature working mine with its miners, stonecutters, and mine inspectors. The maternal servant figure can be read as a member of this constellation of workers (see 1984, 585-86.)

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Beginnings: Representing Memory    CHAPTER 1

it lies in the courtyard, unadorned and having shed its needles, whereas it was alienated to the child in its “glory.” And the Christ Child, whose return is praised in a Christmas carol, hides for the child the coming of the angel, who could change the course of history. Thus, under the anarchical gaze of the child, that which is socially sanctioned appears as negative, and the despised and forgotten as the carrier of hope. (1984, 580)35

In Karasu, the maternal world of labor leads to the world of Beyoğlu’s underprivileged lower strata, symbolically recalled through the topography of the poor areas, marked by their stench, on the slopes of the Beyoğlu hill. The ultimate pariah figure, Crazy Meryem represents the impoverished residue of Pera-Beyoğlu’s former social milieu. Do the marginalized stand as carriers of hope in Karasu? As other, they perhaps suggest hope in their defiance of the Spartan world and of power structures in general, including the new nationalist public sphere. As my close reading of Black Waters will demonstrate, the mother’s world contains the central ciphers of cultural difference, and being such a core, it functions as the carrier of an unredeemed hope. However, in Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives, any idea of redemption, personal or collective, remains unpronounced and uncertain. Concerning the question of hope, a similar ambiguity permeates Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood. Witte explains this ambiguity with the messianic element in Benjamin’s philosophy of history. He argues that the order of the vignettes, proceeding from security and comfort toward destruction, reveals a context of meaning: For Benjamin’s messianism, the despised and the low turn into their opposites and become the carriers of hope. We have to read the “texts of destruction,” that characterize the end of Berliner Kindheit precisely in this sense. The manifold aspects of destruction hold for the author a pledge

35 “daß das Kind sich allemal auf die Seite der Unterlegenen und Besiegten schlägt und damit den kanonisierten Wertvorstellungen zuwiderhandelt. In dem Text ‘Weihnachtsengel’ kommt der Weihnachtsbaum dem Kind, das im Einverständnis mit den armen Hofbewohnern steht, erst nahe, als er ohne Schmuck und entnadelt im Hof liegt, während er in seiner ‘Glorie’ dem Kind entfremdet war. Und das Christkind, dessen Wiederkehr ein Weihnachstlied besingt, verdeckt ihm das Kommen des Engels, der die Geschichte verändern könnte. So erweist sich unter dem anarchischen Blick des Kindes das geselleschaftlich Sanktionierte als negativ, und das Verachtete und Vergessene als Träger der Hoffnung” (ibid., 580). Translations of quotes from Witte are mine.

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for the possibility of that paradise, the appearance of which had had to be recognized in the earliest childhood. (1984, 582)36

The dialectical tension between destruction and hope, doom and redemption, remains without reconciliation in Benjamin. As Witte notes, the author is doubly present in the memory images, in the beginnings of his life and in the “now-time” of the writing person, which he experiences as “endtime” (577). As Szondi notes, Benjamin’s later historical experience finds its expression in affirmative as well as in negative images of childhood. For the reader of Benjamin and Karasu, the task at hand is to work through the contradictions toward the insights these authors offer on their respective times and selves.

36 “Für Benjamins Messianismus schlägt das Verachtete und Niedrige in sein Gegenteil um und wird zum Träger der Hoffnung. In diesem Sinne wird man auch die ‘Vernichtungstexte’ lesen müssen, die den Schluß der Berliner Kindheit bestimmen. Die vielfältigen Aspekte der Destruktion gelten dem Schreibenden als Unterpfand der Möglichkeit jenes Paradieses, dessen Vorschein in der frühesten Kindheit auszumachen gewesen war” (ibid., 582).

Chapter 2

From Berlin’s Old West to Istanbul’s Beyoğlu: Narratives of Memory, Narratives of Lost Topographies

Irretrievable Pasts In his 1938 “Foreword” to the Final Version of Berlin Childhood, Benjamin puts his childhood memoir in historical context when he connects the genesis of the book with his bleak emotional state in 1932. He writes that during his stay abroad it became increasingly clear that he would have to say farewell forever to his native city Berlin. Benjamin defines his return to childhood reminiscences as a cure, a vaccination of sorts against homesickness in exile, maintaining that it is the images of childhood that trigger nostalgia most intensely. Benjamin’s self-reflexive statement, pointing to the chasm between a past disrupted traumatically and the exile’s present, betrays the motive of his enterprise. Furthermore, it illustrates the intrinsic link between Berlin Childhood’s poetic form, untypical of conventional autobiography, and the particular historical moment: My assumption was that the feeling of longing would no more gain mastery over my spirit than a vaccine does over a healthy body. I sought to limit its effect through insight into the irretrievability—not the contingent biographical but the necessary social irretrievability—of the past. (1996b, 344)

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(Das Gefühl der Sehnsucht durfte dabei über den Geist ebensowenig Herr werden wie der Impfstoff über einen gesunden Körper. Ich suchte es durch die Einsicht, nicht in die zufällige biographische sondern in die notwendige gesellschaftliche Unwiederbringlichkeit des Vergangenen in Schranken zu halten.) (1991c, 385)

Consequently, more than depicting a personal biography or in Benjamin’s words, mapping out “the physiognomies” of family and friends, the Berlin recollections are concerned with exploring the trope of the collectively lost past by way of a spatio-temporal trajectory (1996b, 344). Benjamin contrasts his method of conjuring up the past through images to the “continuity of experience” that defines conventional autobiographies. For Benjamin the former implies a certain “depth of experience,” which continuity, established by the autobiographical genre, lacks. Moreover, Benjamin understands the intertwining of remembering and place to be expressly related to the experience of the big city. In order to illustrate Benjamin’s specific employment of the “social irretrievability” of the past, we will return briefly to Szondi’s “Hope in the Past.” As we should recall, Szondi argues that the meaning of Benjamin’s quest for the lost past is a quest for the lost future. The paradox contained in Szondi’s title—“Hope in the Past”—borrowed from a phrase of Benjamin himself, deserves renewed scrutiny. In what sense can the invocation of the past offer redemption when the future implied in the past already points toward destruction? Benjamin’s representation of technology in his Berlin Childhood, as well as in his two “Exposés”—“Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935 and 1939)—which were contemporaneous with the memoirs, provides the answer. Through his reading of the vignette “Imperial Panorama” in the Berlin memoir in tandem with the “Exposés,” Szondi illustrates that technology for Benjamin once implied a utopian possibility that was never concretized (2006, 23). Thus, only by returning to the past can we discover this potential. The remembered child’s fascination with an early form of cinematic technology, the moving images at the panoramas, becomes representative of an entire collective’s hope for the future. Even if a technology has failed to fulfill its promise, the hope itself still exists buried in the past. In his own dialectical reading of the meaning of the past in Benjamin, then, Szondi calls this “a past. . . which is open, not completed, and which promises the future” (19).

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From Berlin’s Old West to Istanbul’s Beyoğlu    CHAPTER 2

Benjamin’s notion of technology, as he experienced it in his childhood around the turn of the century, brings us back to the big city as the arena (Schauplatz) of memory. Constructing the past through fundamentally urban imagery connects memory expressly with spatiality. The function of an urban site in inscribing remembrance at the same time elucidates Benjamin’s emphasis on the social irretrievability of the past. The author writes that he sought to capture the past in “images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated in a child of the middle class” (1996b, 344). He thus articulates the representative function of his child figure as belonging to the city and a particular social stratum—the middle classes before the world wars. As Benjamin states, compared with the established conventions of autobiographies narrating a childhood in the countryside, there was no generic literary form yet to convey this urban childhood experience: But, then, the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience. I hope they will at least suggest how thoroughly the person spoken of here would later dispense with the security allotted to his childhood. (344) (Dagegen sind die Bilder meiner Großstadtkindheit vielleicht befähigt, in ihrem Innern spätere geschichtliche Erfahrung zu präformieren. In diesen wenigstens, hoffe ich, ist es wohl zu merken, wie sehr der, von dem hier die Rede ist, später der Geborgenheit entriet, die seiner Kindheit beschieden gewesen war.) (1991c, 385)

In light of the catastrophic events brought about by the world wars, that eventually led to Benjamin’s exile and his untimely death, the images of a metropolitan childhood “preform” later historical experience in that they point to the rift between the protected world of this childhood and its destruction by historical forces. In this sense, Benjamin’s Berlin memoirs evolve around the topos of loss. As the counterpart of Benjamin’s remembered child, situated in the milieu of the big city, Karasu’s evocation of a childhood in Beyoğlu is inseparable from urban imagery. The cosmopolitan, secular, and liberal lifestyle of old Pera-Beyoğlu goes well with the image of the European city. Thus, the theme of loss, conveyed through reflection on the social irretrievability of a past, constitutes a major affinity between Benjamin’s and Karasu’s memory narratives. In Benjamin’s Berlin and Karasu’s Beyoğlu, remembering

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is intertwined literally and metaphorically with topographic exploration, through which the vanished past resurfaces in the form of memory images. Benjamin’s vignettes in Berlin Childhood elucidate his notion of “a past become space” through titles designating sites such as “Loggias,” “Tiergarten,” “Blumeshof 12,” and “Markthalle.” Karasu’s narrator repeatedly evokes the gloomy interiors of Beyoğlu’s old apartment houses, the district’s narrow side streets, and, in a manner similar to Benjamin’s arcades, the passages that the remembered child walks along with his mother. Most of Benjamin’s scenes concern his early childhood and prepubescent boyhood, and are interrupted by the narrator’s commentary on what was to come. By way of these reflections the reader of Berlin Childhood may see a developmental pattern, as in conventional autobiographical narrative. However, instead of a narrative of linear progress, the pattern reveals the dialectical entanglement of the past and future, as discussed by Szondi. Thus, Benjamin’s tableaux are marked by the deferral, delay, and often absence, of a chronology. Like the Benjaminian narrator’s interventions into his childhood tableaux, Karasu’s use of diegetic time in the Beyoğlu stories displays a multilayered structure, including the narrated time of childhood, the present time of narration with the voice of a first-person narrator, and a more recent past, when the adult narrator revisits his childhood neighborhood. The distance between then and now manifests itself through a self-reflexive moment. Like Benjamin, Karasu’s most personal, even if fictionalized, evocation of the past rests on the assumption of the social irretrievability of the Beyoğlu neighborhood prior to the ultimate destruction of its social fabric beginning with the 1950s. As already sketched out in Benjamin’s texts, the theme of social irretrievability also determines the narrative mode in Karasu. For, as Szondi illustrates, the reminiscences of the social and city topographies remain open-ended and incomplete, containing the hope in the past. Benjamin’s poetics of memory points simultaneously toward the future ruination of these topographies and the redemptive element that remained unfulfilled in the past. The formal principle of discontinuity that governs A Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood indicates Benjamin’s wish to capture a particular historicity through its ruptures. This principle reveals why Benjamin’s seemingly autobiographical undertaking does not rely upon those elements that form the basis of traditional autobiographies. Likewise, Karasu withholds a linear narrative of childhood experiences. Although members of the narrator’s family, primarily on the maternal side,

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From Berlin’s Old West to Istanbul’s Beyoğlu    CHAPTER 2

appear as the main actors of the fragmented memoirs in Black Waters, no physiognomies or individual characteristics, and rarely any names, are given. The discontinuity between the segments in each section of Black Waters, as well as between the independent texts that are compiled in the book, indicates a strategy beyond the issues related solely to its posthumous publication history. We should recall that Benjamin privileges what he calls the “depth of experience” over “continuity” in his construction of memory. Benjamin’s concept of excavation as a metaphor for remembering brings to light how the images of sites and objects, dug out from the depths of experience, construct the perished milieu of Berlin’s turn-of-the-century Jewish bourgeoisie. The juxtaposition of the tableaux as montage replaces the linear unfolding of a life-narrative. Benjamin conveys in his images of the big city the recollection of a child situated in that same social milieu. As he articulates in the quote on his metropolitan childhood, the textualized memory-images contain two interconnected elements: the German Jewish bourgeoisie of a specific historical moment and the experience of the big city. In Berlin Childhood both elements appear as enclosed in the short form of each tableau. In the opening sentence of “Loggias,” the first vignette of the Final Version, these elements are poetically encapsulated in a Berlin courtyard and, more specifically, in the spatiality of the peculiar loggia: For a long time, life deals with the still-tender memory of childhood like a mother who lays her newborn on her breast without waking it. Nothing has fortified my own memory so profoundly as gazing into courtyards, one of whose dark loggias, shaded by blinds in the summer, was for me the cradle in which the city laid its new citizen. (1996b, 345) (Wie eine Mutter, die das Neugeborene an ihre Brust legt ohne es zu wecken, verfährt das Leben lange Zeit mit der noch zarten Erinnerung an die Kindheit. Nichts kräftigte die meine inniger als der Blick in Höfe, von deren dunklen Loggien eine, die im Sommer von Markisen beschattet wurde, für mich die Wiege war, in die die Stadt den neuen Bürger legte.) (1991c, 386)

The figure of the loggia serves as the container of the past, and it thus illustrates how Benjamin historicizes memory by fixing it through spatiality. Howard Eiland states that, while places and things make up the philosophic-poetic mode of Berlin Childhood, the imminence of exile constitutes the form. He calls the former a “methodological imperative” and the latter a

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“historical imperative” (2006, viii). While the loggia as cradle represents hope for the promise of the future, evoked in the exilic meditation of the author in the 1930s, the cradle-like space is unmistakably imbued with associations of the grave. Stefan Zweig’s renowned memoir, Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), may serve here as a succinct example with which to illustrate the contrast between Benjamin’s undertaking in Berlin Childhood and the conventional genre of autobiography. Published in 1942, the same year in which Zweig committed suicide in his last place of exile, Brazil, Die Welt von Gestern bears several resemblances to Berlin Childhood. Like Benjamin, Zweig was the son of a wealthy, assimilated, Central European, Jewish, bourgeois family. Due to the cataclysmic historical events that swept Europe, Zweig had to abandon his native Vienna and, with the rise of antisemitism and fascism, he fled Europe permanently in 1934. Sharing with Benjamin the predicament of exile, Zweig wrote The World of Yesterday under similar circumstances of homeless wanderings. Like Zweig, Benjamin died a suicide, taking his own life in 1940 while fleeing the Gestapo at the FrenchSpanish border. Each author depicts the past by imagining his city’s spaces inhabited by the upper-class, educated, Jewish bourgeoisie of the West End neighborhood of Berlin and its counterpart in Vienna. Both perceive the vanishing of these places, with the collapse of the Wilhelmine and AustroHungarian Empires at the end of the First World War and their final destruction at the hands of National Socialism, as the irretrievable loss of a culture. The vehemence of these traumatic chasms, which Zweig calls “volcanic eruptions of our European earth,” reveals the proximity of his outlook to Benjamin’s. Zweig states in the preface to his memoir: “Actually, it is not so much the course of my own destiny that I relate, but that of an entire generation, the generation of our time, which was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history” (1964, xvii).1 1 The full sentence in the original reads as follows: “Nichts liegt mir ferner, als mich damit voranzustellen, es sei denn im Sinne des Erklärers bei einem Lichtbildervortrag; die Zeit gibt die Bilder, ich spreche nur die Worte dazu, und es wird eigentlich nicht so sehr mein Schicksal sein, das ich erzähle, sondern das einer ganzen Generation— unserer ehemaligen Generation, die wie kaum eine im Laufe der Geschichte mit Schicksal beladen war” (Zweig 2002, 7). Zweig’s emphasis on image, delivered by time or history itself and the downplaying of his function as narrator only to one who shows and explains a slide show undoubtedly resonates with Benjamin’s method in his Berlin memoir. However, the entirety of Zweig’s autobiography displays difference rather than similarity between the two memory works.

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From Berlin’s Old West to Istanbul’s Beyoğlu    CHAPTER 2

Notwithstanding Zweig’s focus here on the representative rather than personal dimension of a biography that he shares with Benjamin, Zweig’s recollections are grounded precisely on what Benjamin calls the “continuity of experience” in his preface to Berlin Childhood. From Zweig’s well-known first chapter, “The World of Security,” in which he depicts, not without a nostalgic note, the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie’s delusional belief in the idea of progress, to the last chapter, “The Agony of Peace,” which concludes with the outbreak of the Second World War, The World of Yesterday flows chronologically forward due to the agency of “I,” the narrating subject, that holds together, and makes coherent, the sections of the book. Accordingly, “The Agony of Peace” presents a forceful closure, accentuating and even doubling the stature of the narrating subject: The sun shone full and strong. Homeward bound I suddenly noticed before me my own shadow as I had seen the shadow of the other war behind the actual one. During all this time it has never budged from me, that irremovable shadow, it hovers over every thought of mine by day and by night; perhaps its dark outline lies on some pages of this book, too. But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived. (1964, 436)2

With the figure of the shadow, Zweig extends his persona on a spatio-temporal axis. The authoritative voice of his narrator enunciates the alternation of despair and hope as the experience bestowing meaning to life. This statement not only redeems Zweig’s generation of fellow sufferers, but also summarizes the narrative of his own bios. The episodes in Berlin Childhood, in each of which the past appears as sediment in a spatial entity, demonstrate a poetics highly distinct from Zweig’s linear narrative. Benjamin’s vignettes function with the image as vehicle that contains the inscription of the destroyed past. Andreas Huyssen examines Benjamin’s use of short form as a new genre under the label “modernist miniatures” or “metropolitan miniatures” (2007, 27-42). His analysis thus further elucidates the memory model Benjamin employs 2 “Die Sonne schien voll und stark. Wie ich heimschritt, bemerkte ich mit einemmal vor mir meinen eigenen Schatten, so wie ich den Schatten des anderen Krieges hinter dem jetzigen sah. Er ist durch alle diese Zeit nicht mehr von mir gewichen, dieser Schatten, er überhing jeden meiner Gedanken bei Tag und bei Nacht; vielleicht liegt sein dunkler Umriß auch auf manchen Blättern dieses Buches. Aber jeder Schatten ist im letzten doch auch Kind des Lichts, und nur wer Helles und Dunkles, Krieg und Frieden, Aufstieg und Niedergang erfahren, nur der hat wirklich gelebt” (ibid., 492-93).

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in Berlin Childhood. The new genre, so Huyssen argues, emerged in conjunction with those traumatic events of the early twentieth century that led to the transformation of traditional (European) storytelling. He gives this “minor” genre a central place in the history of literary modernism. It is important to note here that the term “small form” applies not only to Berlin Childhood, but to other material that Benjamin wrote around the same period. These include One-Way Street (Einbahnstrasse, 1928), where he presents Denkbilder or “thought figures.” The loosely connected pieces that comprise A Berlin Chronicle are other examples of the “small form,” Huyssen’s “modernist miniature.” Eiland describes Benjamin’s increasing use of this form as “the dialectical method of montage, with its simultaneous isolation and assemblage of materials” (2006, viii). In contrast with Zweig, then, Benjamin’s imagistic Berlin Childhood abstains from continuity and a grand finale. However, despite the formal principle of discontinuity and the uncertainty of the sequential order, I would argue that each small piece in the childhood memoir ends with its own minor dénouement. The concluding sentence of “Butterfly Hunt,” for example, reads: And that is why the Potsdam of my childhood lies in air so blue, as though all its butterflies—its mourning cloaks and admirals, peacocks and auroras— were scattered over one of these glistening Limoges enamels, on which the ramparts and battlements of Jerusalem stand out against a dark blue ground. (2006, 351) (Und darum liegt das Potsdam meiner Kindheit in so blauer Luft, als wären seine Trauermäntel oder Admirale, Tagpfauenaugen und Aurorafalter über eine der schimmernden Emaillen von Limoges verstreut, auf denen die Zinnen und Mauern Jerusalems vom dunkelblauen Grunde sich abheben.) (1991b, 393)

As Szondi has persuasively shown, metaphor functions for Benjamin as the container of a larger meaning: “The comparison brings together the present and the future, the premonition of the child and the knowledge of the grown man” (2006, 17). In the above section this is achieved through the simile of childhood as a cloud, on the one hand, and, on the other, the conjectured correspondence between this image and that of the landmarks of Jerusalem on the Limoges.3 In its turn, Jerusalem signifies a severed site of 3 For an extended treatment of the “cloud” thematic see Hamacher (1986, 133-62).

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From Berlin’s Old West to Istanbul’s Beyoğlu    CHAPTER 2

origin for the child as well as the collective to which he belongs. Jerusalem holds both the past and the ominous future awaiting the child and the Jews of Berlin. The mnemonic image of Jerusalem is conveyed through the verb schimmern, reminiscent of the Freudian memory trace as a wink, a glimmer surfacing from the unconscious. Huyssen’s historicization of the miniature genre prevents its facile transposition to other contexts. Nevertheless, reading Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives in conjunction with the category “modernist miniature” sheds light on the Turkish author’s construction of memory as fragment. Karasu’s narratives of childhood are embedded in the experience of the city, capturing old Pera-Beyoğlu’s unique urbane milieu, still tangible in the early decades of the republic.4 Beyoğlu in those decades also retained some of its multiethnic texture, although to a far lesser extent compared with the imperial times. Even if Karasu remains silent about the historical heterogeneity of the place, his Beyoğlu images enclose a childhood self that belonged to this very social fabric. Unlike Benjamin’s affluent German Jewish bourgeoisie, the actors in Karasu’s narratives are members of the petty bourgeoisie— seamstresses, salesclerks, and impoverished widows. However, as we have seen through Witte’s analysis of Berlin Childhood in the previous chapter, Benjamin’s memoirs bear sufficient witness to Berlin’s underprivileged. In Black Waters, only the paternal dwelling of the remembered child represents a somewhat more well-off social stratum. Yet, although the cultural and religious identities of the Beyoğlu residents are not spelled out, the stories in Black Waters imply numerous allusions to local Christian and Jewish customs. In light of Szondi’s motto, “hope in the past,” Karasu’s encoded identity markers can be understood as indices of Beyoğlu’s past diversity. To be sure, Karasu could not be further removed from promoting an identificatory discourse, and he is most certainly not a champion of multiculturalism. However, since the faint and ambiguous allusions are dispersed throughout the narratives in Black Waters, they beg for interpretive reception. Following Szondi’s exegesis of the dialectical entanglement of the future and the past, I read the undertones of minority representation in 4 See Gülersoy’s discussion of Beyoğlu in the context of the republican self-fashioning between 1923-50. Gülersoy draws an image of the district as still preserving some of its cosmopolitan character while at the same time offering diversion and a Westernized lifestyle to Turkey’s new urban elites. This depiction of Beyoğlu prior to its decline after the mid-century presents a “clean” and dignified environment, free of crime, that helped the modern Turkish elites shape their new identity (2003, 36-42).

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the Beyoğlu texts in a double manner. Seen from the perspective of a culture-pluralistic approach, Karasu’s intimation of minority identities entails a promise: the acceptance of difference. At the same time, this intimation, implied in the ethno-cultural markers, foreshadows the future marginalization and displacement of these groups beyond the recollected childhood years. Accordingly, and resembling Benjamin’s Berlin memoirs, Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives suggest an unfulfilled promise in the past while anticipating a future that entails the destruction of the non-Muslim collectives of old Pera. The stories in Black Waters lead in an accelerated pace toward the demise of the father figures, from the Crimean War onward. The deaths of the male family members are soon followed by the dissolution of the old families of Beyoğlu. Using a celebrated metaphor in Benjamin studies, Eiland defines Berlin Childhood as standing on the “threshold” between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He points out that, while the book memorializes “a world that was about to disappear,” it also hints at the complicity of this bourgeois world with the “unending brutality of the ‘victor’” (2006, xv). Here “brutality” primarily refers to the crimes of the Third Reich; yet Eiland also seems to suggest a broader context, including both world wars and leaving the connotations of “victor” unspecified. With this reference to “complicity,” Eiland underscores Benjamin’s “dialectical consciousness,” glancing backward to the heyday of the bourgeoisie and forward to the global crisis. Thus, as Eiland aptly illustrates, this dialectical method makes Benjamin both detached and engaged, his tone “at once sunny and melancholy” (2006, xv-xvi). As the reader will recall, Benjamin writes that his decision to set down his childhood memories is to vaccinate himself against nostalgia. The dialectical method provides Benjamin the means to achieve this. The following analysis presents a close examination of historicity, loss, and nostalgia as they apply to Karasu’s Beyoğlu stories. In Black Waters, the author draws on some of the major events of late Ottoman-Turkish history without using a referential master narrative. A remark by Benjamin on the dimensions of remembrance illuminates Karasu’s poetic strategy: “A remembered event is infinite, because it is merely a key to everything that happened before it and after it” (Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust,” cited in Eiland 2006, xii). The remembered childhood in Beyoğlu assumes a similarly key function in Karasu, in that the memory segments extend both to the past and the future. By interweaving dates and markers, the author moves his narrative of Beyoğlu on a trajectory that, though only by

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allusion or cryptically, evokes major events in Ottoman and Turkish history. The Crimean War of 1853-56 and the violent incidents of 1909 that broke out in the aftermath of the political coup of 1908, carried out by the Young Turks, lead to the deeper past of Pera-Beyoğlu. The narrator’s return to the childhood site in the 1960s and 1970s conveys the changed image of the neighborhood from later perspectives. In the fragmentary childhood reminiscences, Beyoğlu’s identity as the arts and entertainment center surfaces through reference to the shows of Zozo Dalmas, the famous Greek singer of the 1930s, or through the trip to see King Kong. As illustrated by way of piecemeal familial stories and elusive biographies of other Beyoğlu dwellers, Karasu captures, primarily on a micro-historical plain, an earlier past that reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century. What Eiland depicts in Benjamin helps illuminate Karasu’s endeavor in his Black Waters: “By means of the text’s framing devices, the child’s mythology is dissolved into the space of history” (2006, xv). There is a crucial question here about the representative function of the remembered child in the Beyoğlu narratives. In what sense and to what extent does this figure constitute a parallel to the remembered child in Benjamin’s assimilated Jewish bourgeois milieu at the turn of the century? Furthermore, while the protected universe Benjamin portrays was ultimately destroyed by both world wars, how are we to understand the loss conveyed through Karasu’s decaying topography of Beyoğlu? Finally, what is the significance of this vanished past for the hypothesis of the current study? As stated in the introduction, as the center of Istanbul’s Levantine and minority milieu Pera began to unravel with the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. While the collapse of the Wilhelmine and Habsburg dynasties in 1918 marked the beginning of further destruction in central Europe, this date also denotes the end of the Ottoman Empire. This historical framework sheds light on the common predicament that Berlin’s West End, Benjamin’s Jewish Berlin, shares with Istanbul’s cosmopolitan Pera: the demise of the two empires and the following socio-political changes resulted for both neighborhoods in the loss of their former character as culturally diverse sites. The Ottoman Empire was officially abolished when the Turkish nationalist struggle against both the victors of the First World War and the Ottoman dynasty prevailed, leading to the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the new leader of the nation-state, envisioned creating out of the ashes of the heterogeneous social fabric of the

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empire a homogeneous Turkish identity. Discussing this nation-building process, Azade Seyhan refers to the representation of the transition by the authors of the time, stating that “they portrayed with deep insight the young nation’s struggle to refashion a new Westernized Turkish identity and its precarious adaptation of secular modernity in the shadow of a suppressed but powerful religious tradition” (2008, 5). While modernizing society had its enthusiasts and critics alike, the nationalist project radically affected urban enclaves characterized by their heterogeneous social fabric, such as the former Pera. These areas, containing diverse cultures and lifestyles along with, or outside of, the Muslim majority culture during the Ottoman era, were destined to lose their multiethnic or “pluricultural” identities (see Kasaba 1986).5 In her introduction to From “Milieu de Mémoire” to “Lieu de Mémoire,” Ulrike Tischler describes the objective of the book first as an analysis of the formation of the bygone Istanbul milieu, coined as Pera society. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s concepts she states: In a further step, the most various factors (deportation, dispossession, expulsion, discrimination) are identified that have gradually allowed these milieux to be turned into what today are memorial sites (lieu de mémoire) that have been tricked out to appeal to tourist trade. (2006, 15)

The Figure of the Arcade An excursus to the figure of the arcade, constituent for Benjamin’s and Karasu’s mnemonic cityscapes, opens up new dimensions for exploring the motif of “lost place.” With this in mind, I turn to Brian Elliott’s unpublished comparative essay “Dream Places: The Pera Arcades as Heterotopias.” As mentioned in my introduction, Elliott investigates the former signification of the passages in Istanbul’s Pera district in light of Benjamin’s representation of the Parisian arcades. Elliott applies the Foucauldian term “heterotopia” to Benjamin’s arcades, in order to illustrate how in Benjamin’s reading the Parisian arcades become the sites of projection for the collective unconscious of the nineteenth century. Like their prototypes in Paris, the belated emergence of the Pera arcades in the second half of the nineteenth century 5 In his critique of the term “multiculturalism” as implying essentialist undertones and referring to a closed system, Johannes Feichtinger opts for “pluriculturalism,” a concept that in his view presents openness and an acceptance of difference (2006, 95).

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indicates the aim to modernize Istanbul after the image of large Western cities (unpublished manuscript, 9). Thus, in accordance with their European counterparts, the Pera arcades reflect the consumerist dreams of a collective. However, while the promise of happiness that the arcades contain and project toward the future was material consumption, this promise is embedded, in Paris as in Istanbul, within a larger aspiration to modernity. Elliott’s discussion of the concept of modernity in the context of the arcades proves highly relevant for the present study. As mentioned earlier, the founding ideology of the ruling classes in the new Turkish Republic was also an aspiration to modernity. However, this project differs from the preceding modernization movement in the imperial context of the late nineteenth century, in that the latter preserved the cosmopolitan social structure whereas the new direction was based on Turkish nationalism. Thus, the openness to ethno-cultural diversity that defined the bygone Pera disappeared gradually in the republican era. Yet this “openness” should not be viewed as an unproblematic state, for the urban renewal project was entangled in the conflict between the empire and the colonial aspirations of those Western powers that enjoyed certain rights and privileges within the Ottoman territories. While Pera-Beyoğlu retained its multiethnic structure, social divisions along those lines sharpened (Elliott unpublished manuscript, 10).6 Reading Bilge Karasu’s narratives against this historical backdrop brings us back to the trope of decline that permeates not only Karasu’s mnemonic discourse on Beyoğlu but also Benjamin’s writings on Old West Berlin and on Paris’s abandoned arcades. Referring to the urban decay to which the Pera arcades succumbed, Elliott poignantly refers to these structures as “dark and faintly sinister places, so that one feels a slight resistance when entering from the openness of the main street” (22). The following passage from Benjamin powerfully conveys this ominous sense emanating from the prototypes of the Pera arcades, the abandoned Parisian passages: Just as that remarkable covered walkway [Passage de l’Opéra] had done for an earlier generation, so today a few arcades still preserve, in dazzling light and shadowy corners, a past become space. Antiquated trades survive 6 In reference to architectural historian Zeynep Çelik’s discussion of Pera’s urban renewal in the nineteenth century, Elliott writes: “The radical ethnic diversity of Istanbul relative to the cities of western Europe meant that the westernizing ideology that directed the programme of urban renewal in the city created further complexities of social division beyond the more general dynamics of class conflict” (unpublished manuscript, 10).

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within these inner spaces, and the merchandise on display is unintelligible, or else has several meanings. Already the inscriptions and signs on the entranceways. . . , already they have about them something enigmatic. . . . And who would have the courage to take the dilapidated stairs up one flight to the beauty salon of Professor Alfred Bitterlin? (2002, 871) (Wie dieser merkwürdige Wandelgang es bis vor kurzem tat, bewahren noch heute einige Passagen in grellem Licht und düsteren Winkeln raumgewordene Vergangenheit. Veraltete Gewerbe halten sich in diesen Binnenräumen und die ausliegende Ware ist undeutlich oder vieldeutig. Schon die Inschriften und Schilder an den Eingangstoren. . . , schon die Inschriften haben etwas Rätselhaftes.  .  .  . Und wer hätte den Mut die ausgetretne Stiege hinauf zu gehen in das Schönheitsinstitut des Professeur Alfred Bitterlin.) (1991d 2:1041)

Benjamin’s collage of derelict images includes at the end of this essay the figure of an old woman that seems to belong to bygone times: Here, in the quietest part of the side-alley, individuals of both sexes can interview for a staff position within the confines of a sitting room set up behind glass. On the pale-colored wallpaper full of figures and bronze busts falls the light of a gas lamp. An old woman sits beside it, reading. For years, it would seem, she has been alone. And now the passage is becoming more empty. (2002, 872) (Hier in dem stillsten Teil des Seitenganges können Personen beider Geschlechter Personal werden, wo hinter der Scheibe eine Wohnzimmerkulisse eingerichtet ist. Auf die blaßbunte Tapete voll Bilder und Bronzebüsten fällt das Licht einer Gaslampe. Bei der liest eine alte Frau. Die ist wie seit Jahren allein. Nun wird der Gang immer leerer.) (1991d, 2:1042)

In a vein similar to Benjamin’s rendering of decline in the eerie spatiality of the arcade, his contemporary and friend, Siegfried Kracauer, bemoans the gentrification of an old Berlin arcade. This fascinating piece, titled “Farewell to the Linden Arcade” (“Abschied von der Lindenpassage,” 1930), is included among Kracauer’s Weimar essays. With the opening sentence, “[t]he Lindenpassage (Linden Arcade) has ceased to exist” (1995, 337), Kracauer delves into different temporalities defining the bourgeois era. Conjuring up the earlier days of the Lindenpassage before the First World

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War, prior to the renovation process that Kracauer observes at the time he wrote his essay, the author states that arcades like this one functioned as repositories of bourgeois fantasies, suppressed by the official culture: They housed the cast off and the disavowed, the sum total of everything unfit for the adornment of the façade. Here, in the arcades, these transient objects attained a kind of right of residence, like gypsies who were allowed to camp only along the highway and not in town. One passed by them as if one were underground, between this street and the next. Even now the Linden Arcade is still filled with shops whose displayed wares are just such passages [Passagen] in the composition of bourgeois life. That is, they satisfy primarily bodily needs and the craving for images of the sort that appear in daydreams. (338)7

Both Benjamin and Kracauer read the arcades as ambiguous structures of bourgeois culture, passageways that promised (material) happiness for the society of their youth that was eventually abandoned as capitalism moved to its later phases.8 In their Marxist-oriented critique of bourgeois culture, Benjamin and Kracauer view the later, crumbling state of the arcades dialectically as sites of the unredeemed dreams of the masses, even if the fantasies focus on purely material means of satisfaction. Rolf Tiedemann explains the connection Benjamin establishes between the arcades and dreams as follows:

7 The German original of this passage reads: “Sie beherbergten das Ausgestoßene und Hineingestoßene, die Summe jener Dinge, die nicht zum Fassadenschmuck taugten. Hier in den Passagen erlangten diese passageren Gegenstände eine Art von Aufenthaltsrecht; wie Zigeuner, die nicht in der Stadt, sondern nur an der Landstraße lagern dürfen. Man ging gleichsam unter Tag an ihnen vorbei, zwischen Straße und Straße. Noch ist die Lindenpassage mit Läden gefüllt, deren Auslagen solche Passagen inmitten der bourgeoisen Lebenskomposition sind. Und zwar befriedigen sie vor allem die körperliche Notdurft und die Gier nach Bildern, wie sie in Wachträumen erscheinen” (Kracauer 1977, 327). 8 The temporal discrepancy between the prime of the Parisian arcades and Kracauer’s Linden Arcade should be noted. While the Paris passages had their heyday in the first half of the nineteenth century, their Berlin counterpart Lindenpassage, called Kaisergalerie, opened in 1873, following the foundation of the Wilhelmine Empire and Germany’s rapid transition to industrialization. Thomas Y. Levin notes that the upscale identity of this arcade lasted till 1888: “At the turn of the century, Friedrichstraße had become the entertainment district, with its concomitant tourism and prostitution, leading to a further ‘decline’ in terms of the class affiliations of the arcade’s patrons” (ibid., 389).

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Benjamin wanted to draw attention to the fact that architectonic structures such as the arcades owed their existence to and served the industrial order of production, while at the same time containing in themselves something unfulfilled, never to be fulfilled within the confines of capitalism. (2002, 933)

If we look at the present state of the Pera arcades in light of these insights, we may discern a similar trajectory: in their prime in late nineteenth century, Istanbul’s passageways contained the aspirations of modernity, dreamed by a progressive Turkish administration and the cosmopolitan collective of Pera. In the course of the twentieth century, especially after the middle of the century, these arcades lost their earlier signification as commercial centers for upper classes, turning instead into shadowy spaces displaying a multitude of merchandise, from buttons to luggage to hats, in part “unintelligible,” as Benjamin writes above. Pera’s passageways have remained, in Kracauer’s terms, “underground,” inhabiting, among others, movie theaters that played pornographic films. Since the Beyoğlu revival movement in the 1990s, some of the arcades have been renovated to liken their original architectural structure and ornamentation. Others only carry the name, but have been radically rebuilt as new commercial spaces so that there is no correlation with the original. Through their spatial function, however, as either thoroughfares connecting the main street of Beyoğlu, Istiklâl Caddesi (or Grand’rue de Péra, as it was called during the glory days of the arcades) into the back streets, or as passages leading into an interior separate from the main venue, these places still point toward their bygone signification as dream passages of modernity.9 Neither Benjamin nor Karasu recall the past before the waning of the arcades with nostalgia. However, through the imagery of decline that permeates their narratives, the authors do address the theme of a quest for redemption, sought by the masses before the disappearance of the old order. It is important to note that the recurrent depiction of a dilapidated passageway in Karasu’s Black Waters conveys a similar sense of strangeness as Benjamin’s above-quoted lines from The Arcades Project.

9 Bir Beyoğlu Fotoromanı (A Beyoğlu Photo-romance) presents through images and narratives glimpses into Beyoğlu’s history from the 1800s to the millennium. The book offers a useful reference for understanding the function of the arcades in the process of the district’s modernization. See also Belge 1994, Yeltin 1985.

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Pera in Literary Imagination and the “Beyo˘glu Literature” As noted earlier, the polyglot Pera is among the most celebrated, but also the most contested, multiethnic sites of the imperial capital (Akın 1998, 11-25; Ortaylı 1986, 84-93).10 Pera-Beyoğlu and the adjacent port of Galata, originally a Genoese settlement, founded during Byzantine times, have been depicted in the literary imagination with a mixture of fascination and disgust. From nineteenth-century Orientalist travelogues, most notably by Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert, Pierre Loti, and Edmundo de Amicis, to its representations in a rich corpus of Turkish literature, the environs of Pera-Beyoğlu have been textualized in ambiguous tropes. Even in the revivalist and nostalgic “Beyoğlu literature” (Beyoğlu edebiyatı) of the 1980s and 1990s, traces of the older depictions mixing attraction and revulsion still resonate. However, the revivalist literature depicts Pera’s cosmopolitan era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as its more urbane days prior to its deterioration in late 1950s, in a predominantly nostalgic mode. Beyoğlu literature or the discourse on Pera-Beyoğlu offers an engaging area for the critical study of Turkish literature, and especially for interdisciplinary approaches to the representation of non-Muslim minorities of Turkey. Beyoğlu has been a recurrent cityscape not only in Western travelogues, but also in seminal novels and short stories by Turkish authors from the nineteenth century onward (see Çoruk 1995; Hızlan and Oral 2008; Özpalabıyıklar 2000).11 Among the prolific body of twentieth-century and contemporary publications on Beyoğlu, ranging from academic studies to fiction, we may recall cultural historian and preservationist Çelik Gülersoy’s cultural histories in memoir form; Nur Akın’s socio-historical 10 Çelik Gülersoy states that the designation “Pera” (“across”) was given with respect to the other side of the old peninsula, where the Byzantine city (Constantinople) was located (2003, 22). 11 Türk Edebiyatında Beyoğlu (Beyoğlu in Turkish Literature), edited by Özpalabıyıklar, contains diverse representations of Pera-Beyoğlu in late nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Turkish literature, ranging from ambivalent to negative. A prime example of Beyoğlu’s depiction as a polyglot site of decadence, treason, and baseness is found in the works of acclaimed nationalist novelist of the republican era, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu (1889-1974). See the selection from his 1928 novel Sodom ve Gomore (Sodom and Gomorrah) in Özpalabıyıklar 2000, 79-84. The anthology also includes Karasu’s “Beyoğlu Üzerine Metin” (“Text on Beyoğlu,” 240-52). “Beyoğlu Üzerine Metin” is printed in yet another collection of narratives on Beyoğlu, titled Beyoğlu’ndan Esintiler (Breezes from Beyoğlu, 2008), edited by Hızlan and Oral, and including Oral’s designs (see 2008, 379-94).

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study on late nineteenth-century Galata and Pera; Said Naum Duhani’s social topographies of Beyoğlu, unprecedented and original in their genre; poet Salâh Birsel’s colorful memoir of Beyoğlu as bohemia; or film critic Attila Dorsay’s memoir of the movie houses of Beyoğlu. Furthermore, a rich array of works by authors belonging to Istanbul’s minorities bears witness to Pera-Beyoğlu’s destroyed ethno-cultural past: Beyoğlu expatriate Maria Yordanidu’s Loksandra: Dream of Istanbul, written already in 1963 in Greek but not translated into Turkish until 1990; Turkish Armenian author Mıgırdiç Margosyan’s autobiographical writings; and the epic work by the Turkish Jewish author Mario Levi, as discussed in chapter 1, are among these, to name just a few. Finally, Giovanni Scognamillo’s autobiographic memoir, Bir Levantenin Beyoğlu Anıları (Beyoğlu Memories of a Levantine) offers a classic example of Beyoğlu literature. Scognamillo’s construction of place and selfhood in the traditional referential memoir form stands in contrast to Karasu’s obscure mnemonic fragments. The Levantine author’s memoirs also present a counterpart to Zweig’s The World of Yesterday in comparison to Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood.12 These works, and many others by Turkish minority writers, make up a significant segment of the diverse corpus of Beyoğlu representations. Through their own life stories, the above authors aim to transmit an “authentic” experience of their place of belonging. Situated in this context, Karasu’s work on Beyoğlu contrasts with such predominantly realist narratives. In contradistinction to the referential paradigms of Beyoğlu literature, I read Karasu’s ethno-cultural indicators, which establish the connection between place and selfhood, as the unarticulated current, the black waters, of Black Waters. As my analysis will illustrate, the imaginary of “Beyoğlu” encompasses all but a neutral space. The history of the name is charged with an array of associations: ethnic diversity, a Tower of Babel with its collage of languages, an enclave of arts and culture, bohemia, minority presses, free thinkers, and a site perceived as conducive to subversive activities. In the collective imagination, Beyoğlu is regarded as a cosmopolitan place, connected with foreignness, not belonging to Turkish or Islamic tradition. Thus, it often signifies otherness, marginality, licentiousness, prostitution, and crime. It is the underbelly of the city. 12 Giovanni Scognamillo (1929-2016) was the son of Italian Levantines. He was a wellknown cinema critic. Besides the above-mentioned memoir, Scognamillo published works on the history of cinema, as well as fiction.

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The neighborhood’s conflict-laden identity reveals itself already in the dual designations of Pera and Beyoğlu. In his cultural history Beyoğlu’nda Gezerken (Strolling Through Beyoğlu), Gülersoy critically distances himself from the nostalgia wave for “Pera,” as manifested in the revivalist trend of the 1990s led by the intelligentsia and media. Objecting to the fad of calling the district by its old name, Gülersoy argues that even prior to the republican era the Ottomans used to call the neighborhood “Beyoğlu.” Gülersoy maintains that the word “Pera” was coined by the Frenks (Europeans) and the Levantines, adding that even the local minorities referred to the district by its Turkish name, “Beyoğlu”: “If we say Pera for Beyoğlu, the name for İstiklâl Caddesi would have to be ‘Grande Rue’” (2003, 12). Gülersoy’s polemic clearly illustrates his ambivalent stance towards the signifier “Pera.” While the author defines himself as one of the most adamant cultural revivalists for the district, he cautions against an uncritical embrace of its foreign name by “Pera” enthusiasts. Due to his loyalty to republican-nationalist ideology, Gülersoy associates the glamour of bygone Pera with its darker flipside, foreign dominance and exploitation of the empire: Then, with Pera, foreign post offices, capitulations, citizenship under the protection of a foreign committee [düvel-i-muazzama uyrukluğu], i.e., foreign passports for local minorities, would arrive, for these were all parts of a larger chain. Do we want all this? For the sake of “cheerful cafés, bakeries, elegant boutiques”? What kind of degeneration is this? (Gülersoy 2003, 12; translations from Gülersoy are mine)13

Along the lines of Gülersoy’s argument, the designation “Pera” is consistently absent in Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives. The title of the cardinal story “Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu,” which also became the book’s title under Akatlı’s editorship, suggests that the author identifies this site, where he was born and raised, by its Turkish name. As a child of the early republican era, the author avoids any reference to the neighborhood’s “foreign” (or Frenk) designation of “Pera.” Following Gülersoy’s argument that even the local minorities of the district, namely the Greek-Orthodox, Armenians, and Jews, used to use the Turkish name, we may conjecture that “Beyoğlu” 13 “Beyoğluna Pera dersek, İstiklâl Caddesinin de adının, ‘Grande Rue’ olması gerek! Sonra Pera ile, yabancı postahaneler, kapitülasyonlar, düvel-i muazzama uyrukluğu yani azınlıklara yabancı pasaportlar dizisi de, sökün etmeli. Çünkü bunların hepsi bir zincirin halkalarıydı. Bunlara da var mıyız? ‘Keyifli caféler, pastaneler, elegan butikler . . . ’ aşkına,? (sic.) Bu nasıl bir yozlaşma?” (Gülersoy 2003, 12).

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was the common name in Karasu’s family environment in the 1930s and 40s. However, the complete absence of “Pera” in Karasu’s Black Waters may indicate a purposeful silence. The gap, apparent in the omission of the other name, then, can be seen as a constitutive element in Karasu’s way of remembering.

Black Waters as Autograph The title “Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu” that Karasu gave to his central narrative in the namesake volume deserves further scrutiny. Clearly, the title establishes through the conjunction “or” (ya da) as synonyms the genitive construction “Mother of Black Waters” (“Mother of Sewage”) and the proper name “Beyoğlu” (implicitly also “Pera”). However, a close examination of Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts shows that the metaphor of “sewage” or “black waters” evokes more than “slum” and “underbelly.” As a child of Beyoğlu, the author may be inscribing his signature, “Karasu,” through the associative web of “sewage” or “black waters,” since “Karasu” literally means “black water” in Turkish.14 Among the word’s multiple renderings in English, we find the translation as “slowly flowing water.” Employing a cross-cultural translation paradigm, we may read the imagery of sewage (lağım) in the title as black waters or kara su, thus revealing a self-referential gesture by the author. Accordingly, the black waters of the city’s sewage suggest a more complex reading than merely the negative meaning of “waste waters.” It is true that the equation between “Beyoğlu” and “sewage,” as established in the title, brings to mind primarily the image of the neighborhood as the dirty underworld of the city. However, by placing “sewage” or “black waters” in a genitive construction, “Mother of Black Waters,” Karasu introduces a further semantic complexity. His neologism lağımlaranası is a compound noun that recalls denizanası—jellyfish. Its fully articulated 14 Bilge Karasu is not related to Emanuel Karasu (1862-1934), who belonged to the Sephardic Jewish Carasso family in Ottoman Salonica. Emanuel Karasu (Emmanuel Carasso), a lawyer by training, joined the movement of Young Turks in Salonica and became one of the first non-Muslim members of the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti). When the Young Turks came to power, Karasu became the Salonica deputy of the Ottoman Empire. The form Karasu is a Turkification of the name Carasso, and is also spelled as Karaso, Karassu, and Karasso (Wikipedia, s.v. “Emmanuel Carasso,” last modified September 19, 2019, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_ Carasso); see also Zeynep Uçak’s recent study, Selanik Mebusu Emanuel Karasu—Hayatı ve Siyasi Faaliyetleri (Istanbul: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık, 2016.) There are also several rivers and a town in northwestern Turkey named Karasu.

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genitive form would have been lağımların anası, even though the omission of the “ın” suffix is quite common. An instant suggestion following from the connection between “sewage” (black waters) and “mother” would be to read the compound noun negatively. In accordance with the pejorative discourse about the place, Beyoğlu would then be painted as the worst, biggest, dirtiest slum, almost the mythic Whore of Babylon. In this reading, “mother” becomes the cause or perpetrator, the source from where the abject originates. Yet, the word ana entails beyond its initial signification of “mother” numerous meanings when used as an adjective or as a noun in a genitive construction. These include “primary,” “main,” “essential,” and “most important.”

Recollection of the “Mothers” in Benjamin and Karasu It is interesting to note that in Berlin Childhood Benjamin also employs a multifaceted imagery around “mothers.” Benjamin’s imagery evokes a web of references when he describes in the vignette “Tiergarten” the paths he traversed with his friend Franz Hessel, whom he calls “an expert guide, a Berlin peasant” (see Skoggard 2010, 182-89). Benjamin depicts their stroll through the Tiergarten, thirty years after his childhood experiences in the park, as follows: “He led the way along these paths, and each, for him, became precipitous. They led downward, if not to the Mothers of all being, then certainly to those of this garden” (2006, 352-53). Both Eiland and Skoggard identify the reference as the chthonic “mothers” in Goethe’s Faust, part 2.15 Using the classical mythology in Goethe as an intertext, Benjamin renders the city park a mythic site. The bridges and statues of the Tiergarten and the ornaments adorning the adjacent villas all generate a mythologized landscape for Benjamin. It is also in this “Tiergarten” episode that Benjamin employs the central figures of the labyrinth (with Ariadne as the guide into it) and that of the threshold:16

15 Skoggard explains: “With his Theseus-like guide, the narrator descends into the heart of the mystery of the Tiergarten. Goethe’s Faust visits the chthonic ‘mothers’ to discover the secret that will lead him to Helen of Troy” (2010, 186). See also Eiland 2006, 172n17. 16 With the allusion to the legend of Ariadne, Benjamin implies his childhood love, Luise von Landau, who died untimely. Skoggard summarizes the well-known myth of Ariadne and the labyrinth as follows: “The earliest labyrinth of legend was devised by the Greek artisan Daedalus for King Minos of Crete to house the Minotaur, a frightful monster. You were not supposed to be able to find your way in the labyrinth, but Ariadne,

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Among the caryatids and atlantes, the putti and pomonas, which in those days looked on me, I stood closest to those dust-shrouded specimens of the race of threshold dwellers—those who guard the entrance to life, or to a house. For they are versed in waiting. Hence, it was all the same to them whether they waited for a stranger, for the return of the ancient gods, or for the child that, thirty years ago, slipped past them with his schoolboy’s satchel. Under their tutelage, the Old West district became the West of antiquity— source of the west winds that aid the mariners who sail their craft, freighted with the apples of the Hesperides, slowly up the Landwehr Canal, to dock by the Hercules Bridge. And once again, as in my childhood, the Hydra and the Nemean Lion had their place in the wilderness that surrounds the Great Star. (2006, 354) (Unter den Karyatiden und Atlanten, den Putten und Pomonen, die mich damals angesehen hatten, standen mir nun am nächsten jene angestaubten aus dem Geschlecht der Schwellenkundigen, die den Schritt ins Dasein oder in ein Haus behüten. Denn sie verstehen sich aufs Warten. Und so war es ihnen eins, ob sie auf einen Fremden warteten, die Wiederkehr der alten Götter oder auf das Kind, das sich vor dreißig Jahren mit der Mappe an ihrem Fuß vorbeigeschoben hat. In ihrem Zeichen wurde der alte Westen zum antiken, aus dem die westlichen Winde den Schiffern kommen, die ihren Kahn mit den Äpfeln der Hesperiden langsam den Landwehrkanal heraufflößen, um bei der Brücke des Herakles anzulegen. Und wieder hatten, wie in meiner Kindheit, die Hydra und der Nemeische Löwe Platz in der Wildnis um den Großen Stern.) (1991c, 395)

To be sure, the mythical “mothers” of Benjamin’s garden are not “the Mothers of all being,” whom the narrator suggests when describing the paths he descended with his friend. Nevertheless, the evocation opens up with transformative power the dreamy landscape of legend in the midst of the city. The opening of the vignette, with the well-known statement about “losing one’s way in a city,” leads directly to the motif of the labyrinth. Instead of directly introducing the memory image of the Tiergarten with its maze-like paths, Benjamin takes a detour, remembering first a kind of labyrinth other than the topographical:

daughter of King Minos, helped the Greek hero Theseus make his way into and out of it, using a thread. (Theseus succeeded in killing the Minotaur)” (2010, 183).

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This art [to lose one’s way in a city] I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks. No, not the first, for there was one earlier that has outlasted the others. The way into this labyrinth, which was not without its Ariadne, led over the Bendler Bridge, whose gentle arch became my first hillside. (2006, 352) (Diese Kunst [in einer Stadt sich zu verirren] habe ich spät erlernt; sie hat den Traum erfüllt, von dem die ersten Spuren Labyrinthe auf den Löschblättern meiner Hefte waren. Nein, nicht die ersten, denn vor ihnen war das eine, welches sie überdauert hat. Der Weg in dieses Labyrinth, dem seine Ariadne nicht gefehlt hat, führte über die Bendlerbrücke, deren linde Wölbung die erste Hügelflanke für mich wurde.) (1991c, 393)

Ulrike Landfester defines the labyrinth as the central metaphor of Benjamin’s poetics of memory. Landfester sees the logic of remembering in the descent and the paths that “became precipitous” for the friend and guide. She argues that the path of the textually designated topography does not follow the physical laws of the material world but follows instead the logic of remembering, anchored in the literary allusion to Faust and the primordial mothers. Within this logic of remembering, the center of the childhood space, the Tiergarten, emerges at the margins of the park where the villas of the neighborhood are located. In this dreamlike logic, the stairway to Benjamin’s family villa opens up without transition (Landfester 2009, 282). The figurative function of the labyrinth, signifying the process of the textual construction of memory, also becomes manifest when Benjamin refers to the traces of ink on the blotting paper of his school notebooks as labyrinths. Like Freud’s memory model of the “Mystic Writing Pad,” the paradigm of remembering here is based on the spots on the blotting paper, not the script in its entirety.17 17 In “A Note Upon The Mystic Writing Pad” (“Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock’”), Freud presents his mature formulation of his theory of memory, with “distortion” at the center. Freud understands “distortion” here as a legible substitute for a lasting memory trace that, not being available to consciousness, is not legible or perceptible. The short essay from 1925 describes an apparatus, the Wunderblock, or “Mystic Writing Pad,” that was a children’s toy at the time. Freud refers to this device as an exemplary model of the functioning of the psychic apparatus with respect to memory. Two thin sheets—the bottom sheet waxed, the top sheet cellophane—cover a wax surface. When written upon by a stylus, the cellophane surface retains the inscription. Peeling it away, however, results in erasing the script on its surface, for the lower wax sheet pulls out the impression. However, if one peels both sheets away and examines the waxed surface

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Karasu’s figure of the “mother” invites ever more complex readings. Seen in light of the Turkish linguistic usage of ana, Beyoğlu in the image of black waters represents a main, perhaps primal, artery of sorts, expressed through the maternal or feminine. The memories in Karasu’s Black Waters incessantly capture matrilineal figures, these being first and foremost the remembered child’s mother, then his aunt, maternal grandmother, and finally Adile, one of the Sakızağacı sisters. This second, affirmative reading does not cancel out the first, negative signification of Beyoğlu as a lağımlaranası (“mother of sewage” or “mother of black waters”), the lowest of the low, or the site of the abject. However, it opens up new pathways for interpreting Karasu’s venture into Beyoğlu. At the conclusion of his Altı Ay Bir Güz (Six Months One Autumn), another posthumous publication, Beyoğlu appears as backdrop. The author makes explicit the connection between his name and the milieu. A comparative reading of Black Waters and Six Months, One Autumn reveals that the textually constructed topography of Beyoğlu as black waters bears the autograph of their author. In the finale of the latter, we find the main character looking out from the window toward a panorama of Beyoğlu. Major landmarks of the area, such as Taksim Square, the entrance to Sıraselviler Street, and the newspaper stand at the curb toward the main street, İstiklâl Caddesi, are in view. The narrator states that the protagonist started to construct a fortress for himself here, at the upper section of Beyoğlu: As he used to watch the tide of crowds according to the times of the day, as he eyed acquaintances coming and going, as he turned off the lights at nights of blackout and, lifting the black curtains, tried to see and sense the places he knew behind a dark wall, how could he have known that he was in the process of seizing one of the main arteries of his life? He would start writing this black water only years later, far away from that fortress; his own creek that would flow into the legend of this black water. (My translation) (Gününe göre, günün değişik saatlerine göre kabarıp çekilen kalabalıkları, gelen ya da giden bildikleri gözledikçe, karartma gecelerinde ışıkları closely, it is possible to observe that traces remain of the inscriptions that have previously been written and erased. The wax surface presents to the close observer a network of countless traces spatially overlapping each other in chance configurations and that are “legible in certain lights.” (Freud 1994, 19:227-32; my special thanks to Scott Jenkins for explicating this model.)

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söndürüp kara perdeleri kaldırarak belli belirsiz ışıkların devindiği karanlık bir sıvanın altında bildiği yerleri görmeğe, sezmeğe çalıştıkça, yaşamının ana damarlarından birini ele geçirme hazırlığında olduğunu nasıl bilebilirdi? Yıllarca sonra, bu hisardan çok uzaklarda yazmağa başlayabilecekti bu karasuyu; bu karasunun söylencesine gelip katılacak kendi dereciğini.) (2002a, 83)

The inscription of Beyoğlu as black water functions as a dual signifier, containing both the place and the author’s signature, as illustrated through the image of writing as a current that would flow into the discourse of Beyoğlu. At the same time, black water becomes a code, signaling the narrator-author’s own belonging to the place as born and bred in Beyoğlu, and thus, his alterity. Furthermore, as in Benjamin’s memoirs, the space of memory in Mother of Black Waters appears as a cityscape beyond the logic of the physical world. Although some street names are given, the repetitive memory images describing the remembered child’s strolls through the streets with his mother suggest a dreamlike atmosphere. Crossing the threshold of a passage and passing the old buildings in the passageway with their angst-inducing dark basement dwellings behind guttered windows intensify this mode. As will be discussed later, this narrow arcade turns out to be a double dream landscape in that it also unfolds into a memory site of the mother (see Landfester 2009, 286). The above analysis has demonstrated that the “mother” (ana) in the title of Karasu’s Beyoğlu book and his namesake narrative in the volume acquires mythic proportions in both an affirmative and negative sense. On the one hand, it represents the vital center or primary artery of the city; on the other hand, coupled with “sewage” (lağım), it refers to all associations that have connected Beyoğlu in its discursive history with crime, prostitution, and the lowly. Yet, as we have seen, Karasu employs “sewage” or “black water” as a complex metaphor signifying not only wastewater but also his own signature. Benjamin’s A Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood also contain abundant allusions to various female figures that can be read as variations of the “mother.” The imposing market women at the Market Hall, whom Benjamin deems “priestesses of a venal Ceres” (2006, 362), and whom Landfester reads, in correlation with the “Mothers of all being,” as the earthly and secular representatives of the conjured up figures in the “Tiergarten” episode, are good examples. They exude “a mythologically

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colored erotics of fertility” (Landfester 2009, 286).18 As in Karasu’s Black Waters, the mother of the Benjaminian child stands out amidst other images of the “mother.”19 The female element in both authors, then, is woven into a rich network of signification. Through the title of his central story, “Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu,” Karasu’s memory narratives partake in the female principle. It is also important to recall here that Karasu’s title implies the discursive mythology of Beyoğlu, alluding to the construed nature of the place in its textual history. The author emphasizes this point in the above quote from Altı Ay Bir Güz, when speaking of the “legend of this black water.” For Edhem Eldem, the multitude of stereotypes and clichés used to describe the bygone coloration of Pera-Beyoğlu in Turkish discourse of the last three decades are intertwined with a “self-sustaining mythology of Pera and Galata” (2006b, 25). In his polemics against the nostalgia for Beyoğlu’s cosmopolitan past, Eldem argues that this celebratory approach is based on superficial and imprecise assumptions. Along the lines of this critique, Karasu thematizes precisely the myths that have shaped Beyoğlu’s identity in the collective imagination. These include not only the nostalgic projection of the old Pera, but also the negative associations which adhere to its identity. The construction “mother of black waters,” when read as sewage or wastewater, is part of such a myth. Significantly, Karasu names one of his texts in the Beyoğlu group “Bir Söylencedir Beyoğlu” (“Beyoğlu is a Legend”). However, as shown through my close reading of the title Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu, and by alluding to the conclusion of Altı Ay Bir Güz, which displays similar metaphors, Karasu weaves his Beyoğlu as a complex mesh of associations, implying negative as well as positive meanings. My analysis demonstrates that the metaphor of “black waters” as the main artery mirrors the process of writing. Referring to the general title of his work in progress, the narrator anticipates that the structure of the narrative would reflect the main idea implied in the heading “Mother of Black Waters.” This projection entails a thread, a kernel that would connect 18 The original reads as “mythologisch aufgeladene Fruchtbarkeitserotik” (Landfester 2009, 286). Allusions to brothels and whores in the vignette “Sexual Awakening” (“Erwachen des Sexus”) connect Benjamin’s Berlin to Karasu’s Beyoğlu. 19 See Landfester’s interpretation of the real mother figure in “Sexual Awakening” and “The Carousel” (“Das Karusell”) as representative of Jewishness (ibid., 286-87). Landfester also offers a compelling reading of these two vignettes in light of distortion by way of comparing the Gießener Fassung with the Final Version, in which the two vignettes appear in the addendum.

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the texts and incorporate each narrative in the next one. Here we encounter again the image of a flow, this time applied to the process of writing itself (1999b, 79). Thus, after having laid out the interpretive possibilities inherent in the title of the Beyoğlu works, we now return full circle to the author’s inscription of himself into his Beyoğlu through the image of sewage as black water, or kara su. This reading highlights the author’s construction of a space-based identity as a fundamental aspect of his representation of Beyoğlu. As stated earlier, even though Karasu never publicly proclaimed that he came from a minority family resident in Beyoğlu, the site remained a recurrent element in his oeuvre. Beyoğlu emerges time and again as the stage on which Karasu projects himself through his personae. At this point we can raise the question as to why we need to understand this self-inscription in relation to the author’s biography. Why does this matter?

The Decline of Cityscapes Beyoğlu has not vanished in the same sense as Benjamin’s Old Berlin-West neighborhood has. West End, where Benjamin spent the first ten years of his life, is part of the Berlin borough Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. The Benjamin family lived in several residences in this neighborhood. The identity of the borough as home to the upscale German Jewish bourgeoisie was transformed after the First World War, when it primarily became a modern business district. Skoggard illustrates the ruination and transformation of the old district by juxtaposing photos and maps of the old and new. Regarding the transformation of the Tiergarten area with its elegant villas, he states: Well before Berlin Childhood was written, the Tiergarten district had been largely ceded to government and diplomatic activity. In the late 1930s many of its houses would be torn down to make way for Hitler’s grandiose redesign (for “Germania”); most of the rest were destroyed by aerial bombardment in the last years of World War II. (2010, 186)

Today, some of the many streets mentioned in Berlin Childhood bear the same name as in Benjamin’s childhood. However, the apartment buildings and villas, where the family lived around the turn of the century, have all vanished. Berlin Childhood is full of nods to places and landmarks that form the cornerstones of memory. They include disparate sites such as the courtyards of Berlin’s Old West End, railroad embankments, the halls of

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the stock market, imperial panoramas, the Victory Column, statues in the Tiergarten, Market Hall, the Kaiser-Friedrichschule near Savignyplatz, the Anhalter Bahnhof (the former railway terminus), and Potsdamer Straße; the crossing of the Steglitzer and Genthiner streets, where Aunt Lehmann lived, and, finally, the maternal grandmother’s ostentatious apartment at Blumeshof 12, an unforgettable symbol of bourgeois security. Today many of these landmarks are gone, yet some have endured despite the forces of time and history. As Skoggard informs us, the Blumeshof did not escape the destruction of The Second World War.20 An aerial photograph of Berlin from 1943, printed in Skoggard’s text, reveals that the corner of the Genthiner Straße and Steglitzer Straße is still visible. Yet Skoggard states in his commentary that “[o]bliterated during World War II, this block of Steglitzer Straße no longer functions as a through street” (Skoggard 2010, 196-97). A photo on the same page illustrates this change. Benjamin’s fascination with the mythological statues in the Tiergarten leads him, in Skoggard’s words, to “making of it a night sky of memory” (189). We may extend this metaphor to other urban sites depicted in Berlin Childhood. These places of childhood, destroyed during Benjamin’s lifetime or thereafter, are inscribed in the text to form a map of memory. Looking at the urban development and cultural identity of Berlin’s West End in the 1920s provides an interesting comparison with the Beyoğlu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even though the borough of Charlottenburg underwent substantial urban development in the 1920s, the district’s fundamental character remained unchanged. It continued to be a predominantly middle-class residential area, including rental apartment buildings and upscale enclaves around the boulevard Kurfürstendamm. In the golden 20s, the western “city” also became a center for the arts, a hub of culture and commerce, drawing international crowds with its theaters, cafés, cabarets, hotels, and restaurants. Like its counterpart, the old Beyoğlu or Pera, Berlin-West also became an enclave for Russian refugees in the 1920s. As a result, the cosmopolitan district became the target of the antisemitism that was growing stronger throughout Germany. Immediately after the National Socialists seized power, Jews and Marxists were removed from the city and school administration of Charlottenburg. As in Benjamin’s childhood, the borough continued to contain Berlin’s largest demographics 20 “The Blumeshof (devastated in World War II) was laid out in the early 1860s as a large block of imposing apartment houses around an inner court (‘Hof ’) and named after the speculative builder who erected it” (Skoggard 2010, 219-21).

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of German Jewish residents.21 Thus, the neighborhood’s liveliest centers, such as Kurfürstendamm and Tauntzienstraße, were hit hard during the pogroms of 1933 and 1938. The destruction of the West End by National Socialists went from the devastation of its urban structures to the expulsion and murder of its Jewish population, and finally to its total obliteration in the war. Among the several memorials in place today, the ruins of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche are the most conspicuous. It should be noted that in the postwar period, Berlin’s Old West was rebuilt and revived relatively rapidly, and after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, it resumed its old identity as a center of arts, entertainment, and commerce, becoming the “Shop Window of the West.” After a drop in residents during the Cold War, the West City in the unified Germany is up and coming again.22 Even if Berlin’s West neighborhoods recaptured their former cultural traits, their demographic texture carries no traces of Benjamin’s childhood epoch. Likewise, although between 1950s and 1980s large portions of Istanbul’s Beyoğlu borough were erased to make way to highways and to “clean up” the red-light districts, Beyoğlu has regained its identity as a vibrant urban center. Like Berlin’s West End, it too aspires to mimic its past. The gentrification process that began in the 1980s under a progressive city government striving for historical preservation has aimed at returning to Beyoğlu its past identity as an emblem of diversity, openness, and Western-oriented culture. With its restored buildings on the main venue Istiklâl Caddesi, the former Grand’rue de Péra whose pompous façades adorn the street, renovated cafés, restaurants, and movie theaters, present-day Beyoğlu is a replica of its past. Yet, as indicated in the introduction, since the Taksim Gezi Park protest in the summer of 2013, Turkey’s ruling party has undertaken several steps toward changing the secular identity of Beyoğlu. Unlike the Old West End of Berlin, Beyoğlu’s topography was not physically erased through wars. However, as will be seen in chapter 4, three successive wars, the Balkan Wars (1912-13), the First World War (1914-18), and the Turkish War of Independence (1919-23), which led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, also resulted in the exodus of the non-Muslim 21 27,000 of the approximately 160,000 Jews of Berlin lived in Charlottenburg. See http:// www.berlin.de/ba-charlottenburg-wilmersdorf/bezirk/lexikon/geschichtecharlottenburg. html#08. 22 See ibid.

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population of Beyoğlu. Since Beyoğlu’s ethnic minorities almost disappeared, the architectural and cultural renewal points toward a lost past, without being capable of restoring its meaning, that is, the diverse social fabric that once defined Pera-Beyoğlu. The departure of Beyoğlu’s non-Muslim inhabitants during and after the wars and social transformations in the early twentieth century also set the stage for later migrations, which ensued either as an escape from discrimination and ruination, or were forced. Ethnic homogenization of the new Turkish nation was an intrinsic tenet of republican state ideology. Its implementation contributed from the outset to the erosion of the cosmopolitan character of Pera-Beyoğlu. I propose, then, to read Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives not from the vantage point of the contingent biographical, but rather from the necessary social irretrievability of the past, as Benjamin described it at the beginning of his Berlin Childhood. Although not as explicitly thematized as in Benjamin’s memoir, the theme of loss runs through the Beyoğlu stories. Accordingly, we may conclude that in his Black Waters Karasu presents, even if in a non-nostalgic mode, an elegy to Beyoğlu’s vanished past. The narrator of the central narrative “Mother of Black Waters” rejects precisely this possibility, namely, representing Beyoğlu as an elegy. After a self-reflexive introduction about the work at hand, “Mother of Black Waters,” a short and lyrically structured section, titled 1, follows: Beyoğlu is a legend. Exactly as Venice (too) is an elegy. Yet Beyoğlu should not be considered an elegy. Absolutely not. Beyoğlu is a legend, for those (too) who have experienced it. A legend singing of datedness, decay, loneliness.23 Venice Written thousands of times, its beauties praised, its maritime its pomp, filth, sublimity, shrewdness its gilding, its blue, green, red its mold, grayness, ashen color, as it goes down with its decaying foundations in putrid waters 23 The Turkish word “düşkünlük” is polysemic. Its meanings include, along with “decay,” “poverty,” “misery,” but also “affection,” “fondness,” and “addiction.”

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its golden reflection, with those days of its stuffy streets worse than the smell of excrement it is an elegy with thundering voice, at the side of a deceased who does not rise, inexhaustible; [an elegy] sung from the lips of death itself. In Beyoğlu there are Venetian graves (too). [And] those who speak the Venetian dialect, too. Still. (Bir söylencedir Beyoğlu. Nasıl ki Venedik (de) bir ağıttır. Beyoğlu’nu bir ağıt gibi düşünmemeli ama. Hiç düşünmemeli. Beyoğlu, onu yaşamış olanlar için (de) bir söylencedir. Bir geçmişliği, bir düşkünlüğü, bir yalnızlığı ırlayan bir söylence. Venedik binlerce kez yazılmış, övülmüş güzellikleri, kıyıcılığı tantanası, pasağı, yüceliği, kurnazlığı yaldızı, mavisi, yeşili, kırmızısı küfü, bozluğu, kurşun rengi, çürümüş sulardaki çürüyen temelleriyle altın parıltısı, havalandırılmamış sokaklarının dışkı kokusunu bile aratan günleriyle batarken en gür sesiyle bir ağıttır, kalkmaz, tükenmez bir ölünün başında; ölümün kendi ağzından yükselen Beyoğlu’nda Venedikli mezarları (da) vardır. Venedik ağzı konuşanlar da. Hâlâ.) (1999b, 79-80; indentations in the original)

Despite the differential comparison in the above lines, Beyoğlu’s elegiac nature is evoked in a double movement. First, in the initial negotiation of the three opening lines, the parenthetical “too” without its counterpart, the “yet” and “absolutely not” already imply that the narrator has considered the possibility of rendering Beyoğlu (or Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu) as elegy. Moreover, the piece ends surprisingly by fusing the images of Venice with that of Beyoğlu. Thus, reading the above section against the grain helps reveal the topoi of decline and loss that pertain to both cityscapes. Karasu establishes the analogy between Venice and Beyoğlu by way of introducing it and seemingly taking it back. The elegiac tone in Black Waters is subtle: it primarily concerns family losses, yet it also permeates the neighborhood.

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The sudden allusion to Venice within the Beyoğlu imagery functions as one of the multiple encoded references, signaling alterity. By way of making these codes blended and ambiguous, the author complicates the task of uncovering the socio-cultural identity of the represented family. Read as elegy, Black Waters not only conjures up the memory fragments of a family and a neighborhood, but also of an entire childhood universe.

Chapter 3

Incompleteness as Anti-Autobiography: The Production and Publication Histories of Benjamin’s and Karasu’s Memory Narratives

The Figure of Excavation This chapter further explores Benjamin’s and Karasu’s poetics of memory by focusing on the question of incompleteness that defines both authors’ representations of remembering. We have seen via interventions by critics such as Weigel, Richter, Eiland, and Szondi, that the inconclusive nature of Benjamin’s memory texts results from poetic as well as epistemological issues. In Ulrike Landfester’s formulation, the antisequential textual structure of Berlin Childhood is the expression of a specific poetics of remembering. She points to the thesis of Nicolas Pethes, who reads Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood as “a rejection of a poetics of continuity, based on the structure of remembering itself. . . . ” (“Absage an eine Poetik der Kontinuität”) (2009 265n6; Pethes 1999, 270). Taking the central feature of nonclosure as a point of departure, this chapter will continue drawing on approaches from recent Benjamin scholarship. Among the categories, examined by these readings, the allegory of “excavation,” used by Benjamin to describe

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the work of remembering, proves especially relevant for the present study. In chapter 1, Gerhard Richter’s and Carol Jacobs’ readings of memory as excavation were introduced. Here, Jacobs’ exegesis of Benjamin’s allegory will offer additional insights to his construction of memory. As we shall see, this model is intrinsically linked to the inconclusive mode of memory pieces in Benjamin and Karasu.1 Benjamin uses various metaphors in order to depict the memory models he employs in his Berlin memoirs, including both A Berlin Chronicle, the unfinished precursor of Berlin Childhood, and Berlin Childhood itself. The figures of “snapshot” (Momentaufnahme), “labyrinth,” “maze,” “blotting pages,” “fan” (Labyrinthe, Irrgärten, Löschblätter, Fächer), “threshold” (Schwelle), and “passage [arcade]” (Passage) aptly convey Benjamin’s endeavor of writing on memory topographically. Indeed, the critics introduced above expand on one or several of these categories in their explication of Benjamin’s memory model. Among these metaphors, that of excavation stands out as a central paradigm that resonates in Karasu’s incomplete Beyoğlu project. Benjamin illustrates the workings of memory in light of this model in a passage in Berliner Chronik (1991b, 486-87; 1996a 611).2 For Benjamin, memory (Gedächtnis) signifies a medium, rather than an instrument, for obtaining knowledge about the past. Jacobs’ “topographical” reading of memory in Benjamin suggests that this medium is expressed spatially as an “arena” (Schauplatz). Accordingly, remembering is a process akin to the workings of archeology: It [memory] is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. (1996a, 611) 1 Critical approaches that are especially informative for my framework, along with works already referenced such as those by Weigel, Richter, Jacobs, Pethes, Landfester, and Huyssen, include: Anja Lemke’s study on Benjamin’s memory texts, Beatrice Hanssen’s reading of image, and Leena A. Petersen’s examination of the poetic figure of the “in-between space” in Benjamin. Clearly, this selection represents only a small segment of the rich corpus of Benjamin scholarship. However, because the majority of these contributions were published in the new millennium and deal with the otherwise lessexplored Berlin memoirs, they fulfill a representative function in the present analysis. Anna Stüssi’s book Erinnerung an die Zukunft (Remembrance of the Future) from the 1970s provides a good example of an earlier study on Berlin Childhood. Stüssi presents an extensive close reading, which includes a section on image and distortion. 2 A variation of this short piece has also been included under the title “Ausgraben und Erinnern” in the compilation Denkbilder, Gesammelte Schriften (Benjamin 1991a, 4.1:400-1). In English, it is titled “Excavation and Memory” (Benjamin 1996c, 2:576).

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(Es [das Gedächtnis] ist das Medium des Erlebten wie das Erdreich das Medium ist, in dem die toten Städte verschüttet liegen. Wer sich der eigenen verschütteten Vergangenheit zu nähern trachtet, muß sich verhalten wie ein Mann, der gräbt.) (1991b, 486)

The spatial analogy that Benjamin establishes between memory and excavation illustrates the self-reflexive machinery underlying the workings of remembering. The matter of remembrance is for Benjamin “only a deposit, a stratum,” just as the soil at the surface of the ground covers “the real treasure hidden within the earth” (1996a, 611).3 Interestingly, Benjamin at first constructs a hierarchy between the superficial and the genuine, the mere surface and true wealth below. However, the expectation that we will hold this treasure in its wholeness is undermined soon in two ways. First, Benjamin focuses from the outset on the method rather than the product. Thus, by depicting remembering through phrases such as, “to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil” and “ the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam,” Benjamin draws the attention to the process itself (611). Moreover, the matter of remembrance constitutes the state of affairs, the context of a sought for memory. The “matter” (Sachverhalt), such as a childhood in Berlin or Beyoğlu, offers only the conditions of the experience that is contained in Benjamin’s “genuine reminiscences.” The distinction, then, resembles Roland Barthes’ polar opposites of studium and punctum in his Camera Lucida, as we shall see in conjunction with Karasu’s Black Waters. Like studium, the matter gives the context, but not the real essence. On the other hand, what Benjamin designates as “genuine reminiscences,” dug up from under the earth, turn out to be merely fragments that have lost their link to a larger whole. In Benjamin’s words, these memories are “the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the sober rooms of our later insights” (611).4 These crucial lines illustrate the poetics of memory that motivate Benjamin’s Berlin pieces and Karasu’s mnemonic fragments in his Beyoğlu 3 “die wahren Werte, die im Erdinnern stecken” (Benjamin 1991b, 486). 4 “die Bilder, die aus allen früheren Zusammenhängen losgebrochen als die Kostbarkeiten in den nüchternen Gemächern unserer späten Einsicht—wie Trümmer oder Torsi in der Galerie des Sammlers—stehen” (ibid.). See the connection Isenberg establishes between Benjamin’s notion of memory, the trope of collection, and “redemptive criticism” (1999, 131).

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narratives. They thus offer an explanation as to why both authors evade a linear narrative that would provide a coherent life story with a subject at the center. For, as Benjamin states, the images that form authentic memories stand solitary, disconnected from earlier associations. The matter that holds them buried gives away the overall context but does not reconstitute the past experience into wholeness. Consequently, when transforming the segments in A Berlin Chronicle into the vignettes that make up Berlin Childhood, Benjamin rounded them off. Still, despite their inherent completion, there are no transitions between the vignettes that would have propelled forward the narration of a life. Like the images in the quote above from the excavation passage, the vignettes in Berlin Childhood lack the web of earlier associations that surround the past experience, and thus they are unmoored from one another. The proximity of Benjamin’s definition of “genuine reminiscence” as a severed image and its inscription in the structure and mode of the Berlin memoirs manifests clearly the epistemological foundations of memory in his work. The antisequential structure of Berlin Childhood becomes the expression of a specific poetics of remembering, understood as “processual” (prozessual) (Landfester 2009, 265; Pethes 1999, 268). Pethes perceptively argues that Benjamin’s constant rewriting and reorganization of the vignettes that comprise Berlin Childhood mirrors the relentless digging with the spade, unearthing new spots and excavating deeper at the old ones (see also Eiland 2006, viii-ix). Benjamin’s emphasis on the process of remembering rather than its object, or that which is remembered, is set forth forcefully in the final statements of the excavation piece in images such as “the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam” or “this dark joy of the place of the finding, as well,” instead of only the inventory of what has been discovered (1996a, 611). The same dark joy (“dies dunkle Glück”—1991b, 486), then, accompanies the textual replicating of the workings of memory, leaving the memoirs without closure, without an ultimate teleological meaning. We shall see that a similar impetus of seeking underlies Karasu’s memory pieces of Beyoğlu. Benjamin concludes: Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers. (1996a, 611) (Das vergebliche Suchen gehört dazu so gut wie das glückliche und daher muß die Erinnerung nicht erzählend, noch viel weniger berichtend vorgehn

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sondern im strengsten Sinne episch und rhapsodisch an immer andern Stellen ihren Spatenstich versuchen, in immer tieferen Schichten an den alten forschend.) (1991b, 487)

Benjamin’s emphasis on the “rhapsodic” and “epic” modes of remembering suggests an emotionally charged process that is also long-winded. These genres exclude a rationally organized, cohesive narrative with a beginning and end. As Jacobs explains: All this, it would seem, is an image for the manner in which the past must and must not be told—neither as conventional flowing narrative nor, certainly, as report, but as epic and rhapsody, literary forms that marked their own ruptures for Benjamin. (1996, 108)

The nonclosure in Benjamin’s metaphor is compellingly laid out in Jacobs’ reading of “Darstellung” (representation, presentation, performance) itself as the subject matter of Benjamin’s memoirs, and in particular, of A Berlin Chronicle. In order to explicate the discontinuous mode in A Berlin Chronicle, Jacobs employs a concept, coined by Benjamin to describe his method in The Origin of the German Mourning Play (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels), “Darstellung as digression (Umweg).” Because the representation of remembering proceeds through the method of “digression, detour, and ruse” (Jacobs 1996, 96), the expected report or inventory, as Benjamin mentions in “Excavation and Memory,” is withdrawn continuously. As a result of this, Jacobs argues, “Berlin Chronicle is performed as a collection of disconnected snapshots (Augenblicksaufnahmen)” (96). Benjamin’s distinction between memory and autobiography illustrates well the disjointed status of memory: Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. And these quite certainly do not, even for the Berlin years that I am exclusively concerned with here. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration. (Benjamin 1996a, 612)5

5 Jacobs’ translation of this passage reads as follows: “Memories even when they go on extensively do not always present [darstellen] an autobiography. And here it is certainly not one, not even of the Berlin years, the ones in question [Rede]. For autobiography has to do with time, with lapse [Ablauf], and with what makes up the continuous flow of life.

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(Erinnerungen, selbst wenn sie ins Breite gehen, stellen nicht immer eine Autobiographie dar. Und dieses hier ist ganz gewiß keine, auch nicht für die berliner Jahre, von denen hier ja einzig die Rede ist. Denn die Autobiographie hat es mit der Zeit, dem Ablauf und mit dem zu tun, was den stetigen Fluß des Lebens ausmacht. Hier aber ist von einem Raum, von Augenblicken und vom Unstetigen die Rede. Denn wenn auch Monate und Jahre hier auftauchen, so ist es in der Gestalt, die sie im Augenblick des Eingedenkens haben.) (Benjamin 1991b, 488)

In her explication of the above, Jacobs emphasizes that A Berlin Chronicle, which was conceived as the history of his relationship with Berlin, is not a chronicle in the dictionary sense of the term (1996, 96; see also Eiland 2006, vii). She sees in the seemingly extraneous factors that may have impeded Benjamin from writing an autobiography, such as “[t]he impossibility of chronological certainty in the biographical facts, the problematic continuity of the passages, the question of the lost page—” (95), a pattern related to Benjamin’s model of memory. Jacobs documents through the correspondence between Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, the first editor of A Berlin Chronicle, the confusion over the production history of Benjamin’s two Berlin memoirs. Not only was the chronology of the composition of the pieces uncertain, when Benjamin was reworking passages from A Berlin Chronicle into the vignettes in Berlin Childhood, the order of the pages was also uncertain (95). Jacobs sums up this (strategic) confusion under the metaphor of “maze,” calling A Berlin Chronicle, after a phrase of Benjamin, “‘the reading labyrinth’ (4.1:278) that is at once Benjamin’s life and text” (95).6

Production Histories Benjamin’s subversion of conventional autobiography in his Berlin memoirs, as shown by Jacobs, enables us to explore Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives as an equally complex “reading labyrinth.” Like Benjamin’s A Berlin Chronicle, Karasu’s Black Waters remained an unfinished manuscript; in a vein similar to the publication history of the individual vignettes in Benjamin’s second memory book, Berlin Childhood, there is uncertainty about the sequential Here it is a matter of space, moments, the discontinuous. For even if months and years emerge here, it is in the figure they have in the moment of remembering” (1996, 95-96). 6 The original term is “Leselabyrinth” (see Benjamin 1991a, 278).

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order of Karasu’s Beyoğlu anthology. Moreover, the discontinuity of the passages within each narrative in Black Waters recalls the questions Jacobs discusses in the context of the two Berlin books by Benjamin. The complexities inherent in the production histories of Benjamin’s and Karasu’s memory texts intensify due to their posthumous compilation into book form. Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, for example, was first published as a book in 1950 under Theodor W. Adorno’s guidance. Eiland describes the confusion surrounding the publication history of Berlin Childhood around 1900 as follows: The texts in these posthumous book publications were arranged by the respective editors. [Here, the translator refers to the 1955 and 1972 editions.] Only with the discovery in 1982, in Paris, of the manuscript of the 1938 revision, the so-called Final Version (“Fassung letzter Hand”), edited and published in Volume 7 of the Gesammelte Schriften in 1989, do we have a textual arrangement by the author himself. (The recently accessible “Gießen Version,” published in 2000 by Suhrkamp Verlag and dated December 1932-January 1933, also contains, it would appear, Benjamin’s own arrangement of the pieces, which, allowing for the absence of pieces composed after January 1933, and for the pieces later cut, is quite close in sequence to the 1938 arrangement.) (2006, ix-x)

To be sure, the bewildering difference in the order and number of the vignettes that comprise Berlin Childhood, and the lack of absolute authoritative certainty, is in part due to the historical contingencies that forced Benjamin into exile and untimely death, without his being able to give his memory pieces their ultimate organization. The compilation of Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts, along with other manuscripts, connected, some inherently and others loosely, with the “core” Beyoğlu material, reveals a similar question as to the discontinuity of the passages in Benjamin’s two Berlin memoirs. The editor of Karasu’s posthumous works, late critic and author Füsun Akatlı, explains in her introduction to Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu titled, “Gün Battı, Yazık, Arkalarında” (“Alas, the Sun Set Behind Them”), that she named the book after the cardinal story “Mother of Black Waters.” Akatlı writes that this text was the “big project” for Karasu, one he abandoned when working on other books and revisited time and again, and whose notions or segments are dispersed all over his oeuvre. Akatlı adds that she and Karasu jokingly referred to this project as the “opus magnum” (1999, 9), an open-ended work in

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progress in line with Benjamin’s notion of incompleteness. Karasu had entrusted his literary legacy to Akatlı long before he was close to his death. From a suitcase and a travel bag of manuscripts, mostly handwritten, she put together two volumes for publication. One of them was Lağımlaranası ya da Beyoğlu (Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu); the other, Öteki Metinler (Other Texts), a collection that contains Karasu’s essays and notes on otherness. As Akatlı informs us, she undertook her editorial work under strict adherence to Karasu’s own directions, emphasizing that her main task consisted of comparing and choosing between existing versions of a given manuscript, connecting the pieces, ordering them in sections—in short, creating an editorial montage. Karasu’s sentence structure and punctuation were left intact (Akatli 1999, 11). Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu contains three parts. The first, comprising the Beyoğlu stories, is given the same name as the title of the book and contains four texts: “Beyoğlu Üzerine Metin” (“Text on Beyoğlu”), “Bir Söylencedir Beyoğlu” (“Beyoğlu is a Legend”), “Lağımlaranası” (“Mother of Black Waters”), and “Hiç Yoktan Bir Ölüm Daha” (“Another Death out of the Blue”). Akatlı notes that, since the last story is organically connected with the other three Beyoğlu texts, she decided to include it in part one, along with the main Beyoğlu stories. Narrated through the point of view of an old and ailing character, whom I read as the mother figure from the main narratives of Black Waters, “Another Death out of the Blue” takes us back in a dreamlike interior monologue to a childhood at a Beyoğlu apartment and its courtyard around the turn of the twentieth century. Through this seminal text, Karasu doubles childhood as reminiscence. Thus, with its journey toward further depths of the past this narrative forms an inherent component of Karasu’s unfinished “magnum opus.” Akatlı’s comments on Karasu’s posthumous fiction, which she gathered in part two of Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu, offer illuminating insights for our study. She informs us that one among them, titled “İsabey’den Fragman” (“Fragment from İsabey”), would have been a main channel of the “magnum opus.” Akatlı suggests that this narrative and “Ölümün Avlusu” (“The Courtyard of Death”) from part two of Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu, are closely tied to Karasu’s last two books (1999, 9-10).7

7 They are Altı Ay Bir Güz (Six Months One Autumn) and Narla İncire Gazel (Ode to the Pomegranate and Fig).

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The production and publication history of Karasu’s literary bequest, as outlined above, demonstrates that incompleteness is in part related to the fact that the author died before having worked the multiple versions and parts of his “opus magnum” on Beyoğlu into a cohesive whole. Therefore, Akatlı uses the term “montage” when describing her editorial assembly of the manuscript parts (11). However, as in the case with Benjamin’s Berlin memoirs, the incompleteness of Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives points toward further implications beyond biographical facts. At this point, Enis Batur’s compelling commentary on this issue will help elaborate on the question at hand.

Incompleteness: “A Complex Inhibition with Multiple Justifications” In his short essay, published in a commemorative anthology on Karasu shortly after the author’s death, Batur offers vital insights into the Beyoğlu narratives.8 He establishes a relationship between Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu and Karasu’s Altı Ay Bir Güz (Six Months One Autumn). We should remind ourselves here of the close reading, offered in chapter 2, which suggested that the conclusion of Altı Ay Bir Güz bears the signature of the author. This novella-length text consists of loosely linked parts and was the last one that Karasu requested to be published after his death. Pointing to Altı Ay Bir Güz as the final piece Karasu worked on, Batur states that there was actually another project informing this one, one that the author would never have been able to finish even if he had lived for many more years: He carried Lağımlaranası (Mother of Black Waters) since ’75, developed and expanded it in his mind, in a sense he was planning the whole as a search for his own “lost time.” . . . I don’t know why, but I always had the opinion that he would never be able to finish “Lağımlaranası.” . . . To be honest, I had no idea, how much he had written of it in nearly twenty years; I used to compare this process to the course of The Man without Qualities: one of those books

8 To my knowledge, this is the only critical discussion of Lağımlaranası (Mother of Black Waters) in Karasu scholarship, aside from editor Akatlı’s Introduction, “Gün Battı, Yazık, Arkalarında,” to the book form. Batur approaches Lağımlaranası more as an authorial project, rather than examining the Beyoğlu texts, as configured as a book by Akatlı.

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that grow uninterruptedly, that have no finale, one of those vast books that makes its author realize himself that there cannot be a finale. (1997, 160)9

The parallel Batur draws here between Karasu’s two posthumously published works is intriguing. Batur does not spell out the nature of the connection between “Lağımlaranası” and Altı Ay Bir Güz. I propose that the interconnectedness of these two works is based on Karasu’s continuous concern with Beyoğlu as a mnemonic site. “Six Months One Autumn” entails memory fragments of an embedded first-person narrator, regressing toward his first stages of perceiving the world and articulating it through baby language. Several intertextual references to Black Waters and its remembered child appear throughout the narrative. However, as previously indicated, the most striking instance occurs at the end, when Beyoğlu suddenly appears as a spatial vision before the narrator’s and reader’s eyes. Batur’s keen grasp of the impossibility of closure in Lağımlaranası (Mother of Black Waters) resonates well with my reading of Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives.10 We have seen through critical approaches to the paradigm of remembering in Benjamin that memories resurface as fragments, detached from their context, and that the emphasis is laid on the search rather than the finding. Incompleteness, pertaining to Karasu’s work in progress of two decades on Beyoğlu which was never to be finished in Batur’s assessment, thus illustrates, in tandem with the Berlin memoirs of Benjamin, the fragmented nature of memory. As we have seen, the textual presentation of remembering entails a continuous process mimicking the act of reminiscing. Karasu’s persistent return to the mnemonic site Pera-Beyoğlu, then, can be compared to the digging man in Benjamin’s figure of remembering, who would put his spade to fresh spots in the soil, but also return to the same ones in order to unearth deeper layers. With this model of remembering in mind, Batur’s above statement on incompleteness presents a crucially important reading of memory in 9 The original passage reads: “‘Lağımlaranası’nı 75’ten başlayarak taşıdı, kafasında geliştirdi ve genişletti, bir bakıma kendi ‘Yitirilmiş Zaman’ının peşine düşüşü olarak tasarlıyordu bütünü. . . . Neden bilmem, ‘Lağımlaranası’nı hiçbir zaman bitiremeyeceği kanısında oldum hep. . . . Açıkçası, yaklaşık yirmi yılda ne kadarını yazdığı hakkında hiçbir fikrim yoktu; gidişi(ni) ‘Niteliksiz Adam’ın gidişine benzetiyordum kafamda: Durmadan büyüyen, finali olmayan, bir finalinin olamayacağını bir noktadan sonra yazarının da gördüğü uçsuz bucaksız kitaplardan biri” (Batur 1997, 160). Translations of Batur are mine. 10 Batur’s reference to the title here should be understood as to the whole Beyoğlu project in progress.

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Karasu. Although Batur sees biographical obstacles in play, such as a slowing down of the author’s creativity when compared with his younger years, his argument nevertheless assumes the idea of incompleteness, as discussed in this chapter. Perhaps more significantly, however, Batur hints at a further dimension of incompleteness in Karasu. This brings us to the second component of my hypothesis, that is, the question of Karasu’s apprehension or restraint in naming the memories set in Beyoğlu as belonging to an ethnically other past. Since this past implicates the author’s own life story, reading Karasu’s relentless interest in Beyoğlu against his actual biographical roots in Pera-Beyoğlu becomes plausible. Clearly, Batur’s break from the taboo surrounding Karasu’s ethnic background is a rare moment in Karasu criticism. He readdresses the question of incompleteness, this time as stemming from anxiety, hesitation, and avoidance. Batur locates such “writer’s block” primarily in Karasu’s concern with form, with large parts of the Beyoğlu project composed as independent narratives—hence the lack of a center—and the author’s intention to merge them into a whole later. According to this view, it is as if Karasu had preferred a mentally completed project that did not become materialized as an incomplete book. Beside this problem of fragmentation, however, Batur also points to the author’s ethno-cultural background as one possible cause of the nonclosure of the Beyoğlu book. He states: We often talked about this issue of fear. When I used to ask half seriously, “is it because of Jewishness?” he once (in the ’70s) said “it is not,” after years the answer amounted to “who knows, maybe.” It couldn’t have had a single cause anyway. It was impossible not to notice that there was a complex inhibition with multiple justifications. (1997, 161, my emphasis)11

I should note here that Batur’s question regarding “Jewishness” implies a pun, based on the antisemitic Turkish cliché “korkak Yahudi” (coward Jew). Thus, when Batur asks Karasu whether his fear or anxiety stems from “Jewishness,” he suggests on the one hand (albeit ironically) that, as in the racist phrase “coward Jew,” Karasu may have been too timid to overcome his writer’s block and bring the work to completion. On the other hand, the mention of the phrase alludes to Karasu’s half-Jewish background, implying 11 “Bu korku hikâyesini baştan beri sık sık konuştuyduk onunla. Yarı şaka yarı ciddi ‘yahudilikten mi?’ diye sorduğumda ‘değil,’ dediydi bir seferinde (70’lerde), yıllar sonra ‘kim bilir, olabilir de’ ye geldi. Bir tek nedeni olamazdı zaten, karmaşık gerekçeli bir tutukluk olduğunu farketmemek elde miydi?” (ibid., 161).

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that the author may have been anxious about his ethnicity, that is, representing Beyoğlu’s ethno-cultural alterity to which he himself belonged. Taking on Batur’s idea that incompleteness is “a complex inhibition with multiple justifications” on the author’s part, my reading of Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts includes the author’s ethno-cultural background as a key moment in his construction of place and self. Departing from Batur’s suggestion of evasion via his intimation of the “coward Jew,” however, I argue that Karasu’s narrativization of a childhood in Beyoğlu entails a self-confrontation. By hiding and uncovering the ethno-cultural markers that constitute the self as well as the site, Karasu employs a strategy that propels the Beyoğlu narratives forward rather than blocking them. Reading these narratives as an ensemble, as I undertake in this study, reveals the leitmotifs that hold the relatively independent stories together. Ethno-cultural indicators play an important role in such an interweaving. While I agree with Batur that the Beyoğlu project lacked a center (which led to its incompletion), I would propose a corrective to this statement: through the family stories pertaining to his past in Beyoğlu, Karasu’s narrator clearly displays an urge to expose the minority identity of his child-subject. Yet, due to both psycho-biographical elements and Karasu’s poetics that evades a referential narrative, the inhibition Batur alludes to sets in. The psycho-biographical elements are related to Karasu’s self-fashioning as a Turkish writer, his self-assimilation into the dominant Turkish culture, and his public silence regarding his ethno-cultural minority background. The nationalist socio-cultural climate during the childhood and formation years of the author implied the official as well as unofficial discrimination of the already diminished ethnic and religious minorities of the new republican state. This context elucidates the conflicted discourse of Karasu’s Beyoğlu-narrator, which oscillates between covering and uncovering. It is precisely at the intersection of these opposing urges that something akin to a center of the Beyoğlu project can be discerned. The trope of return, as discussed in chapter 1, demonstrates that the Beyoğlu stories unfold from the vantage point of a sort of recognition, occasioned by the mnemonic place of childhood. While Karasu’s modernist and postmodernist strategies of doubling the authorial and narrative positions are of interest per se, I want to focus on another aspect of this playful interaction between the diegetic and meta-narrative elements. As will be examined later in greater detail through Paul Ricoeur’s explication of the term “recognition,” the act of recognizing entails a search for that which has been

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lost. However, transcending the cognitive dimension, the act also carries in it ethical and existential implications, as in the ancient Greek concept of anagnorisis, or late uncovering of truth. By way of unearthing the lost-belonging to Beyoğlu, or the Beyoğlulu identity, of the narrator, whom Karasu has established almost as a double, such recognition replaces the absent center of Black Waters. Finally, yet another critical vantage point for understanding the paradigm of incompleteness in Karasu is offered in Jale Parla’s study on the figure of the author and metamorphosis in the Turkish novel. In Parla’s typology, the author-narrator characters in Karasu fall into the category of the unsuccessful, passive, incomplete specimen. Parla argues that we encounter these types in other representative novels of Turkish modernity, such as in texts by Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, and Orhan Pamuk. In her reading of Karasu’s novel Night (Gece) as a dystopian narrative, Parla underscores the theme of the complicity of language and the work of art with power structures. In Night, Karasu juxtaposes the notion of the incomplete, or the draft, against the completed work of fiction (Parla 2011, 9-34, 206-8; Karasu 1985, 178-79 and 1994b, 103). However, the boundaries between these remain vague. While Parla’s approach differs from Batur’s and mine, as discussed in this section, it provides for the reader of Excavating Memory an engaging critical trajectory to examine incompleteness in Black Waters from a novel angle.

Reminiscences of a Beyo˘g lulu In Streets of Memory, an anthropological study on the formerly multicultural Bosphorus neighborhood Kuzguncuk, Amy Mills underscores the importance of belonging to a place in Turkish identity construction. The remembered child in Black Waters is a Beyoğlulu, a true native of the place, comparable to the regional self-definition of the natives of Kuzguncuk, the Kuzguncuklus, in Mills’ book. Reflecting on the interweaving of place and identity, Amy Mills writes: One of the first Turkish words I learned was “Nerelisiniz?” Turks ask, “Where are you from?” almost before they ask anything else about any new person they meet for the first time: to figure out who someone is, people ask about where. The first reason to ask “Nerelisiniz?” is to discover where a person’s family originates or where a person grew up. The answer expresses a

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personal place identity with a special suffix (-lu/-lü/-lı) after the place name. (2010, 1)

Just as Walter Benjamin spent his childhood in the Old Berlin-West, Bilge Karasu grew up in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district. In line with Mills’ framework, Karasu becomes not only an İstanbullu, but also, in more local terms, a Beyoğlulu—someone rooted in Beyoğlu. When Benjamin places himself, or the remembered child of his memoirs, in the socio-cultural topography of Berlin’s upper-class Jewish neighborhoods, he confirms the associative web between place and identity, as expressed in Mills’ suffix “lu/lü/li.” Can such an association be discerned in Karasu’s evocation of old Beyoğlu, the site of the remembered childhood? A major task for my study, then, revolves around this suffix “lu,” signifying belonging. A further reflection on the notion Beyoğlulu leads us to other designations related to the milieu’s multiethnic past, when the area was home to the Levantine colony, the hybridized Frenk (Frenkish, European) settlers, and to native non-Muslim minorities of the Ottoman Empire. Oliver Jens Schmitt offers a thorough insight into the names used to describe the (Catholic) European settlers of Pera: these often interchangeable names include, in Schmitt’s German rendering, “Franke,” “Lateiner,” “Perapolitani,” “Levantiner,” and finally, since the nineteenth century, “Perote” (2005, 56-58).12 The term “Perote,” coined by Western travelers and writers, was used in contemporaneous representations of Pera. Being derived from the name of the neighborhood, “Perote” evokes all the connotations relating to the mixed and fluid identities that made up the locale’s social fabric. Our inquiry is predominantly concerned with Pera-Beyoğlu in the first half of the twentieth century, as represented in Karasu’s memory texts. Thus, a construction such as “Peran” might better convey the sense of “Beyoğlulu,” distinct from the historically defined term “Perote.” Clearly, “Beyoğlulu” is an inclusive concept, embracing Turks, ethnic minorities, and Western expatriates—in short, anyone who has become a native of the neighborhood. “Peran,” on the other hand, resonates with the old non-Muslim multiethnic identity of the neighborhood and can be tentatively employed to evoke that sense, without being restricted to the narrower meaning of “Perote” as 12 Schmitt also refers to eighteenth-century clerical sources that define “Perote” as the Catholic inhabitant of Constantinople’s Pera district (2005, 56). See also Eldem 2006a and Ortaylı 2006 (Eldem, Ortaylı, and other contributors to the book Avrupalı mı Levanten mi? [2006] emphasize the ambiguities and shifting definitions of “Levantine”), and Akın 1998 (97).

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“Levantine.” To sum up, the signifier “Beyoğlu” has implied various modes of heterogeneity from the beginning of its history. It is in light of such a rich associative network that I propose to read the depiction of this enclave in Karasu’s collection, that is, with all the connotations reverberating in the name of the place. To be sure, Karasu’s remembered child, construed as a Beyoğlu local, cannot be expressly taken to represent Karasu’s own childhood. Like Benjamin’s problematization of autobiography, Karasu’s poetics of memory complicates an unmediated correspondence between author and the subject of the remembered childhood. Furthermore, the narratives in Black Waters proceed in disparate genres, including childhood memories as well as stories about other Beyoğlu families. These fragmented pieces are intertwined with the narrator’s essayistic musings. Yet the child-subject of Karasu’s Beyoğlu stories is undoubtedly a Beyoğlulu, a native of the district, like the author himself, who grew up there as the son of a non-Muslim family descended from mixed ethno-cultural backgrounds. Despite Karasu’s resistance to writing a conventional autobiography, Black Waters deliberately blurs the line between fact and fiction. In reference to Altı Ay Bir Güz, Batur argues that Karasu shows the man through, and hides him behind, the letters, just as in a shadow play: “Autobiographic slices and fictional layers merge more conspicuously in this text, even though Bilge was never for separating life from writing in a clear-cut way” (1997, 161).13 The biographical background, which remained a self-imposed taboo in the perception of the author’s public persona, remains a central concern of my thesis. Despite Karasu’s self-fashioning as a writer in and of the Turkish language, close analysis of reminiscences in Black Waters discerns textual markers that unmistakably, even if elusively, suggest Beyoğlu as a minority space with its own idioms and cultures. Through these ciphers, Karasu codes what I would call a Beyoğlulu, or Peran, identity, in which the remembered child of the Beyoğlu narratives takes part. It is important to stress here that, through these markers, Karasu conveys the neighborhood’s bygone character as the abode of the Jews and Christians of Istanbul only by way of indirection. The few episodic stories besides the familial ones move around Turkish names, as if to cover their Jewish and Christian 13 “Yaşamöyküsel çeşitlemelerle kurmaca tabakaları biraz daha belirgin biçimde kaynaşıyor bu metinde, gerçi Bilge hayatı yazıdan bıçakla ayırma yanlısı hiçbir zaman olmamıştı” (Batur 1997, 161). Batur adds that in Six Months One Autumn the author has shifted his perspective to a different point in comparison to his other narratives.

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counterparts, of which there were so many in Beyoğlu. These contradictory narrative threads create a tension between revealing the childhood neighborhood qua minority space and taking back this intimation by focusing on Turkish names. This narrative ambiguity presents an obstacle for any attempt at reading the Beyoğlu stories as referential representation, without canceling out the realist mode completely. As in Batur’s formula, “a complex inhibition with multiple justifications” seems to be at work here (Batur 1997, 161). Revisiting the question of fact and fiction in Karasu’s writing adds to our understanding of Beyoğlu as a space of alterity in Black Waters. As already discussed, the proximity Karasu establishes between his real-life biography and that of his first-person narrator complicates the separation of fact and fiction, provoking the reader to connect the Peran component of the voice recollecting its childhood to Karasu, the creator of this voice. Here, we should recall Batur’s comment that “Six Months One Autumn” hides and uncovers the man behind the letters. Karasu achieves this ambiguity through several devices, above all a playful self-referentiality. Like the author Karasu, the narrator of Black Waters is working on a book on Beyoğlu. While its main body is yet to be written, the narratives we are reading in Black Waters turn out to be the fragments of the book. Black Waters contains several references to the author’s “real life,” such as the titles of Karasu’s books, names of factual literary writers, and details about the deaths of family members that happen to coincide with their factual counterparts. These indications clearly signal how the trajectories of selfhood representing the narrator and the author Karasu intersect.14 Notwithstanding the poetic disconnect between traditional autobiography and fiction in Benjamin’s and Karasu’s memory texts, I argue that Karasu holds the selves of author and narrator deliberately close to one another, as if leading his reader by way of this proximity toward the 14 The following examples help elucidate Karasu’s playful self-references. In “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the narrator states that his mother did not die in her own bed, but “elsewhere,” at a friend’s home, where they had sought refuge from their own freezing cold apartment in that bitter winter in the early 1980s in Ankara (Karasu, 1999b, 69-70). In fact, Bilge Karasu’s mother died in Füsun Akatlı’s home, who hosted mother and son Karasu. In the same narrative, Karasu’s tomcat Bibik who was a major actor in their household, is mentioned twice by his name (39). In the text “Mother of Black Waters,” we find a reference to the Uyar couple (the poet Turgut Uyar and his wife, the literary author Tomris Uyar) and to Karasu’s fiction Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi (The Garden of Departed Cats) (1991, 89).

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disclosure of a deeply covered layer of identity. We may then conclude that the “real-life” correspondences between the author and his narrator as an adult, speaking from a present-time of narration, bestow authenticity on the childhood memories. By merging himself with his double, author Karasu bonds with a Beyoğlulu identity, thus transcending the inhibition that Batur depicts. This striving for authenticity is a decisive component of Karasu’s Beyoğlu project despite deliberate ambiguities, contradictions, and indeterminacies surrounding identities in Black Waters. The moment of truth, or anagnorisis, implies a double signification: it propels the narrator’s writing on Beyoğlu while also shedding light on the impetus that keeps the author persistently engaged in telling the story of Beyoğlu. The narrator’s statement that he has carried the unwritten text of Beyoğlu in his mind, in his heart indicates the urgency of the work. By way of calling up ethno-cultural difference without naming it at his narrator’s return to Beyoğlu, Karasu hints toward a powerful force underlying the intense attachment: the author makes the Beyoğlu narratives unfold through the dual urge to bring out what has been unspoken and simultaneously keeping it untold. The author-narrator’s personal and familial history and the collective identity of the bygone Perans are rendered through this dual strategy of concealing and enunciating. Taking Batur’s and Akatlı’s commentaries on the unfinished state of Karasu’s “magnum opus” on Beyoğlu, my above analysis explored the complex factors that offer an explanation for the incompleteness of the Beyoğlu project. A crucial question to be addressed here is how the formal-rhetorical strategies informing Karasu’s narratives of memory can be aligned with the substantive component, ethno-cultural alterity. This brings us back to Benjamin’s poetics of memory governing his Berlin memoirs. As we have seen through critical readings of his passage on memory as excavation, Benjamin defines memory as a medium, a stage where remembering takes place as a “processual” act (Pethes 1999, 268). Along these lines we should recall Jacobs’ argument, that A Berlin Chronicle is not a chronicle in the traditional sense, but that its subject matter is Benjamin’s reflection on representation (Darstellung) itself, a reflection that Benjamin pursues in several other writings. Applying Jacobs’ emphasis on Benjamin’s representation of memory as a “ruse,” a constant digression, to Black Waters reveals that both authors are concerned with the representability of memory as text. Consequently, what they wrote continually deviates from giving

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away the referential context, instead focusing on discontinuous moments of remembering that take shape as images. Beginning with his earliest fiction Death in Troy, a main trait of Karasu’s oeuvre has been the self-referentiality of writing. The Beyoğlu texts continue this narrative strategy, making the reader aware of the process of narration, through such devices as interruptions, indented sections, and multiple narrative threads. Like Benjamin’s two Berlin memoirs, Karasu’s mnemonic narratives of Beyoğlu persistently address the question of textuality. A good example of the interconnectedness between the mnemonic model that Karasu constructs in his Beyoğlu narratives and the impetus to unearth ethno-cultural difference is “Marruş,” the nickname of the Beyoğlulu aunt. The close reading of “Beyoğlu is a Legend” in chapter 5 will show that in this narrative the socio-cultural origins of “Marruş” remain withheld. The ambiguity surrounding the signifier illustrates the dual workings of concealing and manifesting alterity. Severed from its referential context, “Marruş” functions as a “dialectical image,” legible in that it leads to a flashing up of traces, but distorted by virtue of being a nickname and diminutive and standing apart from the original name.

Memory as “Snapshot” The selective and sudden nature of the recurrence of the past in images is best articulated in Benjamin’s famous metaphor of the “snapshot,” a Momentaufnahme. As discussed in chapter 1, Benjamin depicts the mnemonic act in analogy to the photographic process of development. We will revisit the passage here, in order to further explore Benjamin’s focus on the analogy. In Benjamin’s presentation, the remembering subject undergoes a peculiar split. When describing the unpredictable emergence of impressions retained in memory, Benjamin states: It is we ourselves, however, who are always standing at the center of these rare images. Nor is this very mysterious, since such moments of sudden illumination are at the same time moments when we separated from ourselves, and while our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by the shock, as is the little heap of magnesium powder by the flame of the match. It is to this immolation of our deepest self in shock that our memory owes its most indelible images. (1996a, 633)

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(Im Mittelpunkte dieser seltnen Bilder aber stehen stets wir selbst. Und das ist nicht so rätselhaft, weil solche Augenblicke plötzlicher Belichtung gleichzeitig Augenblicke des Außer-Uns-Seins sind und während unser waches, gewohntes, taggerechtes Ich sich handelnd oder leidend ins Geschehen mischt, ruht unser tieferes an anderer Stelle und wird vom Chock betroffen wie das Häufchen Magnesiumpulver von der Streichholzflamme. Dies Opfer unseres tiefsten Ich im Chock ist es, dem unsere Erinnerung ihre unzerstörbarsten Bilder zu danken hat.) (1991b, 516)

Memory as “sudden illumination” in Benjamin’s paradigm forcefully shows why his childhood memoirs are constructed as a fragmented, discontinuous narrative. At the same time, the notion of “sudden illumination” helps us understand Karasu’s strategy of conveying memory in an episodic mode, conjuring up recurrent images from Beyoğlu’s streets and interiors. It is telling that in Benjamin’s model the reminiscence as “sudden illumination,” caused by the shock, just like the lighting of magnesium in the photographic process, points to a layer or state of the remembering subject that Benjamin calls the “deeper self.” It is as if the act of reminiscing rattles the unity of the self, sending the remembering self onto the stage (Schauplatz) of memory, thereby exteriorizing it from its everyday part. The metaphor of “immolation” points towards an experiential transformation, a dreamlike state rather than a rational grasp of the mnemonic content. Moreover, with the statement that it is we ourselves who are at the center of the memory images, Benjamin renders the remembering subject itself a “dialectical image.” When read in light of this paradigm, the pivotal scene in which Karasu’s narrator revisits the Beyoğlu home of the deceased aunt Marruş entails such an experiential moment: the “immolation” that enflames the “deepest self ” instigates the narrator’s return to his unfinished memory work on Beyoğlu. At the same time, what is suddenly illuminated on the stage of memory is, among other mnemonic images, his own (dialectical) image as a Beyoğlulu, in other words, his own repressed alterity. In the third chapter of his Matter and Memory, titled “Of the Survival of Images,” Henri Bergson describes the kinship between dream and memory as follows: But, if almost the whole of our past is hidden from us because it is inhibited by the necessities of present action, it will find strength to cross the threshold of consciousness in all cases where we renounce the interests of effective action to replace ourselves, so to speak, in the life of dreams. Sleep, natural

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or artificial, brings about an indifference of just this kind.  .  .  . Now the exaltation of the memory in certain dreams and in somnambulistic states is well known. Memories, which we believed abolished, then reappear with striking completeness, we live over again, in all their detail, forgotten scenes of childhood; we speak languages which we no longer even remember to have learned. (1991, 154-5)

Bergson links this dreamlike state to what he calls, “contemplative memory” (155). He contrasts this state with “motor memory,” solely based on action, maintaining that in real life these extremes interpenetrate. Contemplative memory, and the dream as its pure form, require a withdrawal from action, similar to the state depicted by Benjamin as being “separated from ourselves.” According to Benjamin’s dialectical thinking, it is only by exiting our everyday selves that we experience the sudden flashes of memory, thus encountering our deepest self. Clearly, this model also resonates with the Freudian concept of the unconscious, the locus of the stored traces of memory. Furthermore, as noted above, Benjamin’s approach here suggests a splitting of the subject, very much like Freud’s division of mental life into the conscious and the unconscious, and perhaps not dissimilar to Bergson’s notion of the interpenetration of the two poles of memory, contemplative memory and action. While the mnemonic snapshot leads the self to its deepest layers, the waking, quotidian self continues to mingle in external life, either acting or being acted upon. Such a state, I would argue, defines the memory experience of Karasu’s narrator at his return to Beyoğlu. The pervasive ambiguity governing Karasu’s inscription of remembrance can be summed up as follows: on the one hand, he evades mimetic representation in favor of presenting memory as a shock experience, as in Benjamin’s “sudden illumination,” and a contemplative withdrawal in the Bergsonian sense. On the other hand, the Beyoğlu narratives relate personal reminiscences of a childhood, surrounded by the maternal family, to a socio-cultural framework, even if such factual references do not lead to a coherent life story. As Jacobs suggests in reference to Benjamin’s statement on the disconnect between memory and autobiography, “[i]s this not Benjamin’s answer before the question to those who seek an uninterrupted flow of text and a factual, ordered representation of life?” (1996, 96). Although Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives demonstrate exactly what Jacobs calls, with regard to Benjamin, “[t]he impossibility of chronological certainty in the biographical facts,” they also evidence a revelatory process

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pertaining to the Beyoğlulu identity of Karasu’s narrator. The persistent recurrence of the ethno-cultural pointers of identity as alterity attests to this process. In addition, the question of autobiography becomes more complicated in Black Waters, since, unlike Benjamin, Karasu does not frame his texts as his own recollections. In his “Foreword” to Berlin Childhood, Benjamin addresses the recollected childhood as his own, although having declared that the memoir will not take the form of conventional autobiography. Thus, despite the representative function of the Benjaminian child with respect to the social irretrievability of an era, the relationship between the author and the “I” of the vignettes seems to be less broken than its counterpart in Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives. The nameless first-person narrator of Black Waters, who conjures up his childhood in Beyoğlu’s streets and buildings, remains unidentifiable, shifting between the author’s self-projection and a faceless fictional persona. Karasu problematizes the transition from bios to its representation, from memory to text, precisely through the indeterminate identities of his narrator and remembered child. In this context, it is decisive that Akatlı did not designate a genre for the Beyoğlu narratives when she gathered them in part one of the book under the title “Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu,” separate from part two, titled “Fiction.” In conclusion, it is important to emphasize that Benjamin’s and Karasu’s self-referential poetics of remembering implies historical reflection. Both authors address historicity, even if represented figuratively. In this context, Gerhard Richter’s approach of “reading historically” offers a productive critical method for gaining insight into the political and historical dimensions underlying the language of remembering.

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Chapter 4

Bilge Karasu in Historical Context: Identity Formation in the Shadow of “Turkification”

From “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” to the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955 and Beyond When Bilge Karasu was born in 1930 in Istanbul, only seven years had passed since the Lausanne Treaty of Peace. In several stages of the Lausanne Convention from January 1923 to July of that year, the victors of World War I negotiated the new map of the Middle East, designating new territorial boundaries for new nation states on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The treaty marked the end of the armed conflict (1919-23) between Greece and Turkey and established them as two homogeneous nation states. Renée Hirschon notes that the negotiations emphasized the “ideally homogeneous population” of these states and promoted the ideal of self-determination in accordance with US President Wilson’s Fourteen Principles (2003, 6). The reshaping of the former Ottoman landscape in light of these principles brought about crucial consequences for minorities in these territories. Creating new national boundaries along the principle of population homogeneity meant unmixing the formerly mixed populations (7). On the Turkish side, the new Turkish national identity—distinct from its cosmopolitan Ottoman past—was formed at the cost of massive expulsions of

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Greek minorities. A similar though much smaller purge of Muslim-Turkish minorities from Greece ensued, set by the terms of the treaty. While the Lausanne Convention included specific paragraphs to protect the rights of the minorities remaining in both countries, in the early decades of the Turkish Republic, efforts to form a new Turkish identity based on nationalist principles resulted in various transgressions of the measures set by the agreement pertaining to non-Muslim minorities. The massive exodus of the local Greeks before and after the Lausanne Convention marked the beginnings of the politics of homogenization. This chapter will contextualize Bilge Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives in light of the process of Turkish nation building that marginalized its local GreekOrthodox population, or its Rums, Armenians, and Jews, as its others. We will look at pivotal antiminority actions and assaults, implemented legally or encouraged by the Turkish press and populist agitation. Understanding the Beyoğlu project against the backdrop of the nationalist climate of the new Turkish administration not only situates Karasu biographically in that climate, but also elucidates the author’s construction of Beyoğlu within homogenizing nationalism. Studies in Turkish history presenting new perspectives on the early republican period will guide our analysis (see Eissenstat 2003). In Turkish collective memory of these formation years, the Levantine Pera-Beyoğlu signified the most “unturkish” of all sites. Referring to the Turkish nationalist movements of the 1930s, Rıfat Bali quotes a columnist of the prominent Kemalist newspaper Cumhuriyet (Republic), who wrote in 1933: “‘[Beyoğlu] is the foreigners’ neighborhood of Istanbul, even of entire Turkey. It is not a neighborhood inhabited by foreigners, but a neighborhood that is alien to the Turkish language, Turkish culture, and Turkishness’” (Bali 2010, 168; my translation).1 The article in Cumhuriyet was published in tandem with the rallies of the day, initiated by the National Turkish Student Organization (Milli Türk Talebe Birliği) that promoted boycotts of imported goods and the Turkifying of the foreign names of businesses. Since Beyoğlu was the center of businesses run by non-Muslim minorities, the rally clearly 1 Bali connects in this passage the above-quoted statement by the Cumhuriyet columnist to concurrent Turkification movements: “MTTB’nin [Milli Türk Talebe Birliği] bu toplantısı üzerine Cumhuriyet gazetesinde yazan Abidin Daver, Beyoğlu’nu ‘İstanbul’un hatta bütün Türkiye’nin yabancı mahallesidir. Yabancılarla, ecnebilerle meskûn mahallesi değil, Türkçeye, Türk kültürüne, Türklüğe yabancı mahallesi’ şeklinde tarif etti ve bu durumun bir an önce değişip Beyoğlu’nun Türkleşmesini istedi” (2010, 168).

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exhibited antiminority sentiments. Bali offers ample evidence of Beyoğlu’s signification as the other ingrained in Turkish nationalist discourse of the early republican years. Among Bali’s rich documentation from the contemporary press, the remarks by Nurullah Ataç, the most prominent literary critic of the day, provide a good example of how Beyoğlu was defined as other. In 1937, two law propositions were submitted to parliament: the first barred potential Jewish emigrants from entering Turkey, and the second imposed a short imprisonment and fine on those Jews with Turkish citizenship who did not speak Turkish (296). Ataç welcomes these propositions, denigrating the Spanish (Ladino) spoken by Turkish Jewry as not a language but a hybrid idiom of Beyoğlu, “Beyoğlu-ish” (298n143). How does Karasu as a native of Beyoğlu, a Beyoğlulu, address the site’s alterity thus established in official and popular Turkish nationalist discourse? Does Karasu’s Beyoğlu challenge these stereotypes in his narratives in Black Waters? Why is it important that Karasu situates the childhood of his narrator-self in Beyoğlu? Is this a proclamation of the author’s outsider status, acknowledging his own non-Muslim ethno-cultural origin, and metaphorically, his same-sex orientation? If Karasu’s Black Waters counteracts the exclusion of Beyoğlu from the realm of the nation, what are the narrative strategies that lead to such a questioning? Can Karasu’s mastery of language, his well-deserved reputation as the master of Turkish prose fiction, be reevaluated in light of the oppressive laws or practices, imposed in particular upon the Jews of Istanbul, to speak Turkish? How does remembering itself function in this context? I will continue exploring these questions in chapters 5 and 6. However, it is important to note here that the most intense nationalist campaigns arose in the 1930s and 1940s, during Karasu’s early childhood and adolescence, while he was living in Beyoğlu. It is hard to imagine that the author and his family environment remained aloof from, and psychologically unscratched by, the insistent antiminority atmosphere which targeted their home, Beyoğlu. Exploring Black Waters not only in light of the incompleteness of memory, but also from the vantage point of factual socio-political pressures against non-Muslim minorities that had a powerful impact on the neighborhood’s fate, will lead us to a more nuanced understanding of Karasu’s endeavor in Black Waters. Some of the most flagrant antiminority practices and sentiments occurred during the period of One-Party Rule by Cumhuriyet Halk Fırkası (The Republican People’s Party), founded by Atatürk, extending from the foundation of the republic to 1950. These practices emerged from the policy

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of Turkification that pervaded the public and the private sectors of the new society. Turkification aimed at either assimilating non-Muslim minorities to the new Turkish identity or expelling them from all spheres of public life. The service sector, production, trade, business, and education were all to be purified of non-Turkish elements. The following milestones of antiminority actions detail the context in which Karasu’s life was embedded: 1. A predominant tenet of the Turkification movement was manifest in the campaign “Citizen, speak Turkish!” enforced especially harshly on the Jewish minority. As Rıfat Bali and other scholars have shown, the campaign that started in the 1920s and lasted well into the 1940s targeted primarily, if not only, the Sephardic Jews of Turkey, who continued speaking an archaic Spanish (Ladino) as their primary language. 2. In 1934, anti-Jewish pogroms erupted in Thrace, near the Bulgarian border. As a result of the assaults, many Jews who had been rooted in the Thracian cities, such as Edirne and Kırklareli, fled to Istanbul. The question as to whether the aggression was the indication of a larger antisemitic sentiment or represented a singular incident has been greatly contested (Bali 2010, 13-19; Aktar 2000, 71-99). In 1934, the Turkish government was deeply concerned about the security of these border territories as well as the straits of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. In order to secure the borders against the impending war, plans were made to evacuate the area and secure it with a military presence. In addition, the “control” by Jewish merchants and brokers over the Turkish farmers and small trade holders of Thracian cities was a cause of resentment (Bali 2010, 21-34). Given these multiple reasons, the question to what extent the violence was triggered by the pressures put upon the (Jewish) minority population to speak Turkish in public remains open to debate (see Bali 2010; Aktar 2000). In any case, anti-Jewish sentiments in the nationalist press and among the public in support of the Turkification campaign undoubtedly eased the way to the occurrence of the Thracian Incidents. 3. In April 1941, the Turkish Parliament accepted a proposition, submitted by the Ministry of Defense, to draft or redraft all non-Muslim men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five into military service. This discriminatory decree that would last fourteen months is called Yirmi Kur’a İhtiyatlar Olayı (The Incident of Twenty Class Draftees [Reserves]). The men were to work under the orders of the Ministry of Public Works (Nafia Vekaleti). In early May 1941, around 12,000 men were drafted or redrafted. Because the orders were carried out in secret, many draftees

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found out about their imminent call to service only when military police and police knocked at their doors. The minority members pressed into military service were given no arms, some had to wear special uniforms, and they all were transported to various regions of the country to work on road construction. (Bali 2010, 412-22). They were gathered in labor camps that accommodated 5,000 men. Many were redrafted after they had just returned from their first or second military service. The implementation of this policy, imposed exclusively and collectively upon the minority members, as well as the dismal circumstances at the camps, caused great concern among the men and their families and communities at home (414). It followed Nazi Germany’s aggression into the Balkan territory, which amounted to the most critical period of World War II for Turkey. It should also be mentioned that in June 1941 a peace treaty was signed between Germany and Turkey. There have been a number of theories about the motives for the Yirmi Kur’a İhtiyatlar Olayı, for example: the expulsion of the non-Muslims from Turkey’s economic production and commerce was to prevent the distrusted minorities from becoming involved in spying activities in case of war; the implementation of this law followed a Nazi request for the internment of minorities (Bali 2010, 421-22). The horrifying analogy between the Nazi concentration camps and the internment camps of the “Twenty Class Draftees” circulated widely among the minorities, especially in the Jewish community.2 The “Twenty Class Draftees” were released in summer 1942, although the lifting of the oppressive uncertainty that haunted them during the fourteen-month period of internment was short-lived.3 4. Only a few months after this temporary relief, Turkey’s minorities were struck down by the infamous Capital Tax Levy of 1942. The law was accepted by the Turkish Parliament on November 11, 1942 and its 2 In his rich documentation of this period through testimonies, Bali addresses the pervasive rumor of mass destruction. The rumor emerged from the news that the Turkish military supervising the draftees at construction work yelled at them: “These holes will be your graves!” While the minorities believed that the government had planned their mass destruction, they saw Field Marshall Fevzi Çakmak, who is said to have prevented the destruction, as their savior (ibid., 417-18). 3 For a thorough documentation and analysis of the “Twenty Class Draftees” see also Bali’s 2008 II. Dünya Savaşında Gayrimüslimlerin Askerlik Serüveni: Yirmi Kur’a Nafıa Askerleri (The Military Service Adventure of Non-Muslims During World War II: Twenty Class Construction Soldiers). The study also contains oral history documents, such as memoirs, interviews, letters of draftees, and diaries.

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implementation until 1944 was the most overt discriminatory act against the non-Muslim minorities. In his compelling study of the Capital Tax Levy, Ayhan Aktar explores this practice as a paradigmatic case, revealing the trajectory of the tension between the nation(-alist) state and its non-Muslim others. As Aktar explains, this case study opens up the way to examine the central authority’s shadow over the minorities during the One-Party Era. Analyzing the workings of this shadow, the way in which it was cast and its specific nature would lead to a better understanding of the collective interests of the majority. Through this method, Aktar aims at bringing to light dimensions of Kemalist nationalism that have been less conspicuous in Turkish historiography (Aktar 2000, 136). The notion of the Capital Tax Levy emerged from the financial pressures the war laid upon the Turkish economy. Confronted with increasing expenses for defense, the Turkish government was in search of additional revenues. During that time the nationalist Turkish press voiced inflammatory views against speculative gains made by non-Muslim businessmen in a wartime environment of shortage of supplies and inflation. In their antiminority propaganda, newspapers and popular magazines drew on Jewish stereotypes borrowed from their Western antisemitic counterparts (Aktar, 2000, 143; Bali 2010, 424-41). In a speech given to parliament, the newly appointed Prime Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu addressed the increasing prices and measures to be taken in highly Turkish-nationalistic language. A bureaucrat appointed as the director of financial affairs of Istanbul was ordered to quickly compile lists of those with extraordinary wealth. The targeted payees were classified according to religious and ethnic origin.4 Appeals by the leaders of minority communities of Istanbul to the prime minister to stop this taxation by offering instead to give large donations, was rejected. The prime minister also dismissed possible international objections. Aktar states that the dismissal of both points was based on the idea that Turkey was a modern state now and that the Ottoman organization of millets (the collective of non-Muslim subjects of the empire) that paid taxes to the state was history. The intervention of Western powers through the so-called capitulations (kapitülasyonlar) was also a practice of the past, abolished with the foundation of the nation state (2000, 145-46). 4 Aktar refers to the director Faik Ökte’s memoirs, who wrote: “‘The tables were divided into two parts as M, meaning the Muslim group, G represented non-Muslim minorities. Following this, the letters D for conversos, E for foreigners were added’” (2000, 144n10; my translation).

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After the law passed, those liable were required to pay their taxes within fifteen days. In case the selected taxpayers failed to pay within this time, their debt would be resolved by the confiscation and sale of their belongings in their homes and businesses. Those citizens who were liable but did not pay the Capital Income Tax within a month were sentenced to work in labor camps in Aşkale and Sivrihisar in East and Central Anatolia (Aktar 2000, 149). The predicament of the large groups of non-Muslim business owners and individuals of other professions sent to forced labor camps is well-documented in the scholarly literature (Aktar 2003; Bali 2010; Akar, 2000; Çetinoğlu, 2009). In the first half of 1943, close to 2,000 payees in Istanbul were detained by the police in the Sirkeci-Demirkapı internment center. Those who could pay their dues there were released. Over 1,000 of them, however—all non-Muslims—were sent in freight wagons to Eastern labor camps.5 It is important to emphasize that, although the tax law targeted all citizens considered in possession of extraordinary wealth, forced labor was only imposed upon the minorities. Several perished due to harsh labor, cold, malnutrition, and lack of medical care.6 After a meeting in Cairo on September 17, 1943 between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Turkey’s National Leader (Milli Şef) İsmet İnönü, an addendum to the Capital Tax Levy was introduced that cancelled the unpaid debts. Over 1,000 detainees, most of them Jewish, were released from camps and allowed to return to their homes, after Turkey committed to join the war on the side of the Allies. The Allies must have let the Turkish government know that the Capital Tax Levy was an unacceptable practice for Turkey siding with the democratic front (Bali 2010, 474-76). In the fall of the same year, The New York Times published a series of articles thoroughly examining the Turkish Capital Tax Levy. It is most likely that the decision by the Turkish parliament to pardon some of the unpaid debts, days after The New York Times publication, was also a result of this. After diplomatic negotiations between Ankara and Washington, The New York Times did not pursue the issue. At the same time, Ankara continued with the process of the de facto elimination of the Capital Tax Levy. In March 1944, the elimination was finalized with a decree (Aktar 2000, 151-53). 5 For a detailed account of the inhuman circumstances of the journey and the miserable environment of the camps, see Bali 2010, 457-60. 6 Rıdvan Akar states that 1.5% of the detainees in Aşkale, subjected to forced labor, lost their lives. He attributes most of these deaths to old age and illness (2000, 137).

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The following remarks by Rıdvan Akar cogently sum up the significance of the Capital Tax Levy implementation: In the Republican era, the Capital Tax Levy became a turning point for the minorities. In the 1930s, practices, such as “professional bans”, vandalism, and racist propaganda, targeting the minority communities, had already been endured. However, these practices either included certain communities and thus, they were of partial nature, or they were regional. With the advent of the Capital Tax Levy, all non-Muslim, non-Turkish minorities for the first time suffered as a whole, universally. In later years, such an all-inclusive and systematic policy was neither manifest in the September 6/7 Events, nor in the 1964 Expulsion of the Rums. (2000, 9; my translation)7

The Capital Tax Levy was a milestone in the development of Turkish antiminority policies. The climate it created persisted longer than the antiminority provocations and aggression that were to follow. Given this long-lasting “psychology,” as Akar puts it, and the fact that Istanbul’s minorities were hit hardest by the Levy, it is hard to imagine that Karasu’s childhood environment would not have been influenced by that climate. In the Beyoğlu of the 1930s and 40s, as the center of commerce and entertainment and owned still by Istanbul’s non-Muslims, anxiety and uncertainty must have been widespread. We can now see that the vague mood of gloom running through Karasu’s Black Waters is embedded in the larger context of the bleak era of Turkification. Later in this chapter I will return to the function of the Tax Levy in the homogenizing official ideology of the early republican period. Regarding the Tax Law’s all-encompassing hostility toward the non-Muslim population, Akar states that: “[t]he Capital Tax Levy was an ‘economic genocide’ for the minorities. It was a ‘project’ that cleared the way for the Turkish bourgeoisie” (2000, 9). This “project,” of which the ideological residues continued to live in the Turkish official and popular discourse, led to further antiminority measures, as outlined below. 5. The so-called Events of September 6/7, 1955 represent another significant chapter in antiminority discrimination. The incident, evocative of 7 “Cumhuriyet döneminde Varlık Vergisi, azınlıklar için bir dönüm noktası oldu. 1930’lu yıllarda gerek ‘meslek yasakları’ gerekse vandalizm ve ırkçı propagandalarla azınlık cemaatlerine dönük uygulamalar yaşanmıştı. Ancak bu uygulamalar ya belli cemaatleri kapsadığı için kısmi ya da yerel özellikler arzediyordu. Ancak Varlık Vergisi’yle ilk kez Müslüman ve Türk olmayan bütün azınlıklar bir blok olarak mağdur edildi. Sonraki yıllarda da gerek 1955’teki 6/7 Eylül Olayları, gerekse 1964’te Rumların sınırdışı edilmesi kararı böylesine kapsamlı ve sistemli bir politikayı içermedi” (ibid., 9).

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1938’s Kristallnacht in Germany, is also referred to as the Istanbul Pogrom, Istanbul Riots, or Septemvriana. While Rıdvan Akar views the climax of antiminority aggression in the systematic and pervasive nature of the Capital Tax Levy, Edhem Eldem defines the Events of September 6/7, along with the Capital Tax, as “two of the most flagrant episodes of popular and state-sponsored aggression against local minorities” (2006b, 23). Due to the physical violence and destruction aimed primarily at the Rums of Istanbul, their homes, businesses, and churches in the Beyoğlu district and other neighborhoods, the pogroms of September 6/7 stand out as an infamous page in modern Turkish history. The consequences were profound, because of the immediate threat the minorities endured during that night. With businesses shattered, homes invaded, women and girls assaulted and raped, many of the affected decided to flee Istanbul. They feared for their lives and no longer saw a safe future in the city. It is important to remember that the September Pogrom occurred in a new decade after the One-Party Rule of Atatürk’s party Cumhuriyet Halk Fırkası had ended. The democratically elected Demokrat Parti was in power. The September Incidents occurred against the backdrop of the Cyprus crisis that had escalated since the early 1950s and reached an impasse at the time of the London Conference between Britain, Greece, and Turkey. Just as the London Conference ended without a resolution on September 6, news in Turkey broke that the Atatürk House in Thessaloniki and the adjacent Turkish Consulate had been bombed (Babaoğlu 2012, 19-20). This gave rise to an eruption of ultranationalist fever in Istanbul, whipped up by the press. As soon became evident, the bombs had been planted by agents of the Turkish Secret Police (22; Eldem 2006b, 23). By the late afternoon of September 6, the rallies gave way to systematic riots, carried out by mobs. During the night of September 6/7, horrendous destruction took place in all Rum neighborhoods of Istanbul, including Beyoğlu. The Armenian and Jewish populations were also affected. Historical sources unanimously see the events as systematically planned through the implication of the government and the Turkish Secret Police (Milli Istihbarat Teşkilatı or MİT), because the mobs had been transported into the city from the provinces, they were equipped with uniform assault tools, and they carried out the aggression in orchestrated steps. The Menderes government was held accountable for its complicity in the September 6/7 Events at the military tribunal following its overthrow in 1961.

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In his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk connects the September Events with the theme of the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. For Pamuk, “conquest” and its counterpart “fall” are perspectival terms, standing for the Eastern (Turkish) and Western viewpoints. Born in 1952, Pamuk was too young to remember the September Pogrom, though he states that his family kept telling stories about the riots for years and thus made the events as vivid for him as firsthand experience (2006, 174). He recounts the September riots as follows: The bands of rioters were most violent and caused greatest terror in neighborhoods like Ortaköy, Balıklı, Samatya, and Fener, where the concentration of Greeks was greatest; not only did they sack and burn little Greek groceries and dairy shops, they broke into houses to rape Greek and Armenian women. So it is not unreasonable to say that the rioters were as merciless as the soldiers who sacked the city after it fell to Mehmet the Conqueror. It later emerged that the organizers of this riot—whose terror raged for two days and made the city more hellish than the worst orientalist nightmares—had the state’s support and had pillaged the city with its blessing. (173)8

In another section of his memoir, Pamuk revisits the notion of “conquest” by reflecting on the sanctions the Turkification campaigns imposed upon the minorities. As Pamuk points out, these sanctions can be viewed as the final stage of the city’s “conquest,” or as ethnic cleansing. The author sees the “Citizen, speak Turkish!” campaign that he witnessed as a child as a blatant example of this “cultural cleansing” (239). Babaoğlu focuses on the psychological scars that the September Incidents of 1955 left on the Rum community of Turkey. He contends that, due to the rescue and aid campaigns in which Muslim Turks took part, further escalation of this social trauma was prevented in the aftermath of the riots. Nevertheless, Babaoğlu agrees with other historians that the scope of 8 “Ortaköy, Balıklı, Samatya, Fener gibi şehrin Rum nüfusunun yüksek olduğu mahallelerde de uyguladıkları şiddetle dehşet uyandıran yağmacı çeteler, kimi yerlerde fakir küçük Rum bakkal dükkanlarını yıkıp yağmaladıkları, mandıraları yaktıkları, evleri basıp Rum-Ermeni kadınlarının ırzına geçtikleri için, Fatih Sultan Mehmet’in Fetih’ten sonra İstanbul’u yağmalayan askerleri kadar acımasız davrandıkları söylenebilir. Şehre iki gün dehşet saçan ve İstanbul’u Hıristiyanların ve Batılıların en kötü oryantal kâbuslarından da daha cehennemi bir yere çeviren yağmacıları harekete geçirmek için, devlet destekli örgütçülerin, onlara yağma serbesttir dedikleri de daha sonra ortaya çıktı” (Pamuk 2005, 166-67).

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material damage and loss, resulting from the looting and destruction, was enormous.9 In contrast to the predominant view that the September Events led to a mass exodus of Turkey’s Rums, Babaoğlu argues that the great diminishment in the number of Turkey’s local Greek-Orthodox population was not an immediate outcome of the riots but a long-term consequence of the psychological destruction that the ethnic minorities experienced (2012, 29). The Rums who emigrated as a result of this alienation took with themselves the richness of Istanbul’s social fabric: “With the September 6/7 Events, the cultural pluralism and tradition of coexistence, established in the Ottoman Empire, were hit hard.” Thus, the Rum-Orthodox community that remained in Istanbul would suffer for many years under the traumatic events they experienced (26-27). 6. The final withdrawal of Turkey’s Greek-Orthodox from their native environs occurred with the last wave of forced emigration in 1964. In order to understand the background of the 1964 expulsion, it is important to differentiate between the Rums and the Greek-Orthodox, based on their official nationality. As Alexis Alexandris explains: Of the 110,000 Greek Orthodox in Istanbul who were exempted from the exchange the two-thirds that had been Ottoman nationals were given Turkish citizenship. The other one-third were nationals of Greece who had been established in Istanbul before October 1918. They were allowed to remain in situ. Following the 1923 arrangement, the Greek Orthodox with Turkish citizenship (Rums) and the Greek Orthodox of Greek nationality (Yunanlıs or Istanbul Hellenes) continued to form a single minority group in Istanbul. In October 1930, the right of the Constantinople Hellenes to 9 Babaoğlu quotes both from Turkish sources and the report prepared in 1992 by the Helsinki Human Rights Watch Organization. Turkish sources indicate that seventythree churches, eight sacred fountains, three monasteries, 5,538 homes and shops were destroyed. The Helsinki report gives the material damage as 300 million dollars (Babaoğlu 2012, 23). Other sources give varying though approximately similar estimates. The Wikipedia article on Istanbul Riots (Istanbul Pogrom) also indicates the percentage of material damage between the ethnic minorities: “The American consulate estimates that 59% of the businesses were Greek-owned, 17% were Armenian-owned, 12% were Jewish-owned, 10% were Muslim-owned; while 80% of the homes were Greek owned, 9% were Armenian-owned, 3% were Jewish-owned, and 5% were Muslim-owned.” Accounts of the death toll vary. For example, although Babaoğlu provides a detailed account of the escalation of destruction in the eve of the riots, he does not address any death toll. Several sources mention beatings, rapes, and forced circumcision of men, including priests. As to whether there was a death toll and the numbers of victims who died are somewhat uncertain, with estimates between thirteen and thirty.

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remain in their native city was reaffirmed with the signing of the GreekTurkish establishment, Commerce and Navigation Treaty. (2003, 118)

Alexandris points out that the deepening of the Cyprus crisis in the 1950s and 60s made the Greek-Orthodox minority in Turkey a national scapegoat. Kemalist nationalists, Alexandris proposes, had always suspected this minority group to be agents of Pan-Hellenism and disloyalty to the Turkish state (119). Thus, with Turkey’s unilateral denunciation of the Greek-Turkish Convention of Establishment of 1930 on 16 March 1964, Istanbul’s Orthodox with Greek citizenship were immediately affected. These so-called établis citizens of Greece had been allowed to stay in Istanbul under the terms of the Lausanne Convention and the 1930 Ankara Convention. Alexandris states: By 1967, almost the entire Istanbul Hellene community had been expelled and their assets in Turkey frozen. The exodus of the Istanbul Hellenes and the intense anti-Greek climate in Turkey affected those with Turkish citizenship too: some 40,000 members of the minority left Turkey of their own accord between 1964 and 1967 (119).10

In their study titled İstanbul’un Son Sürgünleri (Last Exiles of Istanbul) Hülya Demir and Rıdvan Akar document the forced mass exodus of those Greeks of Turkey who carried a Greek passport. Through eyewitness accounts, contemporaneous newspaper commentaries, memoirs of the expelled, and photographs, the authors unravel the dimensions of this tragedy. The Greeks were deported in a short amount of time. Most of them were in the age group of fifty to sixty. The deportees were taken to Yeşilköy Airport under strict police control and were searched thoroughly at customs. The belongings they were allowed to take with them amounted to no more than a suitcase of twenty kilograms and 200 Turkish Lira (twenty-two dollars in the currency of the day). The deportees were prohibited from taking their furniture or jewelry (Demir and Akar 1999, 72). The İnönü administration of the time had focused on business owners and entrepreneurs in the first place, so almost all members of the fifty to sixty age group were businessmen. In order to legitimize the expulsion, 10 The census figures indicate that the Greek-Orthodox population of Turkey was around 125,000 in 1935. In the 1970s, their number had decreased to less than 10,000. In the late 1990s, there were 2,500 Greek Orthodox in Istanbul. In the summer months, the population increased to 5,000 (Alexandris 2003, 119).

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a conspiracy narrative was circulated and the deportees were accused of supporting a secret Greek organization (Eleniki Enosis) in favor of Greek Cypriots (75). İstanbul’un Son Sürgünleri exposes the cruelty of these allegations and of the expulsion itself by moving photos. These pictures show aged and ailing women and men, some carried to the airplane in a stretcher, others with the aid of nurses. A caption reads: “She had lived in Istanbul exactly 80 years. Yet, she too was among the deportees with the accusation of being a ‘spy’ for Greece” (“Albüm,” 128-29; my translation). The deportation of Turkey’s Greeks and the confiscation of their property caused panic among the Rum community remaining in Istanbul. As we have seen, the 6/7 September Events had already left the Orthodox minorities alienated and unsure of their future. Demir and Akar explore the oppressive antiminority climate of the 1960s: “In 1964, the wind of state-sponsored chauvinism, blowing in full force, brought some Rums of Turkish citizenship to the point of denying their ethnic identity. A part of these people became the ‘broken’ branches of this wind.” In the press of the day, news about Rums converting to Islam and changing their names to Turkish names abound (101).

Names and Identities The Turkification policies outlined in this chapter—the 1934 aggression against the Jews in Thrace, the Capital Levy and the September Pogrom— had an impact not only on one disparate non-Muslim group, but on all. The widespread trend in the 1930s among the Jewish population to adopt Turkish names is to be understood in conjunction with the attempt by the Rums to deny their ethnic identity in the 1960s. Bilge Karasu grew up in the oppressive climate of the “Citizen, speak Turkish!” campaign that terrorized the Ladino and French-speaking Jewry in the 1930s and 40s. At the time of the September Events in 1955, he had already published his early fiction and essays in literary journals. During the deportation of Turkey’s Greeks in 1964, Karasu launched a career in Ankara and established himself as an avant-garde writer. He also stayed in Europe through fellowships during this period. Born to an inter-ethnic and inter-religious minority marriage, Karasu was de facto doubly subject to antiminority sentiments, although we do not find a direct reference of such a life experience in his writings of the time.

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Rıfat Bali offers an illuminating discussion of name change among the Turkish Jewry of the early republican era (2010, 287). Already in 1933, the Turkification of Jewish names, initiated by Atatürk and endorsed by Kemalist intelligentsia, emerged as a new manifestation of the Turkification movement. The surname law of 1934 prohibited the adoption of surnames referring to “clan and foreign races and nations.” Bali documents this enactment of the Turkification among the Jews through tables, taken from contemporaneous press, as well as other sources. Moreover, Bali provides an extensive analysis of the reaction to the Turkification pressures, especially pertaining to language, among the Jewish elite. He states: The Jewish elites consulted almost unanimously found the Jewish population fully accountable for not speaking Turkish. These people accused the Jews of not following the guidance of the Jewish elite. Only a few of these elites observed that old people would not be able to speak Turkish and said that the young generation needed to be persuaded. Others, however, blamed and criticized, without differentiating between young and old, Spanish and the Jewish people who spoke this language. (2010, 292; my translation)11

The guilt-ridden condoning of the “Citizen, speak Turkish!” campaign by the Jewish elite signifies the surrender to assimilation. In its denial of ethnic and cultural self-identity, this official Jewish response offers a good example of the famous “Jewish self-hatred,”12 a major tenet in the assimilation of European Jewry. At the same time, the conformity of the spokespersons of the Turkish Jewish community with the official ideology attests to an anxious passivity that Bali sums up elsewhere under the Ladino motto “kayadez” (be quiet). When the surname law was implemented, we find an Albert Karaso who became Alber Karasu in the table of Jewish names converted to Turkish (289). Regardless of the speculation as to whether this former Karaso was related to Bilge Karasu, this might show the willing or forced submission to Turkification. As mentioned earlier, Bilge Karasu born as Israel Karasu (or Karaso) changed his first name to “Bilge” at the age of eighteen. Against the background we have discussed here, this appropriation of Turkish identity 11 Bali’s source here is a series in the newspaper Anadolu, 1937. 12 The term is most widely contributed to the German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing and his book Der jüdische Selbsthaß (Jewish Self-Hatred), published in 1930, just before the National Socialists’ rise to power. For critical insights into the history of the concept in Central Europe see, among others, Sander L. Gilman (1986) and Paul Reitter (2012).

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acquires a broader meaning. Karasu’s decision to refashion himself as the Turkish “Bilge,” instead of “Israel,” a word transparently identifying him as Jewish, cannot be seen solely as a personal choice but becomes part of a collective trend, a submission on the part of Turkish Jewry to the discriminatory policies of nationalism. As Bali argues, however, the large part of the Jewish population in Turkey resisted or ignored the Turkification campaigns. They continued speaking Ladino or French in public. Where intimidated, they became silent. In summary, the Turkish Jewish community continued to adhere to their own linguistic, religious, and cultural heritage.

A Cosmopolitan Who Stayed Home At the Bilge Karasu Symposium that took place on December 13-14, 2010, at the Center for Turkish Studies at Bilkent University in Ankara, Pulat Tacar, the former ambassador to UNESCO, made a few remarks regarding Karasu’s ethnic origin.13 We saw in chapter 3 that Enis Batur’s comments on Karasu’s “Jewishness” with respect to the incompleteness of Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu are highly relevant for understanding Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives. Since this issue is rarely addressed in Karasu criticism, Tacar’s reference is worth a closer look here. Referring to his personal memories of Karasu, Tacer stated that, even though he himself was not Jewish, he attended school with the author, and that the instruction was in French. Karasu, who lived in Taksim (in the Beyoğlu district) at the time, also attended the conservatory with Tacar. Of their later meetings in Paris, the speaker said that they never talked about Karasu’s ethnic origin. Tacar argued that this origin had a big impact on Karasu’s life: “The identity of Izael [sic.?] Karasu determined Bilge’s position in Turkish society. It was probably because of this [identity] that after March 12 he was fired [from his job at the TRT, The Turkish Radio and Television]. He needed that salary. He was treated unjustly.”14

13 My references to the Bilge Karasu Symposium are based on the proceedings of the symposium in December 2010 by Tuğçe Ayteş, published in Mavi Melek 50 (2011)—an online literary journal—under the title “Bilge Karasu Sempozyumu.” All translations from the symposium are mine. 14 Karasu worked at the International Broadcast section of the official Ankara Radio. March 12, 1971 is the date of the second military coup in the history of the Republic of Turkey.

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Other participants at the Bilge Karasu Symposium also briefly alluded to the author’s minority origin. Mustafa Şerif Onaran, for example, refers to Karasu’s mother as Aspasya, revealing the Rum identity of the mother. In his plenary speech at the Symposium, Professor Talat Halman of Bilkent University also recalled the mother by her first name, as Madam Aspasya. Shortly before Karasu’s death in 1995, Halman, then a professor at Harvard University, had hosted Karasu during the author’s reading tour of his novel Night to the United States.15 Halman noted that he had already been impressed with Bilge Karasu when he had first met the author as a student at the Philosophy Department of Istanbul University. In Halman’s description, the author was an exceptionally erudite young man who spoke multiple languages: Turkish, English, Greek (from his mother [Halman uses the term for local Greek, Rumca]), Spanish (from his father, which probably included Ladino, the archaic version of the language, as well as modern Spanish), Italian, German, and some Japanese. Addressing the question as to why Karasu did not achieve as much international fame as he deserved, Halman averred that the answer lies in Karasu’s biography, in his decision to remain in Turkey: “It is a pity that Bilge spent his entire life in Turkey and wrote in Turkish only. If he had settled in France, England, the United States, he could have achieved great fame. Besides French and English, he could have also written in Spanish and Italian.” Halman indicated that it was due to his mother, Madam Aspasya, why the author chose not to live abroad. Otherwise, said Halman, Karasu could have produced in multiple languages, like Nabokov. The portrait of Karasu, drawn here as a multilingual person, situates the author as a cosmopolitan who stayed home. The author’s competency in several languages is inseparably linked to his upbringing in a JewishRum family.16 This cosmopolitan trait, then, can be seen as the flip side of the injustice and disadvantage that Karasu must have endured, as indicated above by Tacar. As Tacar proposed, Karasu’s dismissal from the Turkish Radio Television may as well have been connected with his minority background. When situated in the nationalist ideology and practices of the early republican era, these pieces of personal information on Karasu reflect the fate of the non-Muslim collective in modern Turkish society. As mentioned 15 As mentioned in the introduction, Karasu’s novel Gece had won the Pegasus Prize for Literature and was just published in English translation at the time of the author’s reading tour in the United States. 16 For the Jewish education in French Alliance Schools, see Bali 2010, 303-14.

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by Akatlı, Karasu changed his name from Israel to Bilge when he entered Istanbul University. The implementation of the 1926 Memurin Kanunu (restricting the employment of non-Muslim minorities with insufficient command of the Turkish language in trade; banishing non-Muslim minorities from serving in several institutions of the state) was still in effect in the late 40s and early 50s. Being a “Turk,” a main requirement for state officials, was often understood as being of ethnic-Turkish background, thus excluding the local non-Muslim minorities as “foreigners” of sorts (see Bali 2010, 228-40). Although Karasu was not seeking an academic career but entering the university as a student, and notwithstanding that his reasons to shed “Israel” and become “Bilge” may have been highly personal, his choice becomes a paradigmatic case in the discriminatory social climate in which the author’s life was embedded. Curiously, the gender ambiguity implied in the name adds further layers of indeterminacy to the author’s identity. Karasu’s ethnic difference and his homosexuality constitute the two main tenets of his biographical alterity. A critical inquiry into Karasu’s representation of alterity must thus seek the interplay or juncture of these two modes, as projected in his oeuvre. It should be emphasized that both of these identity traits have been subject to suppression in modern Turkish society. At the Bilge Karasu Symposium, Doğan Hızlan recalled an example of such oppression related to Karasu’s early authorship. The prominent critic and ardent Kemalist nationalist Nurullah Ataç rejected a short story by Karasu, submitted for publication, based on a sentence that for Ataç transgressed the decorum of a literary work.17 Reflecting on this incident in connection with the “covered eroticism” in Karasu’s work, Hızlan concluded that it is not hard to imagine how the theme of homosexual love was received. While difference in Karasu’s writings manifests itself through the interplay of disparate modes, homosexuality runs through his works as the dominant, recurring theme, unlike his treatment of ethnicity. Karasu’s grand Beyoğlu project, on which he worked from the 1960s onwards but which he concretized only as fragments, is his major, though veiled, treatment of ethnic and cultural alterity. His Beyoğlu, represented as the remembered and reexperienced space of childhood, is imbued with the codes of such alterity, reverberating also through the same environs in Six Months One Autumn. It might be argued that, while Karasu’s representation of homoerotic desire, 17 The sentence is: “Çocuk çıkardı çişini yaptı” (The child took it out and peed) (ibid.). Regarding Ataç’s fervent participation in the Turkification movement see also his belittling of Ladino, as documented by Bali and discussed earlier in the current chapter.

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in implied or explicit fashion, runs as a leitmotif through his oeuvre, the allusive treatment of ethnicity indicates a deeper level of repression. On the father’s side the family may have been prone to assimilation, as Bali’s table of Jews who adopted Turkish names suggest.18 The fact that Karasu clearly defined Turkish as his mother tongue and became a virtuoso of using it attests to his appropriation of Turkish identity. In the context of Turkish republican history, the seeming sparsity of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural difference in his work becomes part of a general trend of the Jewish collective toward assimilation. However, it is crucial to recognize that being a minority did matter for Karasu. As my reading of Black Waters illustrates, traces of ethnic and cultural otherness are dispersed through the Beyoğlu narratives. It is as if the author, despite his unwillingness to “come out,” embarks on exploring his origins by conjuring up the mnemonic site Beyoğlu as a cipher of difference, even if enveloped in a profound ambiguity.

Homogenization In his forceful critique of Turkish nationalism, Çağlar Keyder sees the process of ethnic homogenization as a foundational event in the transition to the Turkish Republic. Referring to the deportation, massacre, and exchange of the Armenian and Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire, Keyder states: “Rather than being popularly acclaimed, however, the events culminating in the expulsion and disappearance of some nine-tenths of the Christian population were covered up both in official discourse and in the national psyche” (2003, 48). Keyder defines the emerging narrative of Turkish history as an “artifice,” for it clearly concealed a crucial episode in the formation of the new Turkish state: There are silences in every nation’s history that underlie an active effort to forget. Turkish nationalist historiography is distinguished by the enormity 18 The Vikipedi, Özgür Ansiklopedi entry on Bilge Karasu states that, contrary to the commonly held assumption, Karasu was not related to the Ottoman politician Emanuel Karasu and his nephew, the businessman İzak Karasu. The entry then inaccurately maintains that, despite not related to the above persons, Karasu’s parents who later converted to Islam were of Jewish origin. The source here entails a double inaccuracy: Karasu’s Rum mother Madam Aspasya was buried in a Christian cemetery. (She was neither Jewish nor did she convert to Islam.) Bilge Karasu himself was buried in the Muslim cemetery Karşıyaka Mezarlığı in Ankara, although without the customary Muslim prayer (see Akatlı’s testimony, Appendix).

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of the effort to negate the previous existence of non-Turkish populations in the land that eventually became Turkey. In fact, as the legitimizing ideology of the new republic, however, Turkish nationalism was invented against the backdrop of major shifts in popular composition. It is easy to see why this nationalism opted for an ethnic version of the national narrative: a concept of Turkishness was constructed in an attempt to present the remaining population as homogeneous, and it glossed over any real diversity. (48-49; my emphasis)

The overall absence of ethnic alterity in Karasu’s work, then, seems to partake of this large-scale silence. Bali’s discussion of “kayadez” (be quiet) as the main tactic of the Jewish community in cooperating with the new state and society provides a pertinent background here. In this socio-historical context, Karasu’s Black Waters testifies to the climate of silence that characterizes the early decades of republican history. Karasu’s technique of equivocation points toward ethnic difference that the author conveys in his Beyoğlu narratives evocatively yet elusively. He seems to have internalized homogenizing Turkishness to such an extent that even Pera-Beyoğlu does not lead him to directly portray its past cultural diversity. On the other hand, with Black Waters Karasu breaks through the silence by constructing a Beyoğlu that becomes the cradle of memory, of childhood—in short, of selfhood—thereby including remembering and the remembered self in the locale’s differential identity. We should also recall here that Batur defines Karasu’s unfinished work on Beyoğlu as his “magnum opus,” emphasizing its central position in Karasu’s authorship. Like Bali and Keyder, Ayhan Aktar sees homogenization as the key strategy in Turkish nation-building, implemented in all areas of the new society from the economy to language. Aktar’s analysis of Turkish nationalism provides further a variety of insights into this process. He points out that the roots of Turkish nationalism go back to Ziya Gökalp (18761924). Gökalp’s formulation of Turkishness, however, was based on culture and language, and, as Aktar explains, religion was primarily a moral force used to foster social solidarity. This version of nationalism, developed by Gökalp during the Balkan Wars, still took into account the millet system in which non-Muslim communities were constituent parts of the empire (2003, 93). In the late 1920s, Gökalp’s cultural nationalism was gradually replaced by an ethnically defined, particularist notion of Turkishness (9394). Along the lines discussed in Alexandris’ work on the 1923 population

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exchange, Aktar emphasizes the role of the suspicion that the Turks felt against non-Muslim minorities. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Great Powers had intervened in the domestic affairs of the empire, in order to protect the rights and privileges of the non-Muslim population. The Turkish War of Independence (1919-23), fought against the Greeks, left local Greeks under the suspicion of disloyalty in the nationalist approach. No minorities would mean no foreign intervention. Aktar convincingly shows that the formation of Greek and Turkish nationalisms in the wake of the Lausanne Treaty proceeded from similar (though not identical) motives for ethnic homogeneity. The accountability for the human tragedies that resulted from the population exchange after 1923 must be sought on a multinational plane. These tragedies were determined not solely by decisions made by the two new nation states, but also by the victors of the First World War. The predicament of the (non-Muslim) populations of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century was caused by successive wars, beginning with the Balkan War of 1912 and ending with the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the collapse of the empire, and the emergence of the new nation state (see Aktar 2003, 93). Aktar states: “The reactions of the Turkish nationalists were especially significant in that they came to constitute the backbone of the 1930s cultural xenophobia that eroded the cosmopolitanism of the late Ottoman period” (88; my emphasis). Cultural prejudice in Turkey and the concurrent rise of fascism in 1930s Europe lead directly to the question of whether there were antisemitic elements in the discriminatory practices against the non-Muslim, that is, the Jewish population in the 1930s. Bali connects the antiminority trends of the early republican era, such as the “Citizen, speak Turkish!” campaign, the Events in Thrace, the Twenty Class Draftees, and the Capital Income Levy, directly with the rise of antisemitism in Germany (2010, 421). Aktar, on the other hand, presents an intriguing argument as to why the Kemalist elite that had won the War of Independence could not develop a systematic antisemitism akin to the European models. He contends that both the late Ottoman Turkish ideologists and the Kemalist bureaucrats of the One-Party Era lacked the necessary preconditions for the development of a “scientific” racism. In the Turkish society, a (pseudo-) philosophical and anthropological tradition was absent. He stresses that “[r]acism in its technical sense can only be concretized by the states of

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modern industrial societies. In Weber’s definition, only a legal rational state can go into such an endeavor” (90-91). Thus while Turkish nationalism was founded on the basis of categories that underlie all nationalisms, that is, “us” and “others” (101), this ethnic discrimination does not equal racism in its strict sense. A further differentiation Aktar introduces into his analysis of nationalist state ideology is his explanation of the new economic policy with reference to social theorist Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. After examining the data on how the Capital Income Levy was collected, Aktar remarks that besides the classification of social groups into Muslim and non-Muslim there were further unarticulated discriminations within the non-Muslim category: For the understanding of the dominant way of thought in the Ankara administration during the One-Party Rule, it is interesting to note the different ways of tax collection, imposed on two Jewish lawyers who shared the same office, based on their “life styles” and “patterns of consumption.” (157)19

Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption suggests that individuals, especially the nouveau riche, gain respect and status in society by exposing their excess in consumption. Based on their principle of “populism (halkçılık) and national saving,” the Kemalists disapproved such a style of consumption (160). Aktar concludes that the collection of the Capital Tax Levy cannot be defined as “anti-capitalist.” Its target was not property and production but wealth exposed through consumption (172). In the effort to level class differences, the levy was imposed on non-Muslims in much higher percentages. Karasu began working on his Beyoğlu narratives in the 1960s, in the aftermath of most of the landmarks of antiminority activity in Turkish history. In Black Waters, we find some fascinating historical references, if only a few. Cryptic references to the violent uprising of 1909, for example, help establish a sinister mode in the narrative. Pera-Beyoğlu as the locality containing the remembered childhood appears as a timeless space, at other times as a place embedded in the temporality of the early republican era. Markers of the popular culture of the day, such as 19 “Tek Parti Dönemi’nde Ankara yönetiminin egemen zihniyetini algılamak açısından ilginç olan konu, ortak olarak aynı yazıhaneyi kullanan iki Yahudi avukatın benimsedikleri farklı ‘hayat tarzları’ ve sahip oldukları farklı ‘tüketim kalıpları’ nedeniyle son derece farklı bir biçimde vergilendirilmesidir” (Aktar 2000, 157).

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the King Kong movies that cause the remembered child his first trauma and the performance of the famous Greek singer Zozo Dalmas, serve to create Beyoğlu as cultural hub, devoid of politics. What does Karasu’s construction of a childhood in that particular topography reveal about those days and what does it conceal? The next two chapters are dedicated to this question.

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Chapter 5

Forgetting, Remembering, and the Workings of Collective Memory: Survival and the Retrieval of Memory Traces

The Phenomenology of Remembering and Forgetting In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur takes a phenomenological approach to memory, exploring the discourse of memory throughout the history of philosophy. Among Ricoeur’s analyses of various memory models, his discussion of Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory provides concepts pertinent to my subject (Ricoeur 2006, 412–52). Categories, such as “mnestic traces,” “personal memory-images,” and “recognition” as a “mnemonic act,” complement Freud’s theory of memory. These concepts further illustrate how Karasu’s Black Waters construes the resurgence of memories, intimately connected with the narrator’s past as a Beyoğlulu. The author’s own retrieval of reminiscences belonging to Beyoğlu, hitherto largely suppressed in his oeuvre, transpires through these fictionalized memory narratives. Writing about forgetting, Ricoeur defines the dynamic among presence, absence, and distance as the mark of the mnemonic phenomenon,

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contending that, paradoxically, “forgetting can be so closely tied to memory that it can be considered one of the conditions for it” (2006, 426). Ricoeur expands Bergson’s concept of “forgetting,” conceptualized as the “effacement of traces.” To this first mode of forgetting Ricoeur adds “the self-survival of impressions-affections as one of the figures of fundamental forgetting, occupying the same rank as the effacement of traces” (440).1 Following this model of “self-survival” as forgetting, akin to Freud’s memory trace stored in the unconscious, proves useful to demonstrate the core issues underlying Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives. In Black Waters, the author not only reenacts a personal history that was mostly buried in silence in his earlier work, but also alludes to this previous silence itself. We can read this mode of forgetting in light of Ricoeur and Freud as a reservoir containing the surviving impressions or traces. Karasu’s Beyoğlu memories thus emerge precisely from such a silence or forgetting. In this way, the stories and essayistic fragments constituting Black Waters reveal the intertwining of forgetting and remembering. As in Benjamin’s autobiographical writings, Karasu’s recollection pieces refer in a self-reflexive manner to those workings of memory that imply both remembering and forgetting, in Ricoeur’s terms, “the self-survival of impressions-affections.” They signify the mnemonic process itself. Ricoeur illustrates the interconnectedness of losing and remembering through “recognition,” a key concept he appropriates from Bergson’s model of memory. Ricoeur defines recollection as “properly mnemonic recognition,” and, evoking Plato’s Theaetetus, he refers to the notion of a “fit” between the foot and a prior imprint left by it. Such recognition “consists in the exact superimposition of the image present to the mind and the psychical trace, also called an image, left by the initial impression” (2006, 430). This process of recognition resolves the enigma implied in the present representation of a past thing. Ricoeur concludes that “[i]n this respect, recognition is the mnemonic act par excellence.” The suspicion of false recognition (“as when from afar we take a tree to be a person we know” (430)) is eliminated by recourse to an inner certainty, a “prime trust” (430), which eliminates the fear of false recognition because the certainty experienced here is a matter of the heart and therefore “indubitable”: 1 Ricoeur points out that this second mode of forgetting is not stated by Bergson, even though he sees an explicit reference to it at the end of the third chapter of Matter and Memory.

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In the narrative that follows it is pronounced only in the future perfect: it will have been true that I recognized this beloved being as having remained the same despite a long absence, a definitive absence.  .  .  . [S]omething of the original impression has to have remained for me to remember it now. If a memory returns, this is because I had lost it; but if, despite everything, I recover it and recognize it, this is because its image had survived. (430; my emphasis)

Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives can be seen, then, as recovering something that has been lost. However, loss does not mean effacement. As Ricoeur notes, the initial “impression-affection,” preserved in forgetting, resurfaces at the moment of remembering, thus reversing the loss. In the certainty of recognition, the recovered mnemonic object is revealed as “this beloved being” despite a long absence, as the above-quoted passage suggests. In Karasu’s texts, Beyoğlu emerges as the beloved site of belonging, the cache bearing the narrator’s, and by indirection, the author’s identity as a member of its non-Muslim minorities. Writing Beyoğlu thus demonstrates the survival of mnemonic images, or traces, if we resort to Freud, long left in the reservoir of forgetting. By bringing them to surface in individual, familial, and collective configurations, Karasu unearths minority identities as essential components of the represented place Pera-Beyoğlu. The author thereby transcends the greater silences his earlier works display. Consequently, Karasu’s narratives point to the act of this “recognition” itself. In order to better understand the concept of “recognition,” it is important to consider Ricoeur’s equation of “recognizing” and “finding again.” In Ricoeur’s view, “finding again” assumes that “it [the memory] is in principle available, if not accessible—available as though awaiting recall, but not ready-to-hand like the birds in Plato’s dovecote, which one possesses but does not hold” (Ricoeur 2006, 433; my emphasis). According to this model, the first impression-affection remains in a state of latency, until recalled as memory image. We can see here again the affinity to the Freudian traces, repressed into the unconscious as distortions of the original first impression. Benjamin’s definition of the “dialectical image” as memory flashing up back into consciousness like lightning is apt here. In Bergson, “latency” relates to an unconscious state, a passivity of sorts, that he terms “pure memory.” The question as to how, in the act of recognition, I realize that the original impression had not been lost and that I can recall it is thus answered: “I shall then only restore to it its character of memory by carrying myself back to the process by which I called it up,

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as it was virtual, from the depths of my past” (as cited in Ricoeur 2006, 434– 35; originally from Bergson 1991, 139; my emphasis). Karasu’s narratives represent an analogous act: the retrieved memory images stem from the depths of the past, understood both chronologically and, akin to Freud’s unconscious and Bergson’s pure memory, as a topographically construed model of the psyche. Moreover, as in Bergson, memory in Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts is shown as an act of “carrying myself back,” performed through the act of writing. Ricoeur points out that this process of recall is reminiscent of Plato’s anamnesis, the truth of which is “seeking is hoping to find. And finding is recognizing what one once—previously—learned” (2006, 435).2 Following Bergson, Ricoeur sees the process of recollection as a retreat from life. We should remind ourselves here of the notion of “contemplative memory,” introduced in chapter 3, in conjunction with Benjamin’s thesis of “sudden illumination” that involves a splitting of the self and the withdrawal of the remembering part to the arena of memory. Ricoeur indicates that this detachment from the present moment implies hesitation, questioning, and suspension, like the Greek epoché, which is overcome through recognition.3 This definition of recognition as a mnemonic act also resembles Benjamin’s category of the “now-time of recognition” (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit), which is distinct from the ordinary present moment. As in Freud’s theory of memory, traces of the past, inscribed in the unconscious, become legible only at later moments of cognition. After all, “sudden illumination” in Benjamin means the flashing up of the memory trace in the moment of danger, a rescue before the trace disappears. We can conjecture that this moment of illumination is introduced by a state of epoché, as in Ricoeur’s above description. Furthermore, Ricoeur’s comparison of remembering to a “dreamlike state,” somewhat like literature, especially “the literature of melancholy, of nostalgia, of spleen” (2006, 439),4 intersects with Benjamin’s model of 2 As is well known, Plato lays out his theory of anamnesis or knowledge as recollection in his dialog Meno, when Socrates helps Meno’s slave who has no education in mathematics to solve problems of geometry. This paradigm is of course derived from Plato’s metaphysics regarding the immortality of the soul. 3 In reference to the concept of epoché Ricoeur writes: “The participants in Plato’s Philebus never tire asking: What is it? Is it a man or a tree? The place accorded to mistakes is indicated by this epoché, this suspension, which is lifted by the declarative statement: It’s really him! It’s really her!” (2006, 439). 4 Here Ricoeur refers above all to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past “as the literary monument in symmetry with Matter and Memory” (ibid., 439).

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remembering. Although Benjamin bestowed on Berlin Childhood the function of an antidote against nostalgia, threads of melancholy and spleen run through his Berlin vignettes. These moods are also readily discernable traits of the Karasu texts, manifest in images of decay and darkness, and the typology of unfulfilled lives pertaining to the aged locals of Pera-Beyoğlu. In contrast to the so-called Beyoğlu or Pera literature of the gentrification era in the 1980s and 1990s, Karasu’s Beyoğlu emerges as a place that induces more angst than nostalgia. Ricoeur’s analogy between remembering and the dream-state is an engaging point of reference for my study. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud establishes an analogy between dream distortion and remembering. Memory trace as inscription is distorted, as is the manifest content of dreams. For Benjamin, the arcades are dreamlike places. Finally, in Karasu, the recurrent evocation of a Beyoğlu passage exudes a dreamlike mood. At times, perceptions of time and space are blurred, as is shown most prominently in the narrative “Another Death out of the Blue” (“Hiç Yoktan Bir Ölüm Daha”).

Collective Memory Karasu’s nameless first-person narrator, alternating between childhood recollections and stories of Beyoğlu’s old-world residents, represents memory cryptically. Although references seem to link the identity of the narrating voice to that of the author, such an equation is only intimated. Despite such uncertainty, these references invoke what Barbara Misztal defines as “autobiographical memory, which is the way we tell others and ourselves the story of our lives” (2003, 9–10).5 We have seen that Karasu’s and Benjamin’s memory texts defy expressly biographical readings. After Freud’s model of memory trace as a distorted inscription, these texts narrate the past by enacting the workings of memory itself. Their employment of deferral and lapses, and their incomplete nature render any attempt to categorize them as autobiography or memoir problematic.6 Yet my hypothesis here is 5 Misztal enumerates various forms and levels of operation of memory that have been identified in memory studies: procedural memory, declarative or semantic memory, cognitive memory, and habit memory, among others. 6 The genre-defying nature of the four texts and the unspecified selfhood of the narrator is vaguely reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1910 novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Lauridds Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Lauridds Brigge) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982). Malte can be defined as a modernist novel that resists the established conventions of the genre.

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that, despite this resistance to generic conventions, Karasu’s representation of Pera-Beyoğlu contains the sediment of a process of remembering that sheds light on its author’s suppression of his own Beyoğlulu identity in his oeuvre and official persona. The thematic fabric of the Beyoğlu narratives, as disjointed as it may be, attests both to Karasu’s memory as lived experience and to his use of the image of Beyoğlu as engrained in collective memory. At this point we should go back to Mills’ study of the old Bosphorus neighborhood Kuzguncuk and the ascription of identity through the Turkish suffix “lu” (and its variations) signifying the belonging to a place. Thus the social context of remembering, as examined in studies of collective memory, constitutes a decisive component of Karasu’s recollective Beyoğlu pieces. A good example of this approach, as offered by Misztal, will help us discern at a transpersonal level the intrinsic linkage between Black Waters and the site it represents, Beyoğlu. According to Misztal, [m]emory is social because every memory exists through its relation with what has been shared with others: language, symbols, events, and social and cultural contexts. . . . The way we remember is determined through the supra-individual cultural construction of language, which in itself is the condition of the sharing of memory, as a memory “can be social only if it is capable of being transmitted and to be transmitted, a memory must first be articulated.” (2003, 11)7

The ongoing negotiation of the term “collective memory” in memory studies addresses questions such as the construction of memory, the connection between memory and identity, and the relationship between political power and memory. These deliberations indicate that the concept has been modified since its introduction by Maurice Halbwachs. For Halbwachs, remembering is always socially framed. Collective memory helps social groups to constitute their identity and strength in the present by determining what and how to remember from the past (Misztal 2003, 50–51). While Misztal accepts Halbwachs’ main premise, namely, that memory cannot be removed from its social context, which presupposes being embedded not only in linguistic but also spatial symbols, she introduces a more fluid, interactive concept of memory. With Halbwachs’ critics, Misztal favors an intersubjective or interactive model of memory

7 The quote within the quote refers to Fentress and Wickham (see Misztal 2003, 11).

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that emphasizes the role of particularity, that is, of individual variations of remembering in memory formation.8 The interaction between collective and individual memory offers a compelling way to understand, from a different angle, Karasu’s abstinence from projecting his life experience as a Beyoğlulu into his fiction. Up to the Beyoğlu narratives in Black Waters, which remained an unpublished manuscript during the author’s lifetime, we find in Karasu’s works only sporadic references to the site, seemingly more as backdrop. While these undoubtedly deserve critical attention, in the Beyoğlu narratives the remembered locale becomes the main focus. Nevertheless, the narratives do not explicitly articulate how place and identity converge. Scholarship on the social construction of memory sees a close connection between memory, site, and identity formation (Misztal 2003, 14). Referring to Benjamin’s model of spatialized memory, Misztal comments: The link between landscape and memory is also present in Benjamin’s (1968) viewing of the city as a repository of people’s memories. Seeing the urban landscape as the battleground for the past, where the past remains open and contestable, he argues that the city can be read as the topography of collective memory in which buildings are mnemonic symbols which can reveal hidden and forgotten pasts. Although the city offers us “an illusory and deceptive vision of the past” as many real histories are buried and covered (Gilloch 1996: 13), new events or new encounters can help us to uncover the city’s true memories. So, memory and the metropolis are interwoven as memory shapes and is in turn shaped by the urban setting. (16–17)

It is important to bear in mind that in his preface to Berlin Childhood, Benjamin speaks of the “social irretrievability” of the past rather than the “contingent biographical.” His memory images are rooted in the big city, as experienced by a middle-class boy. Capturing these metropolitan recollections is fundamentally different from narrating a childhood in the countryside. As Misztal emphasizes, the city topography becomes for Benjamin the 8 In this context, Misztal states: “[our] intersubjectivist explanation of how we remember also acknowledges that—despite the fact memory is socially organized and mediated— individual memory is never totally conventionalized and standardized. The memories of people who have experienced a common event are never identical because in each of them a concrete memory evokes different associations and feelings.” She compares the relationship between collective and individual memory to Saussure’s distinction between language (langue) and speech (parole), thus allowing individual memory its freedom within the “idealized system” of collective memory (ibid., 11).

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site of collective memory. Thus, these urban recollections are also intrinsically linked to historicity (Benjamin 1996b, 344). How can we read Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives within the social context of remembering, as discussed by Misztal and exemplified by Benjamin’s reflections? While the Benjamin references above sufficiently demonstrate the intersection of place and identity, an equivalent articulation of sitebased identity does not seem to enter Karasu’s oeuvre prior to the compilation Black Waters. If we follow Mizstal’s paradigm, Karasu’s “forgetting” of his Beyoğlulu background cannot be glossed over as only a personal and idiosyncratic choice. Two explanations are possible. The first is that Karasu’s selective remembering in his literary works and public self-presentation shows his assimilation in the dominant Turkish collective that, until the advent of a more democratic public discourse in the mid-1980s, had disregarded or dismissed the pluricultural past of Beyoğlu. As shown earlier, the atmosphere of democratization beginning in the late 1980s led to a boom of Beyoğlu-Pera literature in various genres. The generation of younger literary writers, most notably the Turkish Jewish novelist Mario Levi, acquired their voices qua minority authors. This fits in well with Misztal’s argument regarding the changes and variations of individual memory narratives within the framework of collective memories. A second explanation is that Karasu had always already inscribed in his work prior to Black Waters the theme of being a minority. However, in his previous fiction it is posited primarily through another mode of marginality, namely male same-sex love. In his posthumously published essay, “Azınlık-Azınlıklar” (“Minority-Minorities”), the author contends that being a minority means many different things. While the exact meaning of this statement remains elusive, it does help us to understand how Karasu employs the figure of minority in his fiction. To be exact, it is possible to see a substitution of one mode of minority identity with another; in other words, homosexuality replaces ethno-cultural minority identity. Moreover, as illustrated in his fiction, such as, of A Long Day’s Evening (Uzun Sürmüş Bir Günün Akşamı), The Garden of Departed Cats (Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi), and the novel Night (Gece), oppression by those who rule is another major theme in Karasu. Power and domination are treated universally in Karasu’s fiction and as abstract reflections in the essay “Minority-Minorities.” Nevertheless, they manifest the author’s ongoing concern with oppressive supra-individual forces and the predicament of the individuals exposed to them (see Parla 2011, 197-218).

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The fact that the Beyoğlu narratives remained an ongoing project for the author, abandoned and revisited throughout his career, indicates that he had not casually obliterated his identity as a member of Istanbul’s minority culture from his literary endeavors. At the same time, Karasu was unable or unwilling to bring his Beyoğlu memories to a final articulation, thus remaining an unrecognized forerunner of the minority literature of PeraBeyoğlu. As we have seen, the incompleteness of Benjamin’s and Karasu’s memory texts rests largely on the idea of remembering itself, understood as fragmented and distorted, as laid out in Freudian theory. Consequently, these models complicate and render elusive the relation between the represented and the authorial selves. However, Misztal’s construction of individual memory as embedded in larger structures leads beyond the question of referential representation and enables us to investigate Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives from a new angle. In her definition of “autobiographical memory” Misztal explores the particular in light of the collectively ingrained ways of remembering and forgetting. This approach provides compelling insights with which we can further understand Karasu’s cryptic representation of ethno-cultural alterity. Misztal differentiates between three communities of memory, nation, ethnic group, and family, mapping out the strategies of remembering and selective forgetting in each of these (2003, 19). While all of these memory discourses are relevant for the study at hand, family narratives as a segment of collective memory are especially pertinent to memory construction in Black Waters. Misztal argues that early childhood memories are based on a collection of accounts we heard from adults about our childhood. The recollections in Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts are embedded in this kind of collective discourse. The narrator’s programmatic statement that with the Beyoğlu project he intended to give a subjective history of his maternal family and the gradual shift in the narratives to the recollections of the mother figure, are clear indications of such embeddedness.

Kayadez and Keeping a “Low Profile”: Collective Forgetting as the Survival Strategy of Turkish Jewry Chapter 4 of this book offers an overview of the discriminatory policies and practices imposed on the non-Muslim minorities from the early eras of the Turkish Republic until the mid-1960s. We will now look at yet another enlightening essay by Turkish Jewish scholar Rıfat Bali in which

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he examines an extensive silence that he attributes to the Turkish Jewish minority. Bali’s analysis will help construct the social and political context in which Karasu’s own silence about one of the most fundamental aspects of his identity can be situated. By way of two concepts often used in the popular culture of the Turkish Jews, the Ladino idiom kayadez, meaning “silence” or “quiet,” and the English phrase “low profile,” Bali raises the following question: “Why should a Turkish Jew want to remain silent and unseen?” (2006, 102). In the history of Turkey’s Jewry, Bali argues, remaining silent and apolitical was a survival strategy, despite the equal rights granted the Jewish community since the mid-nineteenth century reform movement Tanzimat and the 1923 Lausanne Treaty of Peace.9 Bali points to the difference between the dhimmi (protected) status of the non-Muslim communities under the Ottoman Empire and their acquisition of the status of citizens following the foundation of the republic in 1923. He then states: Yet, despite these advances “on paper”, the de iure rights accorded to the minorities by these two documents [the Lausanne Treaty and the new constitution of the republic] were never fully implemented in practice. But as long as they remained none too visible or vocal within Turkish society, the minorities could somehow maintain the illusion of equal rights and treatment before the law. Such an illusion could be maintained until the passage in 1942 of the Varlık Vergisi (Capital Tax Law), which was implemented in a fashion so blatantly illegal and discriminatory toward the minorities as to remove all doubt as to their true standing within the country’s legal and political structure. (102)

Referring to the linguistic oppression of the Turkification movement, sponsored by the government (“Vatandaş Türkçe konuş!”; “Citizen, speak Turkish!”) that mainly targeted the country’s Jewish community in cosmopolitan cities, such as Istanbul and İzmir, Bali writes:

9 After much inner dispute and under the pressure of the new Turkish administration, the Jewish community of Turkey gave up its rights as a minority community that was granted to them by articles 42 and 44 of the Lausanne Treaty. By giving up their minority status, they agreed Turkish to be the primary language in Jewish schools and yielded to the complete separation of religious and worldly affairs (see Bali 2010, 54-102). As Bali explains, while the Turkish Jewry was the pioneer with regard to the resignation of their minority status, the Armenians and local Greeks (Rums) followed under state pressure, thereby eliminating any obstacle for the foundation of a nation-state (100-1).

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As a result of the heavy social and political pressure to which they were subjected, Turkey’s Jews, who from the state’s inception until the 1940s were constantly accused in the press of stubbornly refusing to speak Turkish or of speaking it poorly or with a heavy accent, gradually came to adopt the principle of not speaking in public, in other words, kayadez. (103)

The inscription on the collective memory of Turkish Jewry of this unofficial oppression determined the Jewish community’s “manner of remembering” (104). It resulted in an intentional forgetting, such as in the case of the destruction of the communal Jewish archives documenting Zionist activities of the Jewish émigrés during the foundation years of Israel (104).10 In his analysis, Bali reads the celebratory activities in 1992, which marked the quinquennial of the arrival of Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire, in conjunction with his socio-political argument. Through these festivities, initiated by the Turkish state with the participation of the Jewish community in Istanbul, Jews moved into the spotlight. Bali argues that while this demonstrated the state’s efforts to improve its image in the West in terms of human rights, for the Turkish Jewish community, it also indicated another act of self-censorship. By participating in the official version of the peaceful existence of Jews in the Ottoman and Turkish lands, the Jewish community censored its own history. Bali concludes that “[i]n this way, self-censorship and forgetfulness have become an integral part of Turkish Jewish identity” (2006, 106). The Turkish Jewish way of remembering by remaining silent can be further elucidated by Misztal’s idea of social memory. In her discussion of the nation as the main mnemonic community, she underscores the function of “selective forgetting” (17) in constructing and maintaining a collective self-image. She also refers to the term “forced forgetting,” imposed by oppressive states (2003, 17–18).11 These two modes of forgetting are similar to “self-censorship” and “forgetfulness,” as illustrated above by Bali. 10 In contrast to such acts of erasure, Bali points to the fact that the Holocaust occupies a significant role in the official Jewish and Turkish discourse. Bali offers several reasons for this: one is to foster Jewish identity among the young generation; another is connected with Turkey’s self-defense against the Armenian genocide. Since the words “Holocaust” and “genocide” have one equivalent in Turkish, soykırım, the official Turkish view sees it in its own interest to attribute the word to the Jewish predicament only (ibid.,106–7). 11 Misztal discusses forgetting in light of seminal studies on nation building, such as by Ernest Renan, Ernest Gellner, and Benedict Anderson. “Forced forgetting” has been especially applied to communist regimes as nation-building systems.

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Misztal’s intersubjectivist approach to memory helps us to reexamine Karasu’s suppression of his minority background in his oeuvre until he intimates it in his Beyoğlu narratives. When following Misztal’s framework in light of the discriminatory practices in Turkey, discussed above and in chapter 4, it becomes clear that the reaction of Beyoğlu’s minority communities to discrimination was the decisive factor in their mode of collective remembering. Misztal states: [T]he main assumption of the intersubjectivist sociology of memory is that, while it is the individual who remembers, remembering is more than just a personal act. The intersubjectivist approach. . . advocates the study of social context in which even the most personal memories are embedded, and the investigation of the social formation of memory by exploring the conditions and factors that make remembering in common possible, such as language, rituals, commemoration practices and sites of memory. (2003, 6)

A good example of the collective foundation of memory in the context of Beyoğlu’s history in the republican era is the way the September Pogrom (1955) is remembered. The Istanbul version of Kristallnacht clearly marked the destruction of Pera society and the end of Pera-Beyoğlu’s pluricultural identity. In her microhistorical study of the bygone Pera society, based on oral histories of generationally categorized informant groups now living primarily in diaspora or at the peripheries of the district, Tischler comments on the memories of a Peran or Perote woman of Greek descent, living in diaspora, as follows: Events that were experienced—the Varlık Vergisi [Capital Tax Levy], the unrest of September 1955, the decline of Pera in general—if they come up in the life histories at all, they are mentioned with regret but without emotionality and more in passing, and never with details, as if they had not been allowed into memory at all. Many G I informants [those born between 1900 and 1927] say they do not speak Turkish, or only brokenly. Even when they have a reasonable command of Turkish, they avoid direct confrontation with the language (reading, going to a Mass in Turkish, everyday communication). (Tischler 2006b, 166)

The way in which these former members of Pera society relate to the past indicates an affinity to the kayadez principle that Bali attributes to the Jewish community. Furthermore, the resistance of these old Greek Perans through silence in the face of the dominant language reminds us of the

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Turkish Jews keeping a low profile rule and underscores the fact that pressures of Turkification, at work in the 1930s and 40s, were equally instrumental in the death of Pera society, as was the physical destruction caused by the pogrom. Elsewhere in her analysis, Tischler also emphasizes the other extreme, pointing out that the youngest generation of former Perans (referred to as G III), those born in 1956-1985, either do not speak about the cataclysmic events of the past to which they cannot relate in personal experience, or they refer to them “with a degree of emotionality that could give one the impression that they themselves had been involved. All in all, the G II [those born between 1928-1955] and G III narratives tend to concentrate on repeating the memories and targets of animosity laid down by G I” (2006b, 168). Tischler argues that these narratives, further enriched by the idealized memories of the past generations and by certain founding myths (especially in the case of the former Perans of Greek descent), impart an “often nearly pathological distrust of everything that is Turkish, i.e. ‘other’” ( 168). The intersubjective memory model, as laid out by Misztal and exemplified here by Tischler, serves us as a further critical tool to read Karasu’s mnemonic Beyoğlu. While the esoteric narratives in Black Waters enact the distortion, inherent to memory traces according to Freud, they partake in the larger imaginary through which Peran society construed or suppressed the past.

The Other Beyo˘glu: The Topography of the Low Like Said Naum Duhani, author of Pera-Beyoğlu’s first social topographies Eski İnsanlar Eski Evler (People of Old Times, Houses of Old Times) and Beyoğlu’nun Adı Pera İken (When Beyoğlu Was Called Pera), Bilge Karasu speaks as a Beyoğlu insider.12 Duhani himself was a Pera resident and a 12 About the genesis of Duhani’s Beyoğlu books see Gülersoy, “Sunuş” (“Preface”) and the introduction, titled “Kitap ve Yazarı” (“The Book and its Author”) to Beyoğlu’nun Adı Pera İken (1990, 7-15). Gülersoy informs the reader that he had published Duhani’s first social topography in the French original (Vieilles gens vieilles demeures. Topographie sociale de Beyoğlu au XIX ème siecle) in 1947 as an unassuming little book by the Touring and Automobile Club Publications. Gülersoy states that he published the book in 1982 in Turkish translation. It was a better quality print with added illustrations that was sold out within a few years. In 1984 a reprint with a new translation followed. Duhani’s second Beyoğlu topography published in French in 1956 under the title Quand Beyoğlu s’appelait Péra. Les temps qui ne reviendront plus, appeared in 1990. It is interesting to note that Duhani’s works on Beyoğlu were presented to the Turkish reader after remaining unnoticed for decades. Their popularity coincides with the Beyoğlu revival

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kind of Levantine. His family belonged to the Christian congregation of the Melchites of Syria and Lebanon. He was raised in Beirut, where his father Naum Pasha served as an Ottoman diplomat. During the later diplomatic career of the Pasha at the Ottoman capital, the son Said Duhani lived amongst the cream of Pera society. When his father was appointed Ambassador to Paris, Said experienced the glamorous belle époque of Paris. Thus, the gradual changes that took place during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s at Said Duhani’s Pera meant for him the loss of an entire universe. Çelik Gülersoy, who was a leading activist of cultural conservation and whose views on Pera-Beyoğlu I addressed in chapter 2, compares Duhani in this changing urban environment to an image torn from an old history book (Gülersoy 1990, 10-14).13 As in Duhani’s memoirs of Beyoğlu, Karasu’s texts evoke memory through spatial imagery. But while both authors construct Beyoğlu’s identity, past and present, through the depiction of streets and architectural sites, they use space in different ways and for different ends. During his flânerie through Beyoğlu, Duhani’s gaze turns to the exterior of the buildings and streets that he reads as spatialized codes of past lives, of entire family histories, be they real or imagined, and to numerous specific sites, such as cafés, embassies, movie theaters, and other establishments that were the staples of Pera’s bygone identity. Duhani’s narrative represents Pera as a collective environment, belonging to the Pera society of old times. He intersperses various personal anecdotes within an objectivist narration, in which the narrator assumes the role of an omniscient insider who keeps his distance from the stories he tells. Even though Duhani’s narrator penetrates the interior of the spaces, his narrative remains one of exteriority, decoding and revealing to the reader what the sites contain from the past, while he strolls by. In contrast to Duhani, Karasu’s narrative of Beyoğlu is one of interiority. Traces of collective memory and the district’s identity appear of the 1980s and 1990s. While Gülersoy strongly dissociates Duhani from the nostalgic Pera literature that erupted in those decades, he also distinguishes Duhani’s perspective from the negative discourse on Pera as slum (“Sunuş,” Beyoğlu’nun Adı Pera İken). In contrast to Gülersoy, Eldem sees Duhani precisely as the initiator of such nostalgia (2006b, 21-22). 13 Gülersoy’s description of the late Levantine’s run-down attic apartment in Beyoğlu after Duhani’s death in 1970 conveys the sense of isolation surrounding the author’s life and death. Although, as Gülersoy explains, personal reasons determined Duhani’s solitary life, his isolation was a predicament that he shared with other minority residents of Beyoğlu (1990, 14).

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as embedded in fragmented personal histories, hovering at the ambiguous threshold between fact and fiction. Even though Duhani’s Beyoğlu stories are mostly episodic, conveying slices of larger life stories of the old collective, they are ordered more rationally than Karasu’s. At the outset of Eski Insanlar, Eski Evler, Duhani lays out the trajectory of his stroll through space and time by informing the reader of the three segments of Beyoğlu he is going to cover. He leads his reader according to this tripartite division of the neighborhood corresponding to the official mapping of the boundaries, thus subsuming the disorderly, often nonlinear, course of his stories under this general organizing principle. The first of Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts, titled “Beyoğlu Üzerine Metin” (“Text on Beyoğlu”), begins with the renunciation of boundaries and bureaucratic maps and measurements. This signals that Beyoğlu will be explored not in its empirical spatiality, as a geographic designation, positivistically represented, but through some other strategy. The opening lines of “Text on Beyoğlu” read: Its boundaries should remain in administrators’ maps, folders, registries. What we need is not its measurements but it [Beyoğlu] itself. Its muddy, shiny current, flowing strongly, like millions of people. We can pipe up from a random hole of it, from one of its angles, sidewalks, or one of its doors. In the midst of this current, this flooding, what single point can be of importance? Denote anything? (Sınırları yönetim sorumlularının haritalarında, dosyalarında, kütüklerinde kalsın. Bize gerekli olan, ölçüleri değil, kendi. Milyonlarca insan ölçüsünde gür akan, çamurlu, pırıltılı seli. Rastgele bir çukurundan, bir yanından, kaldırım ya da kapısından girebiliriz söze. Bu akıntının ortasında, bu sellenişte, hangi tek noktanın önemi olabilir? Adı olabilir?”) (Karasu 1999b, 15)

This programmatic announcement distinguishes the mode of Karasu’s narrative from the official language in which Beyoğlu is depicted quantitatively, as a borough with boundaries, the parameters of which can be measured. The self-referential gesture distances the narration from a rationalistic mode of discourse, because, it argues, “what we need is [Beyoğlu] itself, not its measurements” (15). Grasping the identity, perhaps the essence, of the entity Beyoğlu necessitates another language. The imagery of a current,

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a flood that characterizes the locale, suggests that the meaning of Beyoğlu will be construed through metaphorical language. Duhani, by contrast, employs metonymy in his representation of the district. Each building with its social history is part of and stands for the bygone identity of Pera. In Karasu’s “Text on Beyoğlu,” it is due to this muddy flux that the narrator rejects finding a starting point for the narrative: there can be no beginnings, no naming amid this flow. “Text on Beyoğlu” positions itself against referential representations of Beyoğlu, undermining a spatial point of departure and a temporal point of origin. Instead, another type of spatial signifier, such as an arbitrarily chosen hole, a sidewalk, or a gate, serves as the springboard for the narrative of “Text on Beyoğlu,” as the second paragraph of the opening statement exemplifies. Moreover, the vertical movement, suggested in the above quote, of beginning to tell the story by rising from a hole resonates strongly with Freud’s theory of the unconscious. The memory traces that come up to the surface offer the material of the discourse on Beyoğlu. We can also read this imagery in connection with Benjamin’s paradigm of the archeology of memory. As we recall, remembering resembles digging out from the depths of the soil only to recover broken pieces, fragments, or to speak after Freud, traces. In the following pages of “Text on Beyoğlu,” several tropes are laid out that will function as leitmotifs through the four main texts compiled as Black Waters, as well as the kindred narrative “Ölümün Avlusu” (“The Courtyard of Death”): the smells of Beyoğlu, in particular the stench of decay and mold; the neighborhood’s cats; life and death; and the recurring theme of darkness. A powerful depiction of the death theme, intertwined with the Beyoğlu streets themselves, reads as follows: Death is a defiled virginity in these streets. Once defiled, the rest follows. Which street in Beyoğlu has not seen a coffin passing through its door, on what pavement stone has a coffin not trembled? (Ölüm, bozulmuş bir kızlıktır bu sokaklarda. Bozulduktan sonra arkası gelir. Beyoğlu sokaklarının hangisinin kapısından bir tabut girmemiş, hangi taşında bir cenaze sarsılmamıştır?) (Karasu 1999b, 16)

In “Text on Beyoğlu” this upward motion is depicted through organic imagery, referring to the lower and upper streets of Beyoğlu as arteries and vertebrae. The ascending movement, which is diametrically opposed to Duhani’s horizontal stroll along Beyoğlu, reveals at the same time a social

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hierarchy. Since Beyoğlu is spread out through a hilly area, with İstiklâl Caddesi cutting through the center as the main artery, the bottom of the hole can be read both literally, referring to the streets at the skirts of the hills merging with old creek beds, and metaphorically, as signifying the slumlike living conditions down there. Karasu first evokes the socially collective life of the neighborhood by following its topography to the lowest of the low: As you descend, the windows pour out ever shriller tones of the radios and of the records in record players, the songs streaming out become more brokenhearted, the erupting folk tunes wilder. On summer days, these windows throw up twice a day smells of deep fried and grilled food, as if to suppress the stench of mold. Those who suffer yell, those who are happy yell, those who fight yell. Everybody looks, sitting at their own window, through everybody else’s window into their interior. For this reason, no one can blame the other, even if he appears doing so. (İndikçe, radyoların, pikaplardaki plakların daha bağırgan, şarkıların daha yanık, oyun havalarının daha deli olup dışarı uğradığı pencereler, küf kokularını bastırmağa uğraşırcasına günde bir iki öğün kızartma kokuları, ızgara kokuları kusar yaz günlerinde. Acı çeken bağırır, sevinen bağırır, çekişenler bağırır. Herkes herkesin penceresinden içeri bakar oturduğu yerde. Bu yüzden de kimse kimseyi gerçekten kınayamaz, kınar görünse de.) (17)

The collective described in the above quote constitutes the first of several social typologies to follow, such as the women of Beyoğlu, in particular the old virgins and widows, and the erstwhile bourgeois of Pera society, the “Spartans.” The words chosen to depict the lower sides of Beyoğlu signify something negative: this slum-like site exudes the stench of mold, it vomits the smell of frying fats; the music played is loud and erratic, and there is a great deal about the human voice as a scream. By starting his discourse on Beyoğlu from these topographically and socially low areas, Karasu makes two implicit statements. First, he resists representing the neighborhood through its main artery, the ostentatious Grand’rue de Péra, which usually acts as the centerpiece in accounts of Beyoğlu, including Duhani’s. Following Duhani, the nostalgically toned biographies of Beyoğlu turn their attention primarily to architectural sites adorning both sides of the main street. By describing the establishments

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that once rendered Grand’rue de Péra a unique European style entertainment district—the embassies, churches, and the beautiful belle époque buildings that were once the mansions of wealthy Levantines and other natives of Pera (mainly consisting of local Greeks and Armenians of the upper strata)—these representations aim to refresh the faded colors of a glamorous cosmopolitan neighborhood. In contrast to these master narratives, Karasu sets out from the depths, the Id, of the district. Second, as I argued above, the move of the narrative upward from a random hole substituting for a linear starting point can be seen as analogous to the process of remembering. Misztal refers to the comparisons of the everyday language, “such as caves, labyrinths, grottoes, and mineshafts,” that have been used as analogies of remembering and forgetting (2003, 3). Thus, the narrative strategy of “Text on Beyoğlu” of delving into what has been repressed from mainstream narratives signals at the same time that other modes of forgetting and remembering may follow. Eldem’s designation of the “self-sustaining mythology of Galata-Pera,” as mentioned in chapter 2, provides a useful way to understand how Karasu counteracts such “mythology.” With his critique of the nostalgically tinted Pera literature, including numerous social and cultural histories which emerged with the revivalist trend in the 1980s, Eldem targets precisely the selective representation of Pera. In contrast to Karasu’s topographical starting point in the lower domains, nostalgic Pera narratives omit the unsightly aspects of the neighborhood. Eldem argues that the authors of the revivalist trend could no longer describe Beyoğlu based on intimate knowledge and memory, as was the case for Duhani. The district’s past at the turn of the twentieth century had already become “history” and thus needed reconstruction, often based on “certain topoi and stereotypes associated with Pera and Galata.” According to Eldem, confusing the familiarity with the tropes and authentic familiarity with the area fosters the mythology of Beyoğlu, instead of embarking on new research. Eldem writes: The greatest danger stems from the profusion of such stereotypes and clichés and by the most inevitable attraction created by a self-sustaining mythology of Pera and Galata. A closer look at most of the research conducted on the area reveals that much of the information used is highly descriptive in nature and extremely selective in scope. Rather telling in this respect is the reliance of most narratives on elements of the urban texture and of the district’s topography characterized by the fact that they stand out in one

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way or another. Typically, such descriptions will tend to include the most prestigious buildings lining both sides of the Grand’rue de Péra, rarely venturing anywhere further than the avenue des Petits-Champs (or rue Kabristan) or an occasional transversal street rendered significant by some major landmark. (2006b, 25)

However, as we saw in chapter 2, there is also a dark side to the myth of Beyoğlu. The Western travelogues of the nineteenth century represent Pera ambiguously, mixing the author’s fascination with the vibrant life of this multicultural locality with disgust at prostitution, filth, and amalgamations of peoples, ethnicities, and languages. By invoking Beyoğlu through foul odors, images of darkness and decay, and shrill sounds, Karasu participates in this kind of fiction. Still, his graphic depiction of the lowest social strata of the area differentiates itself from the ambiguity between fascination and repulsion that is characteristic of the travelogues. Karasu’s Beyoğlu is told from the perspective of an insider, a Beyoğlulu, and it is based on intimate knowledge and memory, a position that Eldem thinks to have vanished from the later nostalgic accounts of Pera-Beyoğlu. Through his fragmented, nonlinear Beyoğlu images, Karasu shapes a discourse that speaks of the unnamed otherness of Beyoğlu. Yet, because it is told from within, the otherness at stake here is, in essence, different from that caught by the Western gaze in travelogues. At the same time, the narratives in Black Waters resist the glorifying stereotypes Eldem alludes to. Evading the polarity between a lowly site and a multicultural haven, Karasu signs his discourse of Beyoğlu with his own signature, carrying it toward new dimensions

The Maternal Realm, the “Half-Light of Habit,” and “Sudden Illumination” This section offers a close reading of the second text of Black Waters, “Bir Söylencedir Beyoğlu” (“Beyoğlu is a Legend”). We have seen that the narrator’s account on the genesis and progression of the Beyoğlu narratives constitutes the core of “Beyoğlu is a Legend.” We should also recall that in Benjamin’s paradigm of memory, the plate of remembrance, due to the “half-light of habit,” may remain dark for a long time, in order then to show an image when lit by a “sudden illumination” (1996a, 632-33; 1991b, 516). The metaphor of memory image as “snapshot” is congruent with Freud’s

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thesis on the sudden and momentary flashing up of traces that had been stored in the unconscious. Reading the passage on the genesis of the narrator’s Beyoğlu project in the context of these models reveals a similar construction of remembering. Furthermore, this crucial section addresses expressly Karasu’s strategy of concealing and manifesting minority identities belonging to Pera-Beyoğlu. The dual urge to articulate what has been unspoken and simultaneously keep it untold suggests that in Black Waters Karasu presents an aporetic treatment of repression. The evocation of the narrator/author’s personal and family history moves around a reluctant enunciation of markers of ethno-cultural difference. Just as the reader registers them, they disappear. Karasu employs a similar method when he depicts the collective identity of bygone Perans under the enigmatic label “the Spartans.” However, when read in light of Benjamin, Freud, and Ricoeur, Karasu’s fleeting images not only convey a hesitation but also the workings of memory itself. In “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the narrator’s reflections on his work in progress provide decisive evidence for this reading. The narrator reports that it was his aunt’s death that gave him the impetus to return to this writing project after having abandoned it for several years: But, in September 1977, upon my aunt’s death, everything started working like clockwork in my mind. It seemed like everything was beginning to fall into place. To me, my aunt appeared to be closely connected to an era, a certain character [façade] of Beyoğlu. I said that, by distancing myself from her and by coming close to her, I wanted to try going from one yarn to another, one color to another in these bundles of thread. (Ama 1977 yılı Eylül ayında, teyzemin ölümü üzerine bir şey, bir saat, bir çark işlemeğe başladı kafamda. Her şey yerli yerine oturmağa başlıyordu sanki. Teyzem, Beyoğlu’nun bir dönemi, bir yüzü ile sıkı sıkıya ilişkili göründü bana. Ondan uzaklaşarak, ona yaklaşarak, bu çileler yığını içinde bir iplikten bir ipliğe, bir renkten bir renge geçmeği denemek istiyorum dedim.) (Karasu 1999b, 45; my emphasis)

While the bundles of thread point to the aunt’s profession as a seamstress, they also establish an analogy between the tools for making a dress and

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writing the narrative of Beyoğlu out of this unorganized mass of threads, or memory traces.14 The deceased aunt embodies a close family member, intimately connected to the narrator’s mother and maternal grandmother. As the narrator reviews the previous two Beyoğlu texts at the introduction of the third one, “Lağımlaranası” (“Mother of Black Waters”), he sees clues in these “drafts” about the direction of his writing: Some clues—not clues: a subjective, emotive “history” of my maternal family; memories selected from my lived experience and connected with one another as far as I regard them as related to Beyoğlu; a subjective piece of Istanbul woven by streets, houses, people; in a less obvious, more intuitive way, it is a story about “the changes that Beyoğlu underwent—in the years I experienced.” (Birtakım ip uçları var (ip uçları değil): Anamgillerin öznel, duygusal bir “tarihi”; yaşantılarım içerisinden seçilip Beyoğlu ile ilişkili gördüğüm ölçüde birbirine bağlanabilecek anılar; sokakların, evlerin kişilerin ördüğü öznel bir İstanbul parçası; daha az belirgin, daha çok sezilir nitelikte, “Beyoğlu’nun— benim gördüğüm yıllarda—geçirdiği değişiklikler” türünden bir öykü.) (1999b, 79)

Throughout the Beyoğlu texts the mnemonic traces waiting to be discerned almost exclusively concern the narrator’s matrilineal family. The leitmotif of strolling, with the remembered child holding his mother’s hand, recurs in all the narratives, as do visits to the aunt’s house as well as to other houses in Beyoğlu whose residents are women. The stories of the buildings, gloomy interiors, and the old neighborhood streets are interwoven with the melancholy predicament of old virgins, as depicted in “Text on Beyoğlu.” The aunt’s Beyoğlu abode and tailoring atelier, where she lives with her mother and her two daughters, occupies a central place within the childhood memories. The predominantly female constellation of the aunt’s household thus represents the discourse on the women of Beyoğlu in Black 14 The phrase Karasu uses in Turkish for “bundles of thread” is “çileler yığını.” “Çile” has two primary meanings: 1) ordeal, trial, suffering, 2) period of severe trial; period of religious retirement with fasting. The secondary meaning of the word is “hank” or “skein.” Even though the above-mentioned quote pertains to this secondary meaning, Karasu associatively refers to both of the primary meanings as well, implying an unspecified trial or suffering as the aunt’s lot (see New Redhouse Turkish-English Dictionary, 1979).

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Waters. Karasu’s ensemble pays homage not only to the fictionalized matrilineal family, but also to the women of Beyoğlu as a collective including the unmarried daughters, and the young and old widows who are confined to the house or hold down small jobs to survive. The figure of the aunt and her household carries still more layers of signification. Scrutinizing these layers will help clarify why the aunt’s death constitutes a turning point for the narrator’s decision to return to the unfinished drafts on Beyoğlu and why he enigmatically claims that “[i]t seemed like everything was beginning to fall into place.” One of the clues that leads us to the concealed ethno-cultural identity of the aunt lies in the covert reference to her name. According to the diegesis, when the narrator arrives at his aunt’s house on a visit to Istanbul in 1977, his cousin conveys to him the death of her mother with the exclamation “Marruş is dead.”15 The aunt’s death is announced with the nickname the narrator used to call her. The polar action of concealing and manifesting can be found precisely in the opacity of this nickname. Like Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” the aural perception of “Marruş” functions as a lightning or shock, triggering the process of remembering. However, like the Freudian memory trace, “Marruş” is distorted, revealing little of its origins.16 Because Karasu chooses to introduce “Marruş” instead of leaving the aunt nameless, we have to identify its function as a marker related to other implied references to ethnic and cultural background. Marruş is among the very few proper names Karasu uses in the Beyoğlu narratives. This is evidence of its hermeneutic significance. The profound ambiguity surrounding the nickname is further intensified by references to the headscarves worn by the aunt and the maternal grandmother. The narrator remembers how, in her old age, his aunt greeted him from her armchair, stretching her arms with skinny wrists forward and grasping her nephew’s hands, while her headscarf slid back from her hair (Karasu 1999b, 32). The grandmother’s bed also occupies an important place in the childhood memories. The narrator remembers: 15 “Marruş öldü” (Karasu 1999b, 35). 16 My research on the use of the name “Marruş” in the Turkish context remained inconclusive. However, Slavic Studies expert Professor Evguenia Davidova confirmed that “Marruş” (Marrush) is used in Bulgarian as a diminutive of “Maria,” and that in Russian there may be a similar designation. I appreciate this information, as well as efforts by Dr. Hasan Kuruyazıcı and Defne Suman for exploring the origins and use of “Marruş” in Turkey.

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When I stayed overnight there, I used to watch quietly, in amazement, how my grandmother got into her bed and sat, leaning back on the two puffy pillows she straightened at her head end, how she spread her head cover in front of her, took out small rolled pieces of paper from a little bag, unknown to me where she kept it, how she rolled and tied these pieces of paper on strands of her hair she had untied and combed, how she then gathered her head cover and tightly tied it back to her head, sliding back the pillows and laying down. (Gece yatısına kaldığım günler, ninemin yatağına girip baş ucuna doğru diktiği iki kabarık yastığa yaslanarak oturuşu, başının örtüsünü önüne açışı, nereden çıktığını hiçbir zaman kestiremediğim ufacık bir çıkından kıvrılı bükülü kağıtlar çıkarması, çözüp taradığı saçlarını tutam tutam bu kağıtlara sarıp bağlaması, sonra da örtüsünü toplayıp başına sıkı sıkı bağlayarak yastıklarını yerlerine kaydırıp yatması, ses çıkarmadan, tansıyarak izlediğim bir oyundu.) (55)

While we could attribute the head cover to non-Muslim women of Pera, the headscarf is primarily associated with Islamic tradition. On the one hand, this perplexing overlap of distinct cultural and religious traditions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which made up in varying degrees the social fabric of Pera, suggests a deliberate fluidity and indeterminacy of these traditions in the textual logic of Black Waters. The headscarf enters the narrative, flashing up and extinguishing like a memory trace that manifests itself through distortion rather than factual clarity. On the other hand, the confusion about the head cover arguably serves to hide the identity of the grandmother and aunt as non-Muslim dwellers of Pera-Beyoğlu. Through this reading we can understand the narrator’s mysterious remark that, with the aunt’s death, everything seemed to fall into place: the figure of the aunt stands for the vanished minority culture of Pera-Beyoğlu, specifically its collective of women. While the memory of the aunt evokes the narrator’s own belonging to that culture, this insight at the same time provides the spark that would propel his writing. Karasu’s preoccupation with Beyoğlu, from the early stages of his career onward, can thus be described as a self-search. In the diegesis of the Beyoğlu narratives, this search acquires a center through the loss of the aunt. Triggered by the return to his childhood neighborhood and by the news of her death, the narrator invokes a very personal history by way of calling to

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life the maternal figures of his past. The family history is inseparably situated in a locality, the past Beyoğlu, and in an era that has disappeared. The heterogeneous society of Beyoğlu still existed when Karasu grew up in the early decades of the republic. At the moment of his narrator’s return to the aunt’s house in the late 1970s, however, this socio-cultural texture had long since disintegrated. As discussed in chapter 4, the pogroms of September 6–7, 1955, against Istanbul’s non-Muslim minorities and the Cyprus conflict of the 1960s and 1970s caused the exodus of large groups of minorities from their native environment. Although it remains unsaid in Karasu’s narratives, the locals of Pera-Beyoğlu, including the Greek-Orthodox, the Armenians, the Jews, and the Levantines, had ceased to exist as a multiethnic collective. The Beyoğlu of the 1970s had become for the most part a rundown environment, its old dwellings now inhabited by those Muslim migrants from the Anatolian countryside who moved to the metropolitan area in hope of better jobs. Recognizing, as if in a sudden flash, that the aunt’s Beyoğlulu identity constitutes the core of his project, the narrator is able to return to the drafts and continue with his writing. Whereas the narrator’s visit to Istanbul and the news of the aunt’s death are told from the perspective of a diegetic present, the sudden realization, like a Benjaminian “sudden illumination,” ensues in the “now-time.” Although the narrator closely associates the aunt with a bygone era, a certain façade of Beyoğlu, he continually evades specifics about ethnicity, culture, or religion, thus rendering the vanished era an empty cipher and leaving its characteristics as a blank space. Karasu’s poetics of memory, then, implies the general, such as collective identities, through the particular. In the nonlinear narrative structure of the stories that comprise Black Waters, details are given without identifying larger denominations of belonging. Instead, the author paints the colors of the past through the representation of space; through the depiction of houses, apartments, streets, cellars, courtyards, and arcades; and through the actors occupying these spaces, without specifying their cultural backgrounds. The locality Beyoğlu becomes the only common denominator defining them. At this point, Misztal’s emphasis on the function of particularity within the framework of collective remembering is helpful: in her interactive model, Misztal acknowledges the differences in individual memory formation, maintaining that it always deviates from a “conventionalized” form of collective memory (2003, 11).

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The following passage from the episode about the aunt’s death illuminates the overarching function of the discursive space of Beyoğlu as repository of memory: As years go by, Beyoğlu becomes a kind of water that at one time enveloped and contained in itself my aunt, several relatives, friends, acquaintances, and that transported them to the beyond. It turns into heavy, smelly, dirty, murky waters that mix and haul flowers and joys, poverties and tears, mighty waters that have carried away for many years thousands of lives. (Yıllar geçtikçe de Beyoğlu, bir ara teyzemi, birçok yakınımı, arkadaşı, tanıdığı da sarıp içine almış, ötelere iletmiş bir su, ağır bir su, kokulu, kirli, çiçeklerle sevinçleri, yoksulluklarla gözyaşlarını birbirine katarak sürükleyen bulanık bir su, binlerce yaşamı yıllar boyu taşıyıp götüren güçlü bir su haline geliyor.) (Karasu 1999b, 45)

Our analysis has shown that the water metaphor invites a more complex reading than merely equating Beyoğlu with murky and foul sewage waters. The figure of water becomes for Karasu’s Beyoğlu project a memory site in flux, as murky as memory itself. It is a primordial place, containing both personal and collective memory, holding and pulling forth the past. In a later section, the narrator defines his project on Beyoğlu “as a subjective, emotive history of my maternal family,” emphasizing that it would be a story about “the changes Beyoğlu underwent—in the years I experienced” (79). Read together, these passages depicting the metaphor of water and change indicate that Karasu’s focus is on the irretrievable character of the past. The phrase “the changes Beyoğlu underwent” contains a specifically historic reference, despite the narrator’s silence about the nature of these changes. Analogous to Old Berlin-West in Benjamin’s memoirs, Karasu’s Beyoğlu represents a lost topography. As in Benjamin, the trope of loss pertains to the “necessary social irretrievability of the past,” rather than just an ontogenetic distance to childhood (1996b, 344). For the old social textures of both Berlin-West and Beyoğlu were destroyed as a result of the calamities caused by nationalist ideologies. The sudden realization Karasu’s narrator experiences regarding the representative function of his aunt can be compared to the concept of recognition that Ricoeur uses to define the mnemonic act par excellence. Read in line with Ricoeur, this event marks a turning point, at which memories are retrieved out of an earlier forgetting, “a sort of forgetting kept in reserve

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(oubli de reserve)” (Ricoeur 2006, 414). After Bergson’s theory of memory, Ricoeur states: The key experience, we have just said, is that of recognition. I speak of it as a minor miracle. It is indeed in the moment of recognition that the present image is held to be faithful to the initial affection, to the shock of the event. Where the neurosciences speak simply of reactivating traces, the phenomenologist, being instructed by lived experience, will speak of the persistence of the original impression. (416)

The survival of memories in the unconscious enables the “’reliving of images’ in the moment of recognition” (417). Ricoeur equates such a survival of memories in the storehouse of the unconscious, understood in Bergson’s sense, with a certain mode of forgetting, defined as a “reserve or resource. Forgetting then designates the unperceived character of the perseverance of memories, their removal from the vigilance of consciousness” (440). By having his narrator experience his moment of recognition at the old familial Beyoğlu location, Karasu establishes a complex connection between site, memory, self-exploration, and writing. Following Ricoeur, we may conclude that, by returning to the milieu of his childhood, Karasu’s narrator experiences a resurfacing of surviving but “unperceived” memories from the “reserve” or “resource” of forgetting. The figure of the deceased aunt, along with the site Beyoğlu, becomes the cipher of an uncharted multiethnic past that the narrator will summon up in his writing on Beyoğlu. Rather than being mimetically referential, however, this writing unfolds akin to Freud’s description of remembering. It is a script that mimics memory traces, which themselves are inscriptions of an originary, yet unrecoverable, excitation. Karasu’s construction of selfhood moves along the thin line between the impossibility and unavoidability of autobiographic memory. On the one hand, the author complicates autobiographical narrative through his poetics of memory. On the other hand, his Beyoğlu texts reveal a mnemonic content, until then “unperceived” or, in Freudian terminology, “repressed.” Recovering this buried aspect of selfhood is inseparably linked to bringing to recollection the identity of the family, embodied by a small collective of Perans. The present inquiry aims at discerning how Karasu’s Beyoğlu as a venue of difference breaks apart the author’s self-integration into the discourse of Turkish national identity. The gaps, discontinuities, and silences in

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the fragmented narratives indicate marginalities, and they betray a minority modus in multiple ways. The future-oriented, self-assured nationalist ideology of the 1930s, the remembered childhood time in Black Waters, is counteracted by fractured memories, conveying a pervasive mood of loss and decay.17 The author’s aporetic treatment of autobiographic memory is best understood, if we read it against the backdrop of a greater trope of decay, in the gradual disintegration of the culturally diverse texture of Pera-Beyoğlu. While this analysis of “Beyoğlu is a Legend” illustrates the deep engagement in Beyoğlu of Karasu’s narrator, it also reveals the author’s urge to speak out what mostly remained unspoken elsewhere in his oeuvre. The spatiality of Beyoğlu provides for Karasu the topos for self-exploration, which is communicated to the reader in the duality of concealment and manifestation. Seen from the vantage point of Karasu’s writing career, this anagnorisis, set off in the narrative with the aunt’s death, comes tragically late for the author himself. While Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts sporadically appeared in literary journals, the author did not see his Beyoğlu book as such published in his lifetime. Karasu’s big concept of Beyoğlu remained a work in progress, due to, in Batur’s words, “a complex inhibition with multiple justifications.” One might argue here that, had Karasu published his Beyoğlu, he could have made a strong enunciation of the ethno-cultural connection he had to the environment of his upbringing. In retrospect, this belatedness resonates in the closing sections of the narrative “Mother of Black Waters.” We read in the penultimate section 5: (My aunt’s eyes, my mother’s eyes. Moreover, the tunes of mandolin; like the sort of old melodies broadcast by radio in the morning. . . . In no way could I materialize what I wanted to tell. What I have done, tried to do, is searching, as much as it is wasting time, escaping.) (Teyzemin gözleri, anamın gözleri. Bir de mandolin havaları; sabahları radyodan yayınlanan eski ezgiler türünden. . . . 17 This mode is reminiscent of the omnipresent hüzün or melancholy that defines the city in the 1950s and beyond in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City. Although Pamuk finds the causes for this gloomy mood in the evacuation of meaning after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the hüzün surrounding Istanbul in Pamuk’s memoir remains largely inexplicable, just as Karasu’s Beyoğlu of black waters is permeated by a nameless sadness.

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Forgetting, Remembering, and the Workings of Collective Memory    CHAPTER 5

Anlatmak istediğimi bir türlü gerçekleştiremedim. Oyalanmak, kaçmak olduğu kadar aramak da, yaptığım, yapmağa çalıştığım.) (Karasu 1999b, 89; my emphasis; indentation in the original)

The passage expresses both the urgency and the impossibility of the task at hand, and it conveys for us a tragic insight, given Karasu’s untimely death. At the same time, “wasting time” and “escaping,” and then again, “searching,” point to the pitfalls of representation, suggesting that any attempt at constructing selfhood has to remain fragmentary. It is also interesting to note that these last sections contain perhaps the strongest codification of the author’s autobiography, the most obvious intersections of Karasu’s life with that of his narrator. These signals are given through various allusions to real-life events, as noted in chapter 2. While these overlaps could be explained away as a playful literary strategy, the fact that they lead the cardinal narrative “Mother of Black Waters” toward its closing and also mark the end of the three core Beyoğlu texts (“Text on Beyoğlu,” “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” and “Mother of Black Waters”) suggests a reading in the confessional mode of an autobiography. The ending of section 5 in “Mother of Black Waters” is too somber in its tone to be reduced to a mere play of self-referentiality. The sixth and last section of the same narrative begins with “Yüzleşme.  .  . ” (“Confrontation.  .  . ”) (91). In this section, the narrator describes the process of writing a book through the metaphor of a fruit. At its genesis the book is as an unknown imaginary fruit. The author finds his way, piercing through the resistance of the surface, toward the kernel and back, creating a fruit with a texture, color, and taste familiar to him, though the kernel remains undecipherable and opaque. Contrary to expectation, the narrator utters that each book acquires its meaning in its ascent back to the surface, after a long and difficult descent toward and circumnavigation of the kernel. Clearly, Karasu’s depiction of writing reverberates with Benjamin’s archeological allegory of remembering that sets the emphasis on the process of digging rather than on the recoveries of the excavation. In Karasu’s metaphor of writing a book, the interior of the kernel containing the seeds of a new tree remains outside of his concern. As in the quote from the fifth section of the same text, where the narrator admits that he was incapable of telling what he wanted tell, the opacity of the kernel suggests the impossibility of representing memory, and with it, selfhood, in its totality. Meaning emerges from working backward from the kernel, though the

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“essence,” imagined to reside within the center, escapes total hermeneutic disclosure. Like the Freudian distortion at work in the inscription of memory, Karasu’s paradigm suggests that the original, an essential meaning of sorts, is unattainable. The last section of “Mother of Black Waters” that began with the “Confrontation. . . ” returns to it in full circle: Confrontation, coming face to face. . . With what? With whom? (Yüzleşme, yüz yüze gelme. . . Neyle? Kiminle?) (Karasu 1999b, 91)

While the first line of this closure points toward self-confrontation, a faceto-face with oneself, the questions in the final line cast the shadow of doubt on this endeavor of self-discovery. These questions seem to undermine fixed identities, yet at the same time they indicate a retreat to kayadez in Rıfat Bali’s terms.

Chapter 6

“Dialectical Images” in Beyoğlu’s Black Waters: The Photograph as Testimony

Levantine Lullabies of Venice and the Figure of the Perote In Black Waters, Venice serves as a crucial marker, pointing to the family’s Perote origins. Venice as a leitmotif, contrapuntal to the discourse on Beyoğlu, surfaces in the second and third texts of the collection—“Beyoğlu is a Legend” and “Mother of Black Waters.” We have seen through the close reading of the Venice reference in the latter that the quintessential trope common to both Venice and Beyoğlu is the theme of decay. To be sure, the legend of Beyoğlu, brought up in the poetic analogy, relates not only to Orientalist travelogues or to nostalgic reconstructions of the site’s image by latecomers, but also to Beyoğlu’s insiders. We should recall here the musings of the narrator: “Beyoğlu is a legend for those (too) who have experienced it. A legend singing of datedness, decay, loneliness.”1 Beyoğlu is depicted as tiny (küçücük) in contrast to the magnificence of Venice; it is characterized as the “other, robust, poor” (“yabanıl, bezeli, yoksul”) (Karasu 1999b, 82). The adjective “bezeli”’ means “adorned,” “decorated,” but also “strong,” “robust.” Rendering it in this second meaning connects well with the narrator’s emphasis on flow, contained in the image of Beyoğlu as the main black water of the city. Though Beyoğlu is also associated with squandering, 1 “Beyoğlu, onu yaşamış olanlar için (de) bir söylencedir. Bir geçmişliği, bir düşkünlüğü, bir yalnızlığı ırlayan bir söylence” (Karasu 1999b, 80; my emphasis).

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by virtue of its continuous flow and the robustness it is implicitly favored over the stench and stagnation attributed to Venice. Beyoğlu is alive, it is full of life, very robust, as the concluding word of this passage reads: “Dipdiri” (82). While these juxtapositions are not surprising, given the prominence of the figure of Venice in Western literature, Karasu’s jump from this comparison to another mode of Venice-Beyoğlu linkage comes unexpectedly, thus drawing the reader’s attention. Moving from a poetic analogy to a more explicit connection, the author establishes a historical relationship between the two localities that conjures up the Levantine or Perote identity. A statement in “Mother of Black Waters,” separated by indentation from the previous lines, marks the transition from the poetic to the historical framework of comparison: “In Beyoğlu, there are Venetian graves (too). [And] those who speak the Venetian dialect, too. Still.”2 Despite the obvious reference to Beyoğlu’s Levantine past, the evocation of Venice remains general, without any connections to the narrator’s family. At this point the narrator questions the validity of his comparison. He strives to find a possible commonality in the past characteristics of the two cities, mentioning names of such places as “The Harbor of Turks” (probably in Venice) and the “Palace of the Bailiff ” (“Balyoz Konağı” in Pera-Galata) (Karasu 1999b, 80). These uncertainties are lifted when we consider the inscriptions of Venice introduced already in “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the second narrative of Black Waters. Here the narrator remembers the old songs sung by his grandmother and, above all, her lullabies: My grandmother’s lullabies, more than the old songs she sang, resonate in my ears. I found a certain appeal in one of her lullabies with Venetian mirrors, Venetian lace, or needles, partly because I was influenced by being “of Venetian origins,” as I was later told and found quite credible. This Venice story must go back, according to calculation, to the 18th century. For years, I have had an itch to create a complete fairy tale. What kind of person was that man who found refuge at the Ottomans, fleeing Venice? (Ninemin eski zaman şarkılarından çok ninnileri kalmıştır kulağımda. Sonraları anlatılacak, ben de bayağı bayağı inanılır bulacağım “Venedik asıllı” oluşun da biraz etkilediği bir tat bulacağım, Venedik aynalı, Venedik

2 “Beyoğlu’nda Venedikli mezarları (da) vardır. Venedik ağzı konuşanlar da. Hâlâ” (ibid.) See chapter 2 for a longer quote from the Venice section in “Mother of Black Waters.”

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“Dialectical Images” in Beyoğlu’s Black Waters    CHAPTER 6

tenteneli, ya da iğneli bir ninnisinde. Bu Venedik öyküsünün hesapça 18. yüzyıla dayanması gerekir. İyiden iyiye bir masal uydurmak kaşıntıları içindeyim yıllardan beri. Venedik’ten Osmanlı’ya sığınan adam nasıl bir adamdı ki?) (76-77; my emphasis)

The above demonstrates that Karasu transforms Venice from a poetic trope to a code identifying the narrator’s maternal lineage. The theme of “origins” is ambiguous because it is enveloped in a lullaby sung for a credulous child, which later urges the narrator to create an entire “fairy tale” of family history. This theme functions at the same time as a decisive trait inscribing Perote identity. The tension between fabricating a tale and pondering who the eighteenth-century Venetian ancestor might have been produces ambivalence towards, but not a rejection of, the Venetian lineage. Franks (Europeans), arriving from the Italian city-states Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, lived in Constantinople from the high Middle Ages and enjoyed privileges bestowed by the Byzantine emperors. By the time Sultan Mehmet II conquered Istanbul in 1453 there was already a Venetian settlement in Galata. Oliver Jens Schmitt’s detailed discussion of the migrations from Galata to the Aegean islands and back to Galata and Pera in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sheds light on the origins and cultural fabric of the Perote culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Schmitt states that numerous members of the “Magnifica Comunità di Pera,” a congregation subsuming all Roman Catholics of the Frank districts and constituting the core of Constantinople’s Levantine culture, emigrated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the Aegean islands, such as Chios and Tinos, that were still under Italian rule (2005, 128).3 The migration substantially weakened the Comunità and finally led to its abolition in 1682. Whereas the Dragoman families, descending from the old Italian settlements of Galata and Pera, often mixed with the local Orthodox aristocracy through marriage, this intermingling came to an end with the downfall of the Comunità and stricter control by the Catholic Church.4 Instead, 3 Chios remained under Genoese rule until 1566; Tinos, under Venetian rule until 1718. Schmitt points out that the “Confraternità di S. Anna” that united all the Catholics of Constantinople can be defined as the kernel of the Levantine identity and that it continued to exist after the “Comunità” was dissolved. Schmitt also informs us that the abolished Comunità was subsumed under the congregation Propaganda fide and the French ambassador (2005, 127-28). 4 The Dragomans were interpreters and mediators at the Ottoman Court and Navy. Schmitt regards them as the very center of the Perotes (ibid., 129).

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French merchant and Dragoman families joined the Italian Levantines. Nevertheless, thanks to the Greek maids working in Pera households, Frankish Perotes often spoke fluent Greek.5 Aegean Catholicism, which comprises the Greek-speaking Catholic populations of the Aegean islands, is another important segment of Constantinople’s Levantine population. It emerged in the thirteenth century and underwent several hardships as a result of religious, political, and economic pressures until its downfall after the Greek uprising of 1821 against Ottoman rule. Already prior to 1821 most of the Catholic island population had migrated to Constantinople and Smyrna for service and blue-collar jobs (Schmitt 2005, 130–131). With the Greek uprising “the flood of refugees from the Archipelago continued to swell and increased the Catholic population of Smyrna and Constantinople,” resulting in an increase in the Greek-speaking inhabitants of these port cities (133).6 Schmitt states that, “as late as 1900 numerous families proudly traced their genealogy back the Aegean lineage” (134). Based on his archival research and as demonstrated through his analysis of the two-way migration from Constantinople to the Aegean Archipelago and back, Schmitt concludes that the Island Catholics are the actual descendants and heirs of the Genoese and Venetian settlers of the Middle Ages (see also Ortaylı 2006; Dursteler 2006). 5

On the prevalence of the Greek language among Pera’s Levantines see Bertrand Bareilles’ 2003 book İstanbul’un Frenk ve Levanten Mahalleleri (Constantinople et les franques). Bareilles came to Istanbul in the 1880s, served as tutor at the Ottoman court and as a teacher of French at military schools. After his return to France he published various (Orientalist) studies on the Ottoman culture. Bareilles points out that Greek maids and nannies came to Constantinople from the Aegean islands of Tenos and Andros, and that they raised the children of Levantine households in Pera in the Greek language (222). See also Schmitt 2005, 260-61; Massavetas 2007, 170. 6 Schmitt points to the extreme difficulties the Island Catholics encountered as follows: “The Island Catholics were [with the Greek uprising] literally caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: while they had anyway been regarded with suspicion by the Orthodox as descendants of the hated Crusaders and representatives of the ‘Frankish’ heresy, they now came under the suspicion of secretly favoring the Turks; the Ottomans on the other hand made at first barely a distinction between the Orthodox and Catholic populations of the rebelling islands” (“Die Inselkatholiken gerieten dabei buchstäblich zwischen die Feuer: von den Orthodoxen als Nachfahren der verhaßten Kreuzhfahrer und Verteter des ‘fränkischen’ Irrglaubens ohnehin beargwöhnt, wurden sie nun verdächtigt, die Türken heimlich zu begünstigen; die Osmanen auf der anderen Seite machten zunächst kaum einen Unterschied zwischen orthodoxen und katholischen Bewohnern aufständischer Inseln” (2005, 132; translations from Schmitt are mine).

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“Dialectical Images” in Beyoğlu’s Black Waters    CHAPTER 6

The historical circumstances defining the formation of a pluricultural and polyglot Pera resonate, fictionally transfigured, in the grandmother’s lullaby with Venetian mirrors, lace, and needles in “Beyoğlu is a Legend.” The historical substratum, enveloped in the metaphor of lullaby, reminds us of Gerhard Richter’s concept of “read[ing] historically” (2000, 26)—his thesis that Benjamin conveyed historical views through his figurative use of language. Karasu’s intimation of the Perote through the lullaby of the grandmother culminates in the conjectured eighteenth-century Venetian ancestor, a figure of distortion between fact and fiction. With respect to the factual background, I have no information as to whether Bilge Karasu’s Greek-speaking maternal family was of Venetian origin and no source indicating that they were Catholic (rather than Orthodox, the common faith among Istanbul’s Greek minorities), or more specifically, Island Catholics. However, aside from the question of biographical data, Karasu’s elusive allusions to Venetian family origins concur with historical facts. As Schmitt’s extensive analysis of interfaith marriages on the Greek islands and in the Levantine milieu of Constantinople over several centuries indicates, it is the distinctness and at the same time the mélange of local Pera communities that offers, through the figure of the Perote, a model of cultural plurality. Karasu inscribes such a model through the maternal realm and other characters in his Beyoğlu narratives. Thus, Karasu’s Perote (though not labeled as such) as memory trace, emerging from the associate web of Venice and Pera, serves as a trope of difference, impelling the narrator’s self-search.

The Death of Pera’s Patriarchs: Memory and Indeterminacy An old dwelling inside one of the arcades of Pera-Beyoğlu emerges as a central memory fragment related to the maternal family. The narrator informs the reader that he is familiar with the passageway, since as a child he used to cross this space with his mother. Yet he could never understand in which house his mother’s family had lived. I will return to this passageway, which represents something uncanny and contains residues of anxiety, later in my analysis. What is important in the current framework is the uncertainty surrounding the mother’s childhood home: As we were passing there [through the arcade], even if she would have said “this is where we lived,” I obviously couldn’t keep that back then somewhere

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in my mind. When I asked her later, her description that was crystal clear to her always appeared uncertain to me. That house must have been for her, too, a memory that was left far back in the past. Her parents were at that time for her, too, fairy-tale characters. Did she have the dream that caused great anxiety for her and led to a speech disorder in that house? (Oradan geçerken bir kezinde “biz şurada oturduk” demiş olsa bile, o zamanlar bunu bir yerlerime yerleştirememişim, belli. Sonraları sorduğumda, kendi için apaçık betimlemesi bana hep belirsiz geldi. O ev onun için de pek geride kalmış bir anıydı herhalde. Annesi, babası o sıralarda onun için de masalsı kişiler. Kendini çok korkutan, aylar süren bir konuşma bozukluğuna yol açan düşü o evde mi görmüştü?) (Karasu 1999b, 65)

This principle of indeterminacy also pertains to the maternal uncle figure. In “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the mother’s elder brother is recalled through speculative statements: did he have his adolescent mental breakdown at that house? The night or morning of a violent political event is evoked, during which strangled people were carried in wheelbarrows; the year is given as 1905, 1906, or 1909. In the syntax of this section the incident appears as loosely connected to either the mother’s or the uncle’s mental crisis, but the narrator is unsure if his mother witnessed these crimes or heard of them. What we can most feasibly consider to have been written about here is the event mentioned in chapter 2, namely, the violence that erupted with the counterrevolution of March 31, 1909 by reactionary religious sects against the Young Turks, who had overthrown Sultan Abdülhamid (Zürcher 1994, 97-104). Karasu conveys this decisive macro-historical occurrence as a memory trace and solely through its affective signification (1999b, 65). A similar obscurity surrounds the mother’s recollections of her brother, now transmitted by the narrator. A tentative construction of the family history surfaces through piecemeal memories. According to the accounts of the mother and the aunt, their father was a harsh and unforgiving man, although he loved his children deeply. The other male figure, the uncle, is depicted as a good-looking young man, evidently admired by his sisters, impeccable in his career as a bank employee and in his social life. It is implied that maternal relatives considered the young uncle as a role model for his nephew, the narrator. Yet the uncle’s predicament turned out to be grim. After being thrown into a mental crisis during the war years, a period when his father fell ill and died, the handsome uncle apparently succumbed

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“Dialectical Images” in Beyoğlu’s Black Waters    CHAPTER 6

to the influenza epidemic in 1918. The dissolution of the empire and, consequently, of the old non-Muslim bourgeois order of Pera is thus projected onto the lives of the male family members. Further uncertainties surround the uncle’s death. According to the familial memory, he caught the influenza during a visit to a ship, a story that the narrator finds unlikely. The gaps and silences surrounding his uncle’s death suggest to him that there are family secrets at work here. He presumes that the uncle, having become weak through his mental crisis, must have contracted the disease in the street, or in a bed. The following analysis will show that the conjecture clearly refers to some sexual adventure, covered up by the family (Karasu 1999b, 66). The deaths of the two men, the grandfather and the uncle, in around 1918 indicate the significance of this year as the great divide for Pera-Beyoğlu culture.

Pathos, Body, and the Truth of the Photograph: Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida Besides the memory fragments conveyed through the family, the narrator of the Beyoğlu stories has one more tool to access the past: photographs. Two such imprints of the past are brought up in the section discussed above from “Beyoğlu is a Legend” that deals with the maternal family. For the narrator, these photographs might contain clues to the unanswered questions he poses regarding his uncle. As visual memory traces they deserve further scrutiny. One of them is a tiny round photograph of the handsome uncle that the mother used to keep in a medallion. Juxtaposed with this “authentic” photograph, the narrator mentions two others that hung for ages on the living room wall of the aunt’s house: one is an enlargement of the original in the medallion; the other, a photograph of the maternal grandfather. The photographs were made in such a way that they had the semblance of black-and-white drawings. Due to his quest to discover the uncle’s “true” life story, the narrator is primarily interested in the picture of the uncle, a very handsome man next to the less impressive grandfather. Strangely, through the shadowy retouching of the enlargement, the uncle appears to be emerging from water. By contrast, the narrator calls the tiny original in the medallion “untouched, a real photo” (Karasu 1999b, 67) not showing the uncle half submerged in water. Instead, the photograph is cut halfway through the uncle’s dark

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outfit at the lower end of the medallion. Despite the narrator’s assurance of authenticity, all that the visual trace offers is a very good-looking man. The narrator searches in vain for clues to a more complete picture of the uncle by asking unusual questions pertaining to the uncle’s body and his habits. Looking at the uncle’s impeccable appearance in the photo, he surmises: At home, in his room, with his books and accounting books, did he also sit well put together like this? How did he look when wearing his nightgown; how did his feet look in his slippers, his ankles from under the seam of the gown? How tall was he? The other thing I know is this: My mother adored her older brother. (Evde, odasında da mı böyle otururmuş, kitaplarının, muhasebe defterlerinin başında? Geceliğini giydiğinde nasıl görünürmüş, terliğinin içinde ayakları, bilekleri nasıl görünürmüş geceliğin eteği altında? Boyu ne kadarmış? Bir bildiğim de şu: Anam taparmış ağabeyine.) (67; indentation in the original)

Notwithstanding the last phrase “the other thing I know,” neither the enlargement nor the original photo seems to convey any knowledge about the uncle’s “real life.” The narrator here explores the corporeal as the path to selfhood. At first, his attempt to grasp the uncle’s identity through his physicality proves futile. The mother’s admiration of her brother clearly gives away the narrator’s own adoration of the uncle figure, and it also implies a self-identification with this male ancestor. Yet if the photographs resist providing knowledge, why does the narrator use the phrase “the only other thing I know”? The depiction of another family photograph that the narrator’s now deceased mother had dug out and left on the table helps to answer this question. It shows a group of men and women, among whom we see the mother as a little girl. The allusion to this picture is accompanied in brackets by a reference to Roland Barthes’ essay on photography Camera Lucida. Karasu does not mention the title of Barthes’ essay. The reference reads as follows: Months after I wrote these, I read the essay by Barthes that he wrote after his mother’s death, and I felt quite strange. Yet, Barthes didn’t know that this would be his last book. I knew that it was his last one, at least published during his lifetime. Is this not a situation awaiting all of us?

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“Dialectical Images” in Beyoğlu’s Black Waters    CHAPTER 6

(Bunları yazdıktan aylarca sonra, Barthes’ın anasının ölümü ardından fotoğraf üzerine yazdığı denemeyi okuyacak, bir tuhaf olacaktım. Oysa Barthes, bunun son kitabı olacağını bilmiyordu. Ben, hiç değilse sağlığında yayımlanan son kitabı olduğunu biliyordum. Hepimizi bekleyen bir durum değil mi ki bu sanki?) (67)

Just as Barthes’ reflections were occasioned by his mother’s death, Karasu’s narrator searches for the traces of the past after his mother’s death. While the aunt’s death gave him the final impetus to return to his unfinished writing on Beyoğlu, the mother’s presence in the narrator’s life and her suffering and death weigh at least as heavily as the aunt’s role in remembering. Like her older sister, the mother is witness to the old Pera culture that remains unnamed in Black Waters. The mother’s mediation of this culture through her recollections and material objects of memory constitute the foremost testimony of the family history. Attempting to unveil the secrets surrounding the uncle’s life, the narrator accepts the fact that “because all my sources have dried out, I will never find out about these things.”7 The narrator’s quest for the uncle’s life pertains to the truth, the essence, of this singular life, not to reconstruct his social and cultural circumstances. Reading this episode concerning family photos in light of Barthes’ Camera Lucida is illuminating in several ways. In the following, I explore such an intertextual connection by sketching Barthes’ views on the tension between the particular and the general and, related to this, the question of the essence or truth the photograph manifests. At the core of Barthes’ essay are two elements pertaining to the photograph, studium and punctum. Barthes defines them by two different affects they cause in the spectator. Finally, the linkage he draws between the photograph and death also proves pertinent for Karasu’s treatment of photographs in his Beyoğlu narratives. According to Barthes, the photograph is defined by contingency, that is, by showing the particular. Thus, the question regarding photography’s essence is accompanied by “the intractable feeling that Photography is essentially (a contradiction in terms) only contingency, singularity, risk” (1981, 20). Hence the photograph itself seems to be cut off from any reference to a truth outside of itself and to a transcendent meaning:

7 “Bütün kaynaklarım kuruduğuna göre artık öğrenemeyeceğim şeyler bunlar” (Karusa 1999b, 66).

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In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see: it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, that This (this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression. (4)

This immanence adhering to the photograph, that is, its nature of pointing to nothing but “here it is,” sheds light on the question of why the narrator in Black Waters wonders about the look of his uncle’s feet underneath his nightgown and of his ankles in his slippers (see Barthes 1981, 5). This focus, replacing more overarching questions, such as those regarding the uncle’s personality or the course his life took, returns us to Barthes’ view of the contingent and particular nature of the photograph. The particular that the uncle’s photograph “gives” to the spectator is the referent’s body, as if the narrator, joining Barthes in fixating his attention on the uncle’s feet and ankles, rejects any transcendent signification, searching solely for particularity manifested in the corporeal. Barthes starts from a phenomenological position, aiming to capture the essence of photography through an “eidetic science” of the photograph, that is, finding the common denominator of all photographs. But Barthes, by placing the emphasis on “desire,” reestablishes the phenomenological method from a different point of departure. By including “desire” in the logical procedure of classical phenomenology Barthes creates a methodological vantage point he calls “affective intentionality” (1981, 21). This concept involves “a view of the object which was immediately steeped in desire, repulsion, nostalgia, euphoria” (21). In contrast to the distancing of the emotions in classical phenomenology, Barthes argues that “the anticipated essence of the Photograph could not, in my mind, be separated from the ‘pathos’ of which, from the first glance, it consists” (21). This emotive element in Barthes’ theory of the photograph sheds light on the fascination that the figure of the uncle in the photograph triggers in Karasu’s narrator. The sentence ending the reflections on the uncle’s picture—“the other thing I know is that my mother adored her older brother” (Karasu 1999b, 67)— reinforces the desire-laden mode underlying the narrator’s preoccupation with the photo. His pathos expresses itself through the adoration of and identification with the image of the uncle. This leads us to the distinction Barthes makes among several ways of dealing with photography, ranging

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from the technical or aesthetic to the historical or sociological. Barthes is the least concerned with these approaches: “Myself, I saw only the referent, the desired object, the beloved body” (1981, 7).8 It is the “beloved body” of the uncle, the particularity his ankles and feet exude, that draws Karasu’s narrator as spectator to the photo. Thus, the involvement in the photographs in Black Waters does not reveal the past in its psychological, social or cultural content but accesses it, albeit partially, through affect. Not all photographs arouse the same kind of effect. Barthes distinguishes between two kinds of attraction he has to photographs: studium, the first kind, is based on a liking, an interest that is mostly intellectual. Studium involves cultural, ethnographical, and historical knowledge, such as information about a period, culture, or family history by examining the attire, hairstyles, and milieu depicted in a family photo. In contrast, the kind of attraction Barthes calls punctum results from an element of the photograph that hits the spectator forcefully. Barthes mobilizes all the connotations implied in the Latin word punctum, such as sting, speck, stick, prick, and cut. It is also a dot, little hole, mark, or wound. It is interesting to note that Barthes employs the concept with a dual function: while objectively these “punctuated” points sometimes are in the photos themselves, though apparently not in all, the “punctuation,” mark, or wound as Barthes calls it, at the same time signifies the prick or wound cut open in the spectator (1981, 26–27). Punctum gives Barthes a way to discover the essence of the photograph. This discovery occurs when looking at a childhood photograph of his deceased mother. The setting and mood of the discovery scene clearly parallel the section concerning family photos in “Beyoğlu is a Legend.” Barthes and Karasu’s narrator turn to photographs while still in grief. They are both in pursuit of some kind of truth. In Karasu’s case, this pertains to the uncle figure; in Barthes’, to the mother: There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it. (Barthes 1981, 67; my emphasis)

8 Moreover, for Barthes, the referent is inseparably glued to the photograph itself. Barthes uses here the analogy to laminated objects “whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both” (1981, 6).

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Barthes does not immediately reveal what he discovers in the old Winter Garden Photograph, dating from 1895 and showing the five-year-old mother with her older brother. All other photos of the mother lead Barthes to fragments of recognition, “which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether. . . . I recognized her differentially, not essentially” (65–66). In contrast to these, Barthes claims to have found the whole essence of his mother not in a specific feature in the photo but simply in the little girl’s face, the way she stood next to her brother, the way she held her hands: [A]ll this had transformed the photographic pose into that untenable paradox which she had nonetheless maintained all her life: the assertion of a gentleness. In this little girl’s image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever. (69)

The punctum that opens up a wound in the son manifests itself in the physical presence of the child mother. Several points in Barthes’ discussion of the rediscovery of his mother are relevant to my analysis of Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives. The link Barthes establishes between memory and his arrival at the flash recognition, described above, leads us back directly to Ricoeur’s exegesis of Bergson— that encountering “pure memory,” a virtual state akin to the unconscious, occurs by a leap outside of the practical sphere.9 At the moment of actual recognition, the mnestic image that survived the original experience is reinserted into the realm of lived action as memory (Ricoeur 2006, 438– 39). Ricoeur views this process of reinscription as the intertwining of action and representation, rather than as a polarity as Bergson suggests. As discussed previously, recognition for Ricoeur also involves a moment of certainty after the initial epoché (439n15). Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past serves for both Ricoeur and Barthes as the best example to illustrate the process of remembrance. Barthes writes: For once, photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced it one day when, leaning over to take off his boots, there suddenly came to him his grandmother’s true face, “whose living reality I was experiencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory.” (1981, 70) 9

Ricoeur explains the virtual nature of Bergson’s concept of “pure memory” by comparing it to the existence of “external things when we do not perceive them” (2006, 431).

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Clearly, Barthes equates the discovery he makes through the Winter Garden Photograph with Proust’s experience. As in Proust’s sudden and involuntary memory of his grandmother’s “true face,” Barthes’ recognition of his mother through this one photograph implies absolute certainty, albeit founded only subjectively. These paradigms of remembering and recognition stand in proximity to Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” a different concept but one also deeply informed by Proust. In Barthes’ view, the truth of his mother, mediated through the photograph, concerns her eidetic essence, but not her identity, which he relates to the analogical function of the photograph. This function is of no great interest to Barthes, for in place of the representational aspect of the photograph, Barthes argues for its capacity for authentication (1981, 70-71, 88-89). In Black Waters, the uncle’s photo does not offer answers to the questions that nag the narrator despite the fact that it clearly shows a young man, a bourgeois representing the bygone turn of the century. Put in Barthes’ terms, Karasu’s narrator is not satisfied with the knowledge mediated through the “analogical” dimension of the photo. This dimension certainly implies and generates a studium. Yet Karasu’s narrator seems to voice a deeper urge beyond that of satisfying his curiosity about his matrilineal culture and history. His interest in his uncle’s impeccable style of dressing, his penetration into this relative’s intimate sphere by imagining him in his nightgown and slippers, the query about the actual events of his death, and the allusion to his mother’s admiration of the brother all point out toward a more profound object of inquiry than the uncle’s identity, at least in its external aspects. Furthermore, the narrator’s engagement with the image of the uncle entails more than this figure. It at the same time alludes to a past that transcends the merely personal. Thus, the search for the particular includes an awareness of temporality. Barthes illuminates this supra-individual aspect of the photograph by diverting his attention from the representational or analogical dimension to the photograph’s connection to the past: [T]he realists [Barthes considers himself a realist] do not take the photograph for a “copy” of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art. To ask whether a photograph is analogical or coded is not a good means of analysis. The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. (1981, 88–89)

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Based on this insight, the photographs in Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts can be seen as performing a complex task: they do offer for Karasu’s narrator and reader indices of a Peran family; but, more importantly, and congruent with the overall premise of Black Waters, they bear testimony as to time, not as to the object in the photograph. Barthes calls this testimony the photograph’s “power of authentication” (89). It is important to emphasize here that Barthes uses “authentication” in the sense of evidencing a being, an essence in a past reality, rather than merely historical witnessing. Obviously, for Barthes, this is not true of all photographs, for he separates photos showing human beings from those of showing inanimate beings, plants, and animals, attributing the power of authentication only to the first category while the other categories relate solely to reality: “But a body, a face, and what is more, frequently, the body and the face of a beloved person? Since Photography (this is its noeme) authenticates the existence of a certain being, I want to discover that being in the photograph completely, i.e., in its essence, ‘as into itself. . . . ’” (107).10 The uncle’s photograph in Black Waters authenticates the uncle’s being as a past reality, not as an object of historical inquiry but as an object of desire, yearning, and affection, as Barthes’ phrase “the body and the face of a beloved person” indicates. In Barthes’ view, Time manifests itself in the photograph not only as opposed to history, but also as the marker of death: [B]y attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past (“this-has-been”), the photograph suggests that it is already dead. (79)

Thus, when looking at the pictures of the beloved mother, Barthes sees his own death inscribed in them. In a similar vein, Karasu’s narrator refers to his discovery of Barthes’ essay, long after completing the section on family photos, through the lens of the dialectic of life and death. By retrieving Barthes’ essay, the narrator turns to a text, not to a photo. This multilayered treatment of image and text offers a more nuanced understanding of the pervasive theme of death in Black Waters. The narrator’s ironic play with temporality (he knew that this was Barthes’ last book, whereas Barthes did 10 In the previous section—44—Barthes quotes Maurice Blanchot on the exteriority of photography. The phrase “as into itself ” that Barthes uses in the above quote is possibly also a reference to Blanchot.

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not) implies the inscription of the author Karasu’s own death, when the narrator extends this tragic discrepancy to the general predicament “awaiting all of us” (Karasu 1999b, 67). Karasu, his narrator, and Barthes may all be implied in this statement. Just as Barthes realized that the photograph of his mother as a child tells him that she is going to die, that this is “a catastrophe which has already occurred” (1981, 96) Karasu’s narrator knows at the time he reads Camera Lucida that the tragic event—referring to Barthes’ death, but perhaps also to his own mother’s—has already occurred. For Barthes, the recognition of death in photographs, especially prominent in historical ones, constitutes their punctum (96).11 Examples of punctum, and not only those marking death, abound in Barthes’ analysis. In all the photos he discusses the punctum is something other than the obvious subject matter of the photograph, often discovered in a detail such as the eyes of a boy holding a puppy, the crossed arms of another boy in a group photo, or the huge collar and finger bandage of two physically deformed and mentally impaired children. Can we uncover such a piercing element, a punctum, in Karasu’s depiction of the uncle’s photo? In order to explore this question, I will first return to the bifurcation between the tiny original embedded in the medallion of the mother and the enlargement hanging side by side with the grandfather’s photo at the living room wall of the aunt’s household.12 11 Barthes explains the inherent linkage between photography, death, and time through the grammatical uses of past and future tenses. In reference to an 1865 photo of Lewis Payne, for example, who attempted to assassinate Secretary of State W. H. Seward, Barthes discerns the punctum in these grammatical tenses: “Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future.” In the same passage, Barthes compares this horror to the shudder that befell a psychotic patient “over a catastrophe which has already occurred” (1981, 96). 12 The depiction of the photos on the wall points out to two separate enlargements, though the phrase “Dedemle dayımın resimleri” (“Pictures of my grandfather and uncle”) leave a small amount of ambiguity as to whether these are two separate enlargements hanging on the wall. The reason of this ambiguity lies in the suffix “le” (ile) which means “with” but also used frequently for “and,” replacing the lesser used Turkish equivalent “ve.” I understand the tiny original in the medallion only as the uncle’s portrait, but it makes sense to assume that the grandfather’s original photo was placed on the other side of the medallion. Otherwise, there would be no original for the enlargement of his photo. But that is beside the point, since the narrator does not dwell on the grandfather (Karasu 1999b, 56–7).

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First, one can identify the punctum at the lower end of the enlargement, the section of the photo that shows the uncle as if half submerged in water with his clothes: “It is as if my uncle is emerging from some kind of water fully dressed. The water is at the level of his stomach.”13 As mentioned earlier, the small original doesn’t carry the effects of the enlargement; instead, the uncle’s coat is cut at the bottom of the medallion. The absence of any explanation in the text regarding this detail and the puzzling attention the narrator pays to it makes it possible to identify as the punctum the line where body and water merge horizontally, and respectively, the rounded cut in the original: “My uncle doesn’t stand in water up to his stomach. His dark clothes are cut off at the lower part of the circle [of the medallion].”14 The punctum in the uncle’s photos in both versions seems to fulfill the term’s connotations in Barthes, both in its objective and subjective implications. By this I mean that Barthes describes punctum both as an element situated in the “pricked photograph” (and the wound it opens in the spectator), and as an addition that the spectator makes. For Barthes, this dual definition is possible, for the punctum is “what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (Barthes 1981, 55). The delineation of the uncle’s lower body in water, and the cut at the bottom of the medallion, probably at about the same level corresponding to the water line in the enlargement, suggest as punctum a detail that “is nonetheless already there” (55) but that the narrator as spectator adds by immediately noticing it. But next, what is the truth contained in this punctum? Evidently something related to the lower body, left out in both versions of the photograph. Thus, the punctum of these photos must entail the body and, implicitly, sexuality. Several points reinforce this hypothesis: first, the narrator focuses repeatedly on the physical beauty of his uncle (Karasu 1999b, 66–67); and second, he concludes his depiction of the photos with the questions about the uncle’s ankles and feet. Moreover, finding the family story that the uncle contracted the influenza that killed him on a ship he was visiting not to be credible, the narrator suspects a cover-up and conjectures other causes: (This ship story appears to me a bit of a fiction. Should we understand contracting a disease on a ship one visits as contracting a disease on an 13 “Dayım sanki bir suyun içinden giyimli kuşamlı haliyle çıkıyor. Su, midesi hizalarında. . . . ” (ibid., 66). 14 “Dayım midesine dek bir suyun içinde durmuyor. Koyu giysisi değirminin alt yanında kesik” (ibid., 67).

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outing, a meeting that was intentionally not told about at length? The mental crisis he went through must have left him very weak; how much more plausible is it that he contracted the disease in a street, a bed!) [(Bu gemi öyküsü bana biraz düzmece gibi geliyor. Gezilen bir gemiden hastalık kapmak, enine boyuna anlatılmak istenmemiş bir gezintide, bir buluşmada hastalık kapmak diye mi anlaşılmalı? Geçirdiği bunalım onu pek zayıf düşürmüştü herhalde; hastalığı bir sokakta, bir yatakta kapmış olması ne kadar daha olası!) (66; parenthesis in the original)]

The year 1918, in which the uncle fell victim to the influenza epidemic and which marks the end of an era in Karasu’s Beyoğlu stories, carries several other historical connotations: it signifies the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and also brings to mind the occupation of Istanbul by the Allies. While for the Turkish majority the occupation was considered among the grimmest pages of its history, for the minority inhabitants of Pera, it meant the advent of liberation from the constraints of Ottoman rule. In historical and literary representations, the occupation era is seen as a heyday of Perote cosmopolitanism. We often encounter depictions of French, British, and Italian sailors and officers strolling on Pera’s streets and frequenting bars and nightclubs. Representations based on the Turkish-nationalist viewpoint consider this atmosphere of freedom and jubilation in Pera as treason. Narratives stemming from such nationalist sentiment describe the occupation period as lawless, decadent, open to all kinds of illicit affairs, above all prostitution. The ship the uncle presumably visits, then, suggests the occupying fleets. Even though the narrator’s correction of the story does not entail a ship but rather a street or a bed, the inference that the uncle got involved with a sailor or officer, or otherwise contracted some type of disease through an illicit “meeting” in a street or prostitute’s bed in Pera or Galata, is clearly given in the text. In his discussion of punctum Barthes also refers to the difference between the pornographic and the erotic photograph. The latter, he maintains, “takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.” He finds the punctum of the erotic photograph in a beyond, “as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see” (1981, 58-59). Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Young Man with Arm Extended” offers for Barthes the best example of this desire emerging by transcending the body in the photograph (58–59). Similarly, the uncle’s implied sexuality is established through the body elements I discussed. In

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the fantasy of Karasu’s narrator, punctum is sent forth as desire into a realm transcending the physical. Following Barthes, I would further argue that the narrator’s relationship with his uncle’s photograph does not concern socius, that is, an institutional and disaffected understanding of the figure in the picture (74). In conclusion, the family photographs do not constitute the subject matter of studium for Karasu’s narrator and they do not function as referential sources to obtain cultural knowledge, even if the narrator may have returned to them with this aim. To complicate the matter at hand, Karasu plays with the question of authenticity by emphasizing the deviations of the enlargement from the tiny original. Even though the function of authenticity here is defined differently from photography’s nature as authentication in Barthes, both authors direct their quests toward discovering a truth through the photographic medium that is not immediately accessible to them. In both cases, this truth reveals itself as tied to the particular and as devoid of social context. It is possible to read Karasu’s entire collection of Beyoğlu narratives in light of this model of inquiring the past, as exemplified through the narrator’s peculiar engagement with the uncle’s photo: he conveys history not as information or as full representation, but as punctum-like memories, in a similar vein to Benjamin’s “snapshots” that conjure up the past as “dialectical images.”

Chapter 7

Remembering as Distortion: The Visual and Aural Traces of Alterity

The Absent Father: Patricidal Imaginary In “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” Karasu’s narrator searches for the traces of the past in the group photograph his deceased mother had left on the table (1999b, 44-45). The medium of this photograph conveys transience and the elusiveness of the past through its own physical and chemical dissolution. The connection between transience and the photograph’s own decay is established through the men in the picture: in their light-colored outfits, they seem to evaporate into the void at the background and margins of the photo, whereas the grandmother in her dark clothes, named as “the woman in the picture” (44-45), manifests a presence that is harder to erase. The narrator’s mother, a little girl with fair hair, is wearing light-colored clothes. The gradual disintegration of the male figures within the photo corresponds to their fading away in the diegesis of Black Waters. The departure of the patriarchs thus signals the decline of the old Peran bourgeois order in the decades following 1918. In reference to the untimely withdrawal of male figures from the maternal family the narrator asks: “Which of the men could really become old on my mother’s side? They are a community, a family of widows.”1 The 1 “Anamgillerde, zaten, hangi erkek yaşlanabilmiş ki gerçekten? Bir dullar topluluğu, bir dullar sülalesi onlar” (ibid., 67–68).

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retreat of men from the family structure sheds light on the resulting microeconomic order based on women’s labor. The most prominent representation of this female work force is through the home atelier of the aunt as a seamstress whose husband is only mentioned twice in passing, by way of an old photograph and a childhood memory (33, 55). Through the information this memory piece provides, we find out that the aunt already had her sewing atelier during her husband’s lifetime. The unemployed uncle is shown reading his newspaper at home. The narrator adds that he found employment later and that he worked until his death. The image of the sedentary, unemployed male figure juxtaposed with the aunt as the steady breadwinner in her creative activity of making clothes empowers the female character. It also suggests the centrality of women in the declining family structures of Pera. The workforce at the aunt’s household includes several other female figures: the apprentice girls working there during the daytime as well as the aunt’s two daughters. While the older one goes shopping in the Pera passages for accessories after the workday is over, the younger daughter comes home from work with groceries (57). Even though this women’s community corresponds to other bleak pictures of the plight of Pera’s widows and old virgins in Black Waters, the female relatives at the same time indicate agency through their daily self-sustenance. Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives portray the decline of the Peran bourgeoisie, as it historically occurred in the decades following the foundation of the republic in 1923, with persuasive nuances. The aunt’s household clearly stands for the petty bourgeoisie, a less explored social stratum in the PeraBeyoğlu historiography. In his historiographical critique, Eldem points to the reproduction of stereotypes and clichés not only in architectural histories but also in representations of the social fabric of the district. Parallel to the descriptions of the most glamorous buildings and establishments of the past along the Grand’rue de Péra, these sources characterize the social texture of Pera by focusing on prominent bankers and industrials of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: [N]ames such as Zarifi, Zographos, Hazzopoulo, Vallauri, Sébah, Canzuch, Camondo, Franco, have been quoted ad nauseam to the point of creating an illusion of representativity at the scale of the whole district. As a result, the present perception of the districts’ [of Galata and Pera] historical texture, reproduced through “virtual” tours of the area, is dominated by the image of a posh avenue lined with prestigious Art nouveau buildings inhabited by

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rich bakers [sic., bankers] of diverse (and often unidentified) non-Muslim identities and surrounded by luxurious shops, brasseries, theaters and cafésconcerts catering to their refined and westernized tastes. True, Galata does serve the purpose of presenting the “dark” side of the picture, . . . but lost is all that lies between the two, a “silent majority” of modest employees and shopkeepers, a petty bourgeoisie and near-proletariat squeezed in those areas of the districts that evidently lacked the attractiveness of the nobler streets and buildings. (Eldem 2006b, 25)

In line with his introduction to Beyoğlu through the district’s topographically lower streets, Karasu brings to life and gives a voice to the group Eldem calls the “silent majority.” Karasu does not inform his reader whether the maternal grandfather figure belonged to the higher tiers of the bourgeoisie; however, as the narrative “Another Death out of the Blue” implies, living in a Pera arcade during the mother’s childhood indicates that the family must be moderately wealthy. Perhaps the family was above the petty bourgeoisie, but they certainly did not belong to the stratum of prominent bankers, merchants, and industrial capitalists of the historical Pera that Eldem mentions. While the narrator portrays his matrilineal family vividly and with individual differentiation in memory fragments, the near absence of his own father is striking. Following the deaths of the maternal grandfather and uncle in the prewar era and in 1918, successive deaths in the family (occurring in 1932, 1938, 1942, 1943, 1948, and 1955) symbolize on a larger scale the decline of pre-First World War Peran culture. The narrator describes the decline in this way: It seemed that the illnesses and deaths of the fathers each time foreshadowed the ending of a world. My grandfather died of cirrhosis about a year before the end of the war; my uncle, of Spanish influenza when the war was over. For my grandmother and my mother these deaths signaled the end of a world. (Bir dünyanın sona erdiğini sanki hep babaların hastalığı, ölümü haber vermişti. Dedem de savaşın sona ermesinden bir yıl kadar önce sirozdan, dayım savaş sona erdiğinde Ispanyol nezlesinden ölmüşlerdi. Ninem için de, anam için de bir dünyanın sonu gelmişti bu ölümlerle.) (Karasu 1999b, 47)

He then refers to two later deaths, in 1977 and 1980. Based on the information provided in the recollections, it is likely that the last two dates refer

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to the passing of the aunt and the mother, respectively.2 The story line also indicates that the narrator’s father must have died early, though the date is not specified. However, the paucity of memories of the father cannot only be attributed to his early death, for Black Waters contains an abundance of early childhood memories all revolving around the matrilineal family, especially its women. Thus, the deletion of the father figure from the narrative requires attention. The first instance in which the father appears in the narrative is in “Beyoğlu is a Legend.” Here the narrator recollects strolling along Istiklâl Caddesi, the main street of Beyoğlu, accompanied by the female figures and, as he puts it, “once in a while, next to my father.”3 In the ensuing narrative “Mother of Black Waters,” the father resurfaces, along with depictions of the narrator’s own childhood household. The location and the interiors of their house in Taksim point to a more affluent status compared with the aunt’s residence on a Beyoğlu street. There is also a reference to the paternal grandmother’s room. When conveying the sparse memories related to the father, the narrator calls him peder, an old-fashioned designation in Farsi, denoting—sometimes ironically—authority, a patriarchal status. In this clearly Oedipal manner, the father figure is summoned up not by returning to an original affection and warmth, which marks the memory of the maternal family, but rather through distance and coldness. The father posits prohibitions, sanctions; he represents the “law.” This signification manifests itself during a visit to the movies in Beyoğlu.4 The stepmother’s mirror and her transformation into a witch in Walt Disney’s Snow White horrify the child. Soon after the visit, he falls ill with high fever and is haunted by these images. Thus, his father prohibits the movies. Interestingly, the narrator focuses on the defiance of the young son rather than on his submission to the “law”: “Father prohibited the 2 The maternal aunt and the mother die in the narrator’s adulthood, with the mother surviving the aunt. 3 “. . . arada bir de babamın yanı sıra” (ibid., 47). Istiklâl means “independence,” “liberation.” The Turkish War of Independence (1919-22) is called Istiklâl Savaşı, in newer Turkish Kurtuluş Savaşı. 4 “When I was reading Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the periodical Yavrutürk, or soon thereafter, I was taken to the Yıldız movie theater to its film version” (“Pamuk Prenses ile Yedi Cüce’yi Yavrutürk dergisinde okurken, ya da okuduktan az sonra, Yıldız sinemasında filmine götürüldüm”) (1999b, 86). Because the memory goes back to the early childhood of the narrator, here as elsewhere, the passive voice is used, rendering the narrator as the passive subject of the Turkish sentence and depriving him of agency.

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movies once again. Yet, these prohibitions couldn’t have any impact when mother and I were together. Before, the King Kong incident had also led to prohibiting [me to go to the movies].”5 Karasu returns to the father figure in “Ölümün Avlusu” (The Courtyard of Death). Akatlı has placed this story in the second section of the posthumous book, thus separating it from the main Beyoğlu texts in the first section of Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu. “The Courtyard of Death” contains more intimate memories with the father compared with the core Beyoğlu narratives. The story begins with the enactment of a symbolic patricide. The narrator recalls that, while awaiting the father’s death at his bedside, he killed his father in his own mind three and a half hours prior to the actual death. Even though the reference to this memory is embedded in a musing on the repulsive nature of death and the exuberant superiority of the living compared with the irreality of the dead, the expression and justification of the symbolic crime against the father in the three opening sentences strike a remarkably cold and reductive chord: I become terribly bored when waiting for something for a long time. Waiting for death is not different from waiting for something else. I killed my father inwardly three and a half hours before his death.

5 “Peder sinemayı bir daha yasakladı. Oysa bu yasaklar, anamla ben bir araya gelince, etkili olamazdı ki. . . . Ondan önce King Kong olayı da yasaklamaya yol açmıştı” (Karasu 1999b, 86-87; my emphasis). In the King Kong incident, the narrator as a child is terrorized by the images on the screen, even as the usher shows him and his mother the way to their seats. Crying and screaming, he forces his mother to take him out of the theater. In conjunction with numerous other memoirs, such as those by Attila Dorsay, Salâh Birsel, and Said Naum Duhani, these two episodes can also be read as memories, witnessing the heyday of Pera’s movie theaters, a favorite trope of literature on Pera. The narrator went to see King Kong at the Şık Sineması, alias Aynalı Sinema (Movie House with Mirrors), and depicts the mirrored entrance they pass on their way out of the theater. With these details, embedded in the partly fictionalized childhood recollections, Karasu bears testimony to the bygone cultural milieu of Pera-Beyoğlu, even if in a very different mode than the above-mentioned memoirs. Along with giving his reader a glimpse of the glamour of the movie theaters of those times, Karasu also points to the presence of Hollywood in Pera, which shaped the imagination of the young generation of intellectuals in their formation years. In the context of the King Kong incident, the narrator remarks that one of the prohibitions lasted longer, and that was one posed by himself, not the father, though he does not recall the reason for this self-imposed sanction. Given the lack of further explanation, this reference remains obscure (ibid., 87).

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(Bir şeyi uzun uzun beklemek beni çok sıkar. Ölümü beklemek, başka bir şeyi beklemekten ayrı değil. Ben babamı ölümünden üç buçuk saat önce öldürdüm içimde). (Karasu 1999b, 139)

The story then looks backward to the narrator’s childhood strolls to his elementary school, accompanied by his father. On those mornings, before father and son set on their walk, the son used to notice from their fifth-floor window the rose blooms in the garden of their apartment building. He goes down the stairs, stepping outside through the basement corridor, where his father apparently helps him with selecting roses meant for the son’s teacher. This episode also portrays impressionistically the Taksim neighborhood of that era, probably the 1930s. An old cemetery, to be demolished shortly, is mentioned, as well as the huge courtyard of the old military barracks, soon to be destroyed by fire, as the narrator witnesses in those days. These references convey forgotten chapters of Turkish history as spatial memory. The graveyard by the Pera district, to which the narrator alludes, is the erstwhile Pangaltı Armenian Cemetery that was founded in 1560 and demolished in the 1930s. Pangaltı Armenian Cemetery, which was part of the larger complex Grand-Champs des Morts, was to become the site of Taksim Gezi Park, one of Istanbul’s modernist landmarks.6 French architect and city planner Henri Prost, who was invited by Atatürk to redevelop Istanbul, designed the Gezi Park as an open urban space, in line with the republican vision of the new era. Prost decided also to demolish the Taksim Military Barracks, mentioned in Karasu’s “Courtyard of Death.”7 The narrator’s childhood home at the Taksim Square thus bears witness to a transformative process. The site of the Armenian Cemetery, once a material signifier of a specific minority culture, serves as the foundation of modern Turkish urban space. Just as in Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” Karasu’s narrative captures it at the moment before its disappearance. The Taksim Military Barracks (Taksim Kışlası or Halil Paşa Topçu Kışlası) 6 Elmon Hançer, “Galata ve Pera’daki Ermeni Kiliseleri” (“Armenian Churches in Galata and Pera”) in Geçmişten Günümüze Beyoğlu II (Beyoğlu From the Past to the Present) (2004, 507-38); see also Akın 1998, 150-52. 7 See Cânâ Birsel, “‘Les Transformations d’Istanbul’: Henri Prost’s Planning of Istanbul (1936-1951)” (2011, 100-116); see also Ebru Karakaya, “Kışlalar” (“Military Barracks”) in Geçmişten Günümüze Beyoğlu II (Beyoğlu From the Past to the Present) (2004, 561-68, here 563), and Zeynep Çelik’s The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (1993, 161-62).

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moved to the public spotlight and became the center of a major ideological controversy beginning with the Gezi Park protests of 2013. The protesters included diverse secular and progressive groups that aimed to resist the current Islamist administration’s decision to rebuild the barracks. In opposition to the plan of reviving the Ottoman past, symbolized by the barracks, protesters reclaimed Gezi Park as their own public arena. They thereby appropriated the Kemalist aspirations of a modern civic space. The Gezi Park protests constituted the first large-scale opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then serving as prime minister. Although the movement fizzled out in the end, the trials of participants continue, and Taksim Square, with its multiple layers of historical markers, continues to be a contested space. Two points are worth mentioning: first, the reconstruction of the Taksim Military Barracks would not revivify the Ottoman past in a strict sense, since the proposed reconstruction would serve as a shopping mall. Second, the Taksim protesters who spoke for diversity were silent about, perhaps even unaware of, the memory of the Armenian gravestones that once stood in place of this public space. Finally, the demolished barracks were a site of violence during the previously mentioned 1908-9 uprising by the Young Turks and the removal of Sultan Abdülhamid from the throne, soon to be followed by the counterinsurgence of reactionary religious sects. The empty space where the barracks stood thus holds the memory of this violence, adding another layer to the conflicted history of Gezi Park. Karasu’s narrator affirmatively conveys the recollection of the father figure from those elementary school years. The bonding between father and son is expressed in such statements as, “[i]t was also he who taught me the pleasure of following the same streets, walking next to the same trees, along the same walls.”8 Despite the intimation of closeness, however, the direct association of these walks with the elementary school establishes a link between the father and other authority figures in the Beyoğlu narratives. The child hands the roses to the teacher, whose receiving hands he kisses—a traditional gesture in Turkish Islamic society which demonstrates respect for elders and high-status people. Soon thereafter the school bells ring and the teachers blow their whistles. The students line up to recite the national pledge, mandatory at elementary schools, which started with the 8 “[y]ürüyüşlerimizde aynı sokaklardan, aynı ağaçların dibinden, aynı duvarlar boyunca gitmenin tadını da o öğretmişti bana” (Karasu 1999b, 142).

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words, “I am a Turk, I am righteous, I am industrious.”9 Why does Karasu cite the beginning of the pledge? To be sure, these words resonate in the ears of every Turkish citizen who has gone through elementary school in Turkey. Thus, phrases of the pledge are conjured up within the mosaic of memory fragments. Yet on a closer look, the opening words of the pledge go beyond being random reminiscences and instead function as the essence of the Turkish elementary school climate Karasu depicts. The signifiers of the school order attest to an authoritarian, disciplining, nationalist environment, in which particularities are erased in the first word of the pledge “Türküm” (“I am a Turk” [I am Turkish]). Based on the agreement of these social markers with the father, I argue that Karasu’s narrative posits an inner linkage between the two elements of memory. Like the father, the school represents the realm of authority. Peculiarly, the story veils the father’s identity completely. His profession, social status, cultural, ethnic and religious background, and his name are withheld from the reader. In chapter 4, I referred to Rıfat Bali’s documentation of Jewish names converted to Turkish ones, when the surname law was implemented in 1934. The reader should recall that among Bali’s findings was an Albert Karaso who adapted the name Alber Karasu. Taking the father figure in “The Courtyard of Death” as the projection of Karasu’s biographical Jewish father with the same last name as Alber Karasu seems at first a pure conjecture. However, as a heuristic step, this reading can uncover why the story emphasizes certain actions of the fictionalized father, such as accompanying the son to school and carrying the roses to be presented to the teacher. Seen in light of the Turkification policy of the 1930s that especially targeted Turkish Jews, the father in Karasu’s story manifests an assimilationist accommodation to the new Turkish-nationalist education system. Given that there were few options for minority children to be educated in own their ethnic institutions, it would be unnecessary to further question the voluntary or involuntary motives of this gesture. It should also be noted that, even if the elementary school in the story were a minority school, the pledge would nonetheless be recited. The (Jewish) father’s alliance with and acquiescence to the school system, representing the official ideology, concurs with the mottos “kayadez” and “low profile”

9 “Türküm, doğruyum, çalışkanım” (ibid.,143). The pledge was abolished in 2013 (https://www.internethaber.com › GÜNCEL).

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that Bali defines as survival strategies of Turkish Jewry. In brief, Karasu’s father figure stands at the same time for authority and submission. The bond between father and son is severed in the adolescence years of the narrator. He indicates that they continued their walks in the streets, as documented by snapshot photos. Juxtaposed with the son’s changing adolescent images, the father’s smile gradually disappears from these pictures. Even though we may detect a punctum of sorts in the father’s decreasing smile, the text does not explore the reasons for his somberness. His grimness is depicted in passing, much less emphatically than the boundary concealing the uncle’s lower body in the photograph. The narrator alludes to the frequent disputes between them during these walks, which suggest the usual rebellious son figure rather than a cruel self-righteous father image. The narrator describes the father’s stance during these later walks in the affirmative: “He would participate, he would object, he would discuss, he would weigh.”10 The interaction between the father and his adolescent son lead to the erasure of earlier school memories, of smells, sounds, and images associated with elementary school: “Over the smells of paper, stationary store, pencils being sharpened, starch, glue, rubber eraser, the leather of school bags, a soft, silencing forgetting was mounting itself.”11 With this forgetting, the son loses proximity to the image of the father, inseparable from elementary school memories. The narrator points out that he recognized the break between his father and himself at a much later time than that at which it had occurred. Then and now he could not help but perceive this as the father’s alienation from his son. The perception intimates, as does the reference peder, the Oedipal model, in which the father poses a threat to the survival of the son. In the closing statement of the “The Courtyard of Death,” the narrator hints at such a Freudian reading when he states that he realized much later that the perceived alienation of the father was a figment, like a bag that could be kept upright only if stuffed up with fantasies (Karasu 1999b, 144). In the end, the image of the father remains more nebulous than those of the matrilineal family members. In the childhood memories in “The Courtyard of Death,” the father is alluded to as “he” through the genderless third person singular pronoun o, never as “father,” “my father” or even peder, as in the other Beyoğlu texts. The narrator seems to deny him the 10 “Katılırdı, karşı çıkardı, tartışırdı, tartardı” (Karasu 1999b, 144). 11 “Kâğıt, kırtasiyeci, yontulan kurşunkalem, kola, zamk, lastik silgi, çanta derisi kokularının üzerine yumuşak, susturucu bir unutuluş yığılıyordu” (ibid.).

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individuation granted to the characters on his mother’s side and to other figures of the Beyoğlu stories, unrelated to the family. Compared with them, the father is a void. “The Courtyard of Death” gives away none of the codes that the core Beyoğlu narratives contain and that speak to Pera’s alterity, such as the marker Venice with its implications of the bygone figure of the Perote or Levantine. Might it be true that Karasu identifies himself more with the Peran culture of his narrator’s maternal family? Jews had a smaller role in the mélange of Pera’s social fabric and mixed marriages occurred predominantly between the Frankish Levantines, as well as those from the Aegean archipelago, and the local Greeks, leaving the Jewish community mostly enclosed in their environment in Galata (Schmitt 2005 84-85, 31327). Karasu inscribes in his narration traces of the old Peran/Perote culture through depictions of the maternal family, representative of this bygone collective. May we also speculate that the father figure remains in the background because Jewishness is inherited matrilineally? Although these questions remain open-ended, the emergence of a further marker of difference in Black Waters that implies the Jewish tradition is noteworthy. While the author seems to erase Jewish identity more radically than he conceals the Greek Peran origins of his narrator, he simultaneously implicates it through a singular clue, related to both the Greek-Orthodox and Jewish mourning rituals. The following analysis shows how Karasu constructs a syncretic representation of ethno-religious traditions that defines the bygone Pera-Beyoğlu. He evades identifying his Beyoğlulu narrator with specific ethno-cultural references, accentuating instead the narrator’s alterity by way of figuration. Karasu’s allusion to the covering of mirrors, a non-Muslim mourning ritual, as a memory trace from childhood expressly situates the narrator in a tradition outside of the dominant Turkish realm. However, in Karasu’s figurative language, the covered mirror becomes a site of contradiction and paradox rather than a direct indicator of identity. As in Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” the figure of the mirror conveys its truth content at the moment it flashes up as memory trace.

Covering and Uncovering the Mirror: The Syncretic Representation of Bereavement In his discussion of the mnemonic methods (Mnemotechnik) of antiquity, Pethes emphasizes the spatial basis of memorization, explaining that in this model, memory was thought to be a technical instrument with an image

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storage capacity that held the potential for optimization. According to an anecdote about the poet Simonides, after the collapse of an auditorium the poet identifies the bodies of the guests based on their order of sitting. The connection between image, space, and rule establishes memory as an ordering principle. Pethes posits the Simonides example as “the primal scene of a téchne of remembering.” He points out that this primal scene, or Simonides’ way of remembering after the collapse of the auditorium, reveals three aspects constituent for a model of remembering: First, the method of remembering [Erinnerungstechnik] is required at the moment of the catastrophe. Death, metonymy for all experiences of break, destruction and forgetting, gives first the impetus to the restitution of continuity. Understood as such, literature would be a cultural method [Kulturtechnik] evolving from the cult of the dead and the art of monument. Second, remembering is tied to the senses through the moment of vision. That which is to be remembered is translated into images and refers in this code to the connectedness of memory to the body. The element that has always accompanied rhetoric and the oral tradition as a topological system in the narrow sense, becomes manifest here as a constructive blueprint of space. (Pethes 1999, 49)12

Pethes’ analysis sheds light on the ways in which Karasu transforms a physical object into a central site and trigger of memory in his Beyoğlu narratives. The object in question is the mirrored console table, a family heirloom that stands next to the aunt’s deathbed when the narrator enters the room. The episode depicting this visit starts with a statement regarding the dissolution of a household and closes with a variation of it. In the anecdote about Simonides, the catastrophic collapse of the auditorium compels the poet to regain the previous spatial order mnemonically. As Pethes puts it above, death gives the impetus to reestablish continuity by way of counteracting the destruction through remembrance. We should recall that 12 “Erstens ist die Erinnerungstechnik gefordert im Moment der Katastrophe. Der Tod, Metonymie für jegliche Erfahrung für Bruch, Destruktion und Vergessen, gibt allererst den Anstoß zu einer Restitution von Kontinuität. Literatur wäre so verstanden eine sich aus dem Totenkult und der Denkmalkunst entwickelnde Kulturtechnik. Zweitens ist Erinnerung durch das Moment der Visualität gebunden an Sinnlichkeit. Zu Erinnerndes wird in Bilder übersetzt und verweist in diesem Code auf die Körpergebundenheit des Gedächtnisses. Drittens konstituiert die Erinnerung eine Topographie. Was die Rhetorik wie die mündliche Tradition als topologisches System im engeren Sinne immer begleitet hat, wird hier als konstruktiver Raumentwurf kenntlich” (Pethes 1999, 49).

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the visit to Aunt Marruş’s Beyoğlu home and the news about her death occasion an unexpected return for the narrator to his Beyoğlu childhood. Following Pethes, we see literature as emerging from the cult of death, as it were. Finally, the mirrored console table functions as a mnemonic site precisely through its physical presence. The table contains the matrilineal family history through its very concreteness. The narrator points to the past ninety years that this piece of furniture spent in several dark corners of Beyoğlu, loaded with memories and its drawers full of bundles of smells. He decides to move the console table to his dwelling in Ankara, which indicates his wish to appropriate the family tradition and, thus, restore continuity (Karasu 1999b, 35-36). Karasu’s narrator conjures up the console table’s past by traversing mentally through space until he reaches the first memories that stem, in Bergson’s terms, “from the depths of my past” (Bergson 1991, 139). Whereas in its last dwelling in Beyoğlu, in the aunt’s bedroom, the console table was in the light, it previously had stood in a dark room of an apartment in a cul-de-sac in the same neighborhood. A curtainless window, behind which there seems to be no sign of life; building façades that surround the cul-desac and letting no light through; noises of music, women’s screams, curses of drunk men rising from the night clubs from underneath these windows draw a gloomy picture of Beyoğlu’s past. While these images surrounding the dwelling suggest that the family was of modest means, they also demonstrate Karasu’s focus on lesser-explored sites: the backstreets, dark corners, and minor characters of the old Pera-Beyoğlu. The console table further transports the narrator to “the first room,” beyond which he has no memories, although he guesses that there must have been at least two other rooms in the console table’s history. The “first room,” as the primal repository of mnemonic traces, then, is a construct akin to the Freudian unconscious. As a spatial metaphor, it is also reminiscent of those threshold experiences that Benjamin describes as entryways to remembering.13 Furthermore, in that the adjective “first” implies a place of origin, “the first room” can be read in light of Ricoeur’s model of forgetting, defined not as the “effacement of traces” but as “the self-survival of impressions” (2006, 440). The mnemonic retreat, initiated by the sight of the 13 Berlin Childhood presents several figures of threshold. We can detect these in the vignettes “Tiergarten,” “Market Hall,” and “Blumeshof 12,” among others. Benjamin constructs the Parisian arcades in his Arcades Project also as entryways to a dreamlike space.

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console table at the aunt’s deathbed, takes back Karasu’s narrator to another deathbed, that of his grandmother. The mirror of the heirloom reflects several layers of the past, conveying Beyoğlu’s micro-history through its nameless social actors. Not only does the narrator recount that he shaved many a time looking at his reflection in this mirror, thereby including himself in this group of Beyoğlulus, but he also imagines his maternal grandmother as a young woman grooming herself in front of the same console mirror. Karasu’s construction of memory through the object-symbol of the mirrored console table is at the same time closely connected with allusions to minority identities. On the day of grandmother’s death, her image was not reflected in the mirror. The narrator states, as if in passing, that “[t]he day my grandmother died, they had thrown a cover over her mirror.”14 Like the Venetian trope discussed earlier, this enigmatic detail points to rituals of the minorities in Beyoğlu: through the covered mirror Karasu invokes first and foremost the Greek-Orthodox tradition of mourning, which includes the covering of mirrors and shiny surfaces as well as burning candles by the head of the deceased. Panagiotis Pentaris points out that, even though regional patterns of bereavement differ, all Greeks share certain customs.15 Covering the mirrors seems to be one such universally Greek ritual that the Beyoğlulu Greek-Orthodox or Rum community enacted during their own mourning process. Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives demonstrate this ritual in the midst of his narrator’s family history, thus making it an inscription of minority identity. Just as was the case with the grandmother’s half-legendary testimony, attesting to her family’s Venetian origins, and their proximity to the figure of the Perote, the covered mirror speaks of a custom that differentiates itself from the ethno-cultural Turkish norm. Nevertheless, the alterity indicated here through the covered mirror is far from establishing a mimetic correspondence to a specific minority identity. On the contrary, through the covered mirror, Karasu also conjures up another ethno-religious ritual, namely the Jewish tradition of shiv’a, the seven-day mourning period that entails among its rules the 14 “Ninemin öldüğü gün, aynasının üstüne bir örtü atılmıştı” (36). 15 Pentaris explains the ritual as follows: “It is believed that when someone dies in a household, the ‘evil spirit’ has entered that house. For that reason, all the windows need to be open for the evil to be ‘washed out’ with fresh air. The deceased’s body has to be dressed up with new clothing which has not been washed, so as to be buried in grace, and all the mirrors in the house, as well as shiny surfaces, are covered with white towels or sheets, hence the bereaved are not diverting their interest into anything else but the reality of the deceased” (Karasu 1999b, 128).

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practice of covering the mirrors.16 But why would Karasu transpose a Jewish rite onto a Rum bereavement process that entails the universally Greek custom of covering mirrors? We may solve this puzzle by bringing back the father figure into the picture. As stated previously, the fictional father remains devoid of cultural, ethnic, social, and religious specifications, standing thereby as the least individuated character among the family. Through the singular clue of the cover on the mirror, the theme of Jewish identity, evaded elsewhere in the Beyoğlu narratives, evinces its presence. Arguably, then, the father in the stories bears some correspondence to the author’s Jewish father in real life. The cover on the mirror works as a palimpsest, hiding and revealing this dual Rum Jewish alterity in identity construction. At the same time, the syncretism through which non-Muslim mourning customs in a Beyoğlu household are shown suggests that Karasu resists any referential or realist narration of minority traditions in Pera-Beyoğlu. Having complicated the representation of minority identities in clearly separated boundaries, Karasu challenges preconceived notions of “Jews,” “Greeks” (“Rum”), “Armenians,” and perhaps “Levantines,” in the Turkish popular imagination. The ambiguity surrounding the covered mirror, evoking both a Greek-Orthodox rite and the shiv’a, confuses the reader of Black Waters just as the head cover of the grandmother does, a garment primarily associated with Muslim tradition yet also used by other religious groups. Karasu represents these blurred allusions to minority cultures through the nonlinear narrative of his Beyoğlu texts, displaying a structure akin to the workings of memory.

16 In Hebrew, shiv’a means “seven.” The seven-day mourning period of shiv’a begins after the funeral and ends in the morning of the seventh day. In the Jewish custom, shiv’a is observed among the immediate family. Providing food for the mourning, removing shoes when entering the shiv’a house, and lighting a shiv’a candle are among the shiv’a practices. The term “sitting shiv’a,” originally derived from sitting low and motionless during the mourning period, signifies the intense and shared grief during that time. Covering the mirrors is explained as follows: “The practice of covering the mirrors began centuries ago and was based on a belief that spirits were attracted to mirrors. Some people thought that the soul could be trapped in the reflection, or that the dead person’s spirit lingered on earth for a time and might reach out from “the other side.” The rabbis interpreted the folk custom, declaring that mirrors should be covered to discourage vanity and encourage inner reflection. Regardless of its symbolism, covering mirrors is a striking visual cue, a token of the disruption and grief felt by everyone who enters the house” (see www. Jhom.com/topics/seven/shiva.html; Diamant 1998).

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The cover on the console mirror entails other complications that will help us understand Karasu’s mnemonic narrative. As explicated above, the cover functions first of all as a metaphor for Karasu’s strategy of concealing and displaying minority identities in Black Waters. The second reference to the mirror in the same text, “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” serves to illustrate this dual move. When recollecting the recent death of his mother, the narrator revisits the memory of his grandmother’s death: I was looking at my grandmother’s bed in the mirror of the console table. I was curious about her dead face, but I was hesitant to look at it, too; because I thought a dead person’s face would be horrifying. Perhaps because I wanted to remember her always with her living faces. Yet as far as I could guess through my glances, her face was not horrifying, it was, as if she were sleeping; still, there seemed to be a change that my eyes at the age of twelve could discern. (Ninemin yatağına konsolun aynasında bakıyordum. Ölü yüzünü merak ediyordum ama bakmaktan da çekiniyordum; ölü yüzü korkunç olur diye. Belki de, onu hep diri yüzleriyle anımsamak istediğim için. Oysa yüzü, kaçamak bakışlarımla sezdiğim kadarıyla, korkunç değildi, uyuyor gibiydi; gene de bir değişiklik vardı sanki oniki yaşımdaki gözlerimin seçer gibi olduğu.) (Karasu 1999b, 71)

This time, by representing the mirror uncovered, the narrator seems to contradict his earlier statement, which suggested that on the day of grandmother’s death they had thrown a cover over the mirror. The narrator informs the reader that he looked at his grandmother’s face in the mirror several hours after she passed. Had they removed the mirror in the meantime? Are the childhood memories inaccurate? The text gives no clue. In any case, the allusion to Christian and Jewish bereavement rituals, made in the first instance, is taken back in the second. Consequently, the covered mirror functions as the uncovering of the minority theme, closely linked to the author’s own biography, while the uncovered mirror covers the theme again. With the paradoxical truth-content it holds, the mirrored console table is one of the central “dialectical images” that Black Waters offers up. Its absence and presence bespeak Karasu’s aporetic treatment of ethno-cultural otherness. Placed back in historical context, the author’s deliberate confusion of cultural traditions and the resulting uncertainty of identity can also be understood as a projection of the blend of cultures and ethnicities

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in Pera’s history. Jews, too, were participants in this mélange, even if to a lesser degree compared with the other non-Muslim groups, as exemplified by Karasu’s own family. In “Beyoğlu is a Legend” the console table’s mirror resurfaces with memories telling of the death of the mother figure. The narrator provides the reader with pieces of information about her mental illness; some kind of anxiety or paranoia had befallen his mother in her last years in Ankara. While recalling the illness and subsequent death of his mother, the narrator depicts her as a doubly displaced figure. First, we find out about the mother’s insistence on returning to Istanbul. The narrator’s dismissal of this “as a wish to return to a past, not a place” is revealing in our context because a Rum from Beyoğlu is clearly an uprooted person in the uniformly Turkish-national capital city.17 Seen in this light, the narrator’s disapproval of his mother’s feelings and his suspicion that they may indicate the early signs of a mental disorder to which she later succumbed seem peculiar. His resistance to acknowledging the fact that there is no community, no collective in Ankara for her mother to identify with, tells of a self-negation—in other words, the narrator’s disavowal of his own Beyoğlulu minority identity. Here, Karasu seems to employ a similar strategy to showing the mirror at the grandmother’s deathbed covered and uncovered. By including his own reflection in the memories of the mirror in Beyoğlu dwellings and by transporting this mnemonic marker to Ankara, the narrator professes his own Beyoğlulu identity. However, his earlier denial of the mother’s— and, perhaps, his own—uprooted state in Ankara veils this displacement. This is akin to showing the console table mirror uncovered, in other words, not indicating any minority ritual, in the second version of remembering the deceased grandmother’s room. Moreover, Karasu treats the trope of displacement not only spatially, but also on a temporal trajectory, as the above quote illustrates: the demise of the Pera-Beyoğlu culture the mother knew renders her wish to return to a place as it was in the past a profound impossibility. The mother’s displacement not only defines her life in Ankara but also her death: She did not die in her home. She did not die in her bed. We had sought refuge at a friend’s house, escaping our own home where heating coal had run out 17 “Istanbul’a dönmek isteyişi, bir yere değil, bir geçmişe dönmek isteğiydi” (Karasu 1999b, 69).

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and the frozen radiators exploded. She died “elsewhere.” After having sang for forty hours. There was a moment in which I could discern, recognize these songs very well. They all were songs from her childhood, her Beyoğlu era. (Evinde ölmedi. Yatağında ölmedi. Kömürün tükendiği, radyatörlerin donup patladığı evimizden bir dost evine gidip sığınmıştık. Bir “başka yerde” öldü. Kırk saat boyunca şarkı söyledikten sonra. Bir ara şarkıları çok iyi seçebildim, tanıyabildim. Hepsi çocukluğunun, Beyoğlu döneminin şarkılarıydı.) (Karasu 1999b, 70; my emphasis)

In contrast to her mother and sister, the figures of the grandmother and aunt, who died in the neighborhood where they had lived and in their own bed, the mother’s death is defined by alterity. The “elsewhere” where she dies marks Ankara both as the symbol of Turkish nationhood and as the foreign bed in which the mother passes.18 Because she dies in another bed, the image of her dead face is not reflected in the console mirror, as the narrator reports (71). We don’t know if the mirror would have been covered if the mother had died in her own bed. Rather than understanding the narrator’s remark within the dialectic of covering and uncovering, it seems more productive here to relate it to the continuity defining the Beyoğlulu minority tradition, which is now broken. Due to the absence of the mother’s dead face, the console mirror reflects a void instead of containing meaning. The void in the mirror suggests at the same time the end of the old Pera-Beyoğlu culture. Yet, the passage about the mother dying “elsewhere” demonstrates again the dual workings of concealing and disclosing in Black Waters. In the quoted section, the mother’s Beyoğlulu Rum identity becomes her final mark of identification after the narrator had just spoken dismissively of her wish to return to her place of origin. By invoking Beyoğlu through song when representing the mother’s death, the narrator seems to lift the suppression he had placed over his own identity. As in the episode of the grandmother’s death, Karasu presents the mother’s death by implying the mourning rites of Beyoğlu’s minorities. Here the narrator notes that his mother’s face was transformed by candlelight into an object. The ritual of lighting candles again recalls a minority tradition observed by non-Muslim natives of Pera-Beyoğlu. As to whether we should read the candlelight as a Greek-Orthodox rite or see in it references to a shiv’a remains an open 18 As noted in chapter 3, this account of the mother’s death corresponds to biographical facts. Madam Karasu died in Füsun Akatlı’s apartment.

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question.19 This uncertainty suggests that Karasu renders the lives of his Beyoğlu characters through the filter of distortion. Consequently, the reader discovers figurations of alterity rather than a positivistically drawn representation of ethnic and cultural differentiation.

The Song of Jileco and the Mummerehlen: The Recall of Long-Forgotten Verses The recollection of an early childhood memory in “Beyoğlu is a Legend” offers another important clue for uncovering the narrator’s background that is embedded in Pera-Beyoğlu minority culture. Like the Venetian songs of the grandmother, this clue lies within an old popular song. It is also connected to Jewish tradition, hinted through the practice of shiv’a that was implied, along with its Greek-Orthodox counterpart, in the covered mirror in the grandmother’s bedroom and in the lit candle at the mother’s deathbed. In contrast to the two earlier signs, however, this intimation is purely linguistic in nature. At the same time, it images of the entertainment life of bygone Pera-Beyoğlu and its cosmopolitan performers. Both aspects of the clue help demonstrate Karasu’s technique of disclosure underlying his Beyoğlu narratives. The memory is triggered when the narrator, while looking out from the window, notices a man who is wearing a vest. The Turkish word for “vest,” yelek, leads the narrator to linguistic musings: he focuses on another word, jile, the alternative word for “vest” borrowed from French. After looking up these words in the dictionary, the narrator states that jile is derived from the Spanish word jileco, which came into Turkish in the sixteenth century and later, during the eighteenth century, found its way into French as gillet. The narrator’s emotional reaction to his lexical inquiry comes as a surprise, hinting at an unspoken context:

19 The Jewish Heritage Online Magazine states: “It is customary to light a large shiv’a candle, also called a ner daluk—burning light—which burns for seven days and nights. Candles are universal symbols of the divine spark that inhabits the body. In the words of the Bible, ‘The soul is the lamp of God.’ The candle is placed in a prominent spot and lit without saying a blessing. The immediate family might gather and designate someone to light the flame; this honor can go to a child, close friend, or other ‘unofficial’ mourner. The funeral home provides a long-burning candle or a special electric light that stays lit throughout shiv’a” (http://www.jhom.com/topics/seven/shiva.htlm, 2-3).

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I like this. I go back and forth between the “j” of Spanish, our “y,” the Spanish “y.” Suddenly, something storms into my mind, as if inflicting pain; it is not pain, it is excitement; an aching memory akin to the joy of opening a forgotten box and finding an old bead, a curl of hair, a childhood tooth that one has been searching desperately. (Hoşuma gidiyor. İspanyolcanın “j”si, bizim “y”miz, İspanyol “y”si arasında şöyle bir gidip geliyorum. Birden, acı verircesine, bir şey doluyor usuma; acı değil, heyecan; sızılı bir anı, unutulmuş bir kutunun açılıp içinde çok aranmış bir eski boncuk, bir lüle saç, bir çocukluk dişi bulunuvermesi sevinci gibi.) (Karasu 1999b, 72; my emphasis)

This rediscovery emerges from the words yelek, jile or jileco that lead the narrator back to a song he first heard from his aunt, then from his mother. Two issues surface here connected with jileco. One of these points to the connotations of the song; the other relates to the etymology of the word. The narrator’s discovery that the word entered Turkish via Spanish in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries intimates the migration of Spanish Jews to the Ottoman Empire in the late fifteenth century and the Sephardic culture they established in the imperial territories. Jileco, then, might have become a word in Ladino, the language of the Eastern Mediterranean Jews. The pleasure the narrator derives from going back and forth between the sounds of the consonants “j” and “y” in Spanish and Turkish is to be understood not as a random whim, but as the narrator’s awareness of his capability to oscillate between languages and cultures. He moves his pluralistically constructed self between the “j”s and the “y”s with ease and enjoys this motion. The narrator refers to the song that has flashed in his memory as the song of yelek. He recalls that he must have been around the age of five when he saw a musical score at the piano. The cover showed a woman with very short hair, a men’s style, a mustached man standing, a chair, and a vest. The narrator does not remember where the vest was located in the picture. As a child he could not read the notes yet, although he knew that the print was something to be played on the piano. However, he was able to read the first line of the song. Acting upon this reminiscence, the narrator begins to sing the first three lines of the song of yelek that goes back forty-five years. He now sings it with a heavy heart, perhaps caused by nostalgia, and is somewhat surprised by the quick resurgence of these memories. What he remembers is the voice of Zozo Dalmas, the famous operetta singer and

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legendary beauty who was considered one of the first Greek divas. The narrator refers to Dalmas as a legend that swept through Beyoğlu forty-five years ago; he also insinuates the gossip surrounding the legend, namely the affair between the diva and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the republic, by mentioning the Dolmabahçe Palace where Atatürk resided and the Tokatlıyan Hotel in Pera.20 Besides these allusions, the reader does not receive any information about Zozo Dalmas’s biography or artistic career. However, her image transports the narrator and the reader into the era of operettas, café chantants, and variety shows that the Pera society attended and that survived from the late nineteenth century into the 1940s. Among the Pera-Beyoğlu community and the larger collective of Istanbul’s non-Muslims, popular songs were recited half in Turkish and half in Greek. Moreover, Zozo Dalmas played the lead role in a 1933 Turkish film titled Cici Berber (Cute Barber). This musical comedy was shown in Istanbul’s movie theaters in two versions, one in Greek and the other in Turkish.21 We are not told in what language the narrator heard this song from his aunt and his mother. He also does not recall whether he saw Zozo Dalmas singing the song but does remember the shaking of hips during the third stanza. An old Istanbul lady responds to his inquiries about the origins of the song of yelek, maintaining that it did not matter whether the song was first introduced by Dalmas. What was important is that it was Dalmas who made it vastly popular. The narrator conjectures that the yelek song’s appeal, especially for Beyoğlu’s women of that era, lay in the sad love theme that it expressed. Its lyrics are from the perspective of a woman who makes a pretty vest for a much younger handsome man and whose hard work seems to remain unappreciated. By introducing this unrequited love trope, Karasu interweaves the yelek song with the hardships and unfulfilled dreams of Beyoğlu’s women. He brings to life this forgotten collective of working women, of widows, and of old virgins as the representative actors of his Pera-Beyoğlu. I should also note that in old age, Zozo Dalmas shared the predicament of Pera’s lonely and impoverished women. After a glamorous youth, when her fame was widespread through the Mediterranean, Dalmas lived in poverty and isolation in a rundown shelter in Athens.

20 For a biography of the Greek actress Zozo Dalmas (1905-80) who was born in Constantinople and her alleged romantic affair with Atatürk, see http://www.imbd. com/name/nm1089453/bio. 21 See www.kameraarkasi.org/makaleler/makaleler/turkyunaniliskileri.html.

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This analysis of the yelek episode illustrates that memory serves as an impetus for the narrator to reenact his buried Beyoğlulu minority identity. While his allusion to old Spanish word jileco evokes the Ladino language, his pleasurable play with Turkish and Spanish consonants hints at his being at home in both languages. His performance of the song of yelek, even if incomplete, is the live testimony of an insider, rendering him a participant of Pera-Beyoğlu’s old days. Remembering becomes performance, a reenaction of the song ingrained in old Beyoğlu’s collective memory. That the yelek episode bears a deeper meaning beyond a haphazard recollection is signaled by the unexpected emotional tone of the passage. The narrator states that” “I couldn’t let go of the song of yelek for a few days. Each time I sang it, I felt slightly melancholy. I will not search what caused this feeling.”22 What is especially telling here is the narrator’s resistance to inquiring into the roots of this heartache. Were it caused solely by nostalgia about childhood, a common feature of all human biographies, he would have no reason to turn away from exploring why the yelek song made him melancholy. It is important to see that the jileco song arises during the narrator’s later life in Ankara. His resistance to understanding his melancholy thus means a denial of his own displacement from his Beyoğlu origins. The memory of Beyoğlu is conjured up as performance by singing the song. Reading the jileco episode alongside Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood reveals several correspondences between the two memory models. Both authors construct memory based on sensory perception. Berlin Childhood offers a rich cluster of aural and linguistic signs that function as mnemonic elements. Pethes argues that remembering in Berlin Childhood is understood as an echo of texts heard long ago. Thus, reminiscences of poems and children’s verses that resonate in Benjamin’s vignettes serve as the building blocks of recollection. The vignette “The Mummerehlen” offers a good example of Benjamin’s program. The term “Muhme Rehlen” (Aunt Rehlen) from a nursery rhyme, distorted by the child’s aural perception, functions as the trigger of remembering.23 Benjamin begins this piece as follows: 22 “Yelek türküsü birkaç gün dilimden düşmeyecek. Her söyleyişte içim hafifçe burkulacak. Bunun nedenini aramayacağım” (Karasu 1999b, 73; my emphasis). 23 For more information on the archaic word Muhme see Benjamin 1996b, 410n40. Benjamin’s perception of Markthalle (Markt-Halle), the Market Hall, as “Mark-Thalle” offers a similar example of linguistic distortion (Berliner Kindheit 402; Berlin Childhood 360-362). On linguistic distortion in Benjamin, see Hamacher 1996, 133-62. Weigel’s study Entstellte Ähnlichkeit (Distorted Similarity) offers another compelling reading of the trope of distortion in Benjamin’s work.

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There is an old nursery rhyme that tells of Muhme Rehlen. Because the word Muhme meant nothing to me, this creature became for me a spirit: the mummerehlen. (1996b, 374) (In einem alten Kinderverse kommt die Muhme Rehlen vor. Weil mir nun “Muhme” nichts sagte, wurde dieses Geschöpf für mich zu einem Geist: der Mummerehlen.) (1991c, 417)

In the closing paragraph of the vignette, Benjamin returns to the rhyme, repeating it in its distorted version as it was retained in aural and oral memory: “Listen to my tale of the mummerehlen” (1996b, 375). Interestingly, Benjamin places the distortion into his original perception, noting that, “Muhme Rehlen, who used to have her place in the line, had already vanished when I heard it recited for the first time” (375). Although Karasu’s jileco, jile (gillet) and yelek are not distortions as in Benjamin’s “Mummerehlen,” the playful move between Ladino, the Turkish transliteration of French, and Turkish demonstrate an implied distortion as a component of cultural and linguistic translation. Furthermore, as in Benjamin’s nursery rhyme, the man wearing a vest and walking past the window of the narrator in Black Waters first evokes the word jileco, and then, “the song of jileco” that contains the word. The song is subsequently associated with the Greek diva Zozo Dalmas. As I discussed above, its lyrics, telling an unrequited love story, became ingrained in the collective memory of Beyoğlu’s women, rendering it unimportant whether the song should be attributed to Zozo Dalmas. In line with Pethes’ above-mentioned argument regarding the construction of memory through texts, the long forgotten jileco song in Karasu becomes the narrative of memory itself. In reference to Gérard Genette’s narrative theory, Pethes states that, for Benjamin, memory is the reminiscence of “foreign [unfamiliar] texts” and is construed through these texts in such a way that the authorial organization behind this construction becomes impenetrable (Pethes 1999, 274).24 The vignette “The Little Hunchback” (“Das bucklichte Männlein”) in Berlin Childhood offers another captivating example of these “foreign texts.” Here, Benjamin quotes verses from the nursery rhyme that bears the same title as the vignette. As a boy, he read the verses in the Deutsches Kinderbuch and attributed his unfortunate clumsy experiences around the house to the

24 Pethes uses the word fremd.

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Remembering as Distortion    CHAPTER 7

little hunchback figure.25 We can also trace further “foreign texts,” defining Karasu’s construction of memory in his Beyoğlu narratives, such as the Venetian lullabies sung by the grandmother. In reference to Benjamin’s anti-autobiographical poetics of memory, Pethes writes: Just as in Freud the memory trace remains essentially unconscious, the I that is searched for [in Benjamin] has to remain “subtextual,” in order that it does not freeze in a closure in writing. (1999, 277)26

I suggest that Karasu withholds the remembered past of his narrator in its autobiographical substance, evoking instead the contours of his Beyoğlulu identity through reference to “foreign texts.” Unlike Benjamin, who inserts fragments of nursery rhymes into Berlin Childhood, Karasu does not provide the lyrics of the jileco song or the Venetian lullabies. These pieces fulfill in Karasu a twofold function: they set out the mnemonic process that entails not only remembering but also remembering alterity. Thus, we may conclude that the jileco episode leads to a “sudden illumination” opening up the remembered Beyoğlu as a site of belonging that is differential vis-à-vis the majority culture. It is precisely due to such illumination that Karasu’s narrator feels melancholy, yet resists exploring the causes of this state. In the above quote from Karasu, when the narrator muses on the multilingual deviations of the word jileco, remembering is compared to opening an old forgotten box and all the intense emotions triggered by this experience. Benjamin uses similar tropes in Berlin Childhood to depict the mnemonic process: “Boys’ Books,” “The Otter,” “Hiding Places,” “The Sock,” and “The Sewing Box” present prime examples of such spatial metaphors. A brief return to Ricoeur’s memory model also proves useful here. As we have seen, Ricoeur defines recognition as the overlapping of the image present to the mind and the psychical trace of an initial impression. In the jileco episode, Karasu’s narrator performs this mnemonic act beginning with the sight of a man wearing a vest. The process then extends via linguistic associations to the aural image of the jileco song and the visual image of Zozo Dalmas. Since in Ricoeur’s view forgetting is not a complete effacement, the lost memory can be recovered and recognized (2006, 8, 430). 25 See Pethes on Benjamin’s use of children’s verses (1999, 274n25). See also Anna Stüssi’s reading of the figure of the little hunchback as a multivalent image of distortion that entails the dialectic of remembering and forgetting (1991, 59-68). 26 “So, wie die Erinnerungsspur bei Freud wesentlich unbewußt bleibt, muss das gesuchte Ich ‘subtextuell’ bleiben, um nicht in schriftlicher Stilllegung zu erstarren.”

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While it is this recognition that puzzles and emotionally stirs the Beyoğlu narrator, he evades confronting what the retrieval contains. When Ricoeur calls recognition the “minor miracle of happy memory,” he states: An image comes back to me; and I say in my heart: that’s really him, that’s really her. I recognize him, I recognize her. This recognition can take different forms. It takes place already in the course of perception: a being was presented once; it went away; it came back. Appearing, disappearing, reappearing. In this case the recognition adjusts—fits—the reappearing to the appearing across the disappearing. (429)

In this context, Ricoeur not only alludes to classical depictions of this small happiness in the history of philosophy, but also to “the vicissitudes of recognition” (429). Here we encounter again the anagnorisis of Greek tragedy. The tragic recognition of the hero uncovering a terrible truth about himself is best exemplified in the case of Oedipus. The consideration of the jileco episode in light of the concepts of recognition and anagnorisis, as employed by Ricoeur, elucidates the narrator’s enigmatic refusal of exploring his sadness. His mnemonic act, that is, the recognition of the fit between the lost and retrieved components of memory, had to be carried toward a final step that would have turned it into self-recognition. By means of this self-recognition, the narrator could have defined himself as an insider of Beyoğlu culture, a member of the former Pera minorities. I argue that while the narrator stops short of such an anagnorisis, albeit less tragic than in the Oedipus myth, the narrative points to it by thematizing the omission. (“I will not search what caused this feeling” (Karasu 1999b, 73)) Karasu’s strategy displays a dialectical tension: the author speaks out his own truth while his fictional double, in line with the dictum of kayadez discussed by Rıfat Bali, remains silent.

Chapter 8

Spatiality as the Inscription of the Past

“Horror of Apartments”: Beyo˘glu’s Dark Interiors This section will further explore Karasu’s representation of Beyoğlu’s past, embodied in architectural sites and interiors. The author’s employment of allegories of light and darkness, the depiction of the heavy furnishings of bourgeois interiors, and the recurrence of the “threshold” experience of traversing a Beyoğlu passage, betray abundant connections to Benjamin’s historico-philosophical rendering of the past through spatial configurations. In two narratives in Black Waters—“Text on Beyoğlu” and “Another Death out of the Blue”—Karasu traces the memories of the site back to the late nineteenth century and the turn of the century. Thus, although Benjamin and Karasu look at the process of modernity from two different temporal standpoints, the former from the 1930s and the latter from the 1960s (the beginnings of Karasu’s work on Beyoğlu), in the above-mentioned narratives the subject of their inquiries pertain in part to the same timeframe in two different socio-cultural contexts. Following this intertextual path, my reading aims at situating Karasu’s narrated Beyoğlu in the broader reflection on modernity and modernization, in which both Benjamin and Karasu took part. In order to read these spatial or image-based evocations of the past, I will return briefly to Andreas Huyssen’s concept of the “modernist miniature.” Huyssen’s concept refers to short prose pieces, as exemplified through Central European writers, such as Rilke, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Kafka,

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and which he defines as an unprecedented narrative form of the “the literary representation of social space in the city” (2007, 29). In these unusual narratives, which include Benjamin’s One-Way Street, Berlin Chronicle, and Berlin Childhood, Huyssen sees a “crisis of perception” based on the experience of the metropolis and, thus, “a new sensibility in perceiving time and space” (37). In the context of Kracauer and Kafka, he argues that the borders between inside and outside, between the subjective imaginary and objective world, are constantly crossed, endangering the coherence of the narrating or narrated, observing or observed subject.” (37)

Benjamin’s representation of the bourgeois interiors of the old Berlin apartments at the turn of the century indicates such instability lurking underneath the sense of bourgeois comfort and security. Referring to Benjamin’s phrase, “horror of apartments” (“Schrecken der Wohnung”), in One-Way Street Huyssen writes: In Benjamin’s text, the bourgeois interior with all its furnishings, potted nature, and collected knickknacks is as subject to intrusions from the outside as is the traditional bourgeois self and its inwardness.” (37)

The dark interiors of the old Pera-Beyoğlu in Karasu’s mnemonic narratives give a similar sense of something ominous, an impending threat that remains unexplained. The aversion Karasu’s narrator expresses toward the dark interiors of memory carries this symbolism. Vignettes from Berlin Childhood, such as “Loggias,” “The Telephone,” “At the Corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner,” and “Blumeshof 12,” illustrate the anxiety associated with the gloomy interiors of the nineteenth-century bourgeois life. Through the emphasis on light and darkness, ample references to gas lighting and the newly introduced electric lights, both authors codify the gloom as the defining feature of the bourgeois world. Benjamin forcefully articulates this despondent atmosphere of the bourgeois habitat when he uses the phrase “the terrors of the Berlin household”: At that time, the telephone still hung—an outcast settled carelessly between the dirty-linen hamper and the gasometer—in a corner of the back hallway, where its ringing served to multiply the terrors of the Berlin household. I arrived to quell the uproar after prolonged fumbling through the gloomy corridor, I tore off the two receivers, which were heavy as dumbbells, thrust my head between them, and was inexorably delivered over to the voice that now sounded. (1996b, 350)

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Spatiality as the Inscription of the Past    CHAPTER 8

(In diesen Zeiten hing das Telefon entstellt und ausgestoßen zwischen der Truhe für die schmutzige Wäsche und dem Gasometer in einem Winkel des Hinterkorridors, von wo sein Läuten die Schrecken der berliner Wohnung vervielfachte. Wenn ich dann, meiner Sinne mit Mühe mächtig, nach langem Tasten durch den finstern Schlauch, anlangte, um den Aufruhr abzustellen, die beiden Hörer, welche das Gewicht von Hanteln hatten, abriß und den Kopf dazwischen preßte, war ich gnadenlos der Stimme ausgeliefert, die da sprach.) (1991c, 391)

The darkness of the corridors and the backrooms of these Berlin apartments evidence the same layout as in Beyoğlu’s old dwellings, built in the late nineteenth and the turn of the twentieth centuries. In “Text on Beyoğlu,” an unidentified character, either Nevzat or Leman Hanım of the dissolved Sakızağacı household, tells the adult narrator on one of his visits: You know, your homes were always light. There was always a breeze going through your homes. When you were a child, you used to be scared of darkness. I tried hard to make you get used to the dark corridors. How you were bored at your paternal and maternal aunts’ homes. When you found a cat you used to catch her and pet her for hours in front of one of the windows. Turning your back to the darkness, the talk, the faces, when you couldn’t find a cat you attacked the magazines, the illustrated fashion journals. All you wanted was something to keep your face turned toward the street. (Karasu 1999b, 22) (Sizin evleriniz hep ışıklıydı. Biliyor musun? Her zaman bir rüzgâr eserdi evlerinizin içinden. Çocukluğunda karanlıktan ürkerdin. Karanlıkça geçeneklere seni alıştırmak için az mı uğraştım. Halanın, teyzenin evlerinde nasıl da sıkılırdın. Kedi buldun muydu yakalar pencerelerden birinin önünde severdin saatlerce. Arkanı karanlığa, sözlere, yüzlere dönüp, kedi bulmadığın zamanlar dergilere, modellere saldırırdın. Tek seni pencere önünde, yüzün sokağa dönük tutacak bir şey olsun da.) (Karasu 1999b, 22)

Leena Petersen’s reading of Benjamin’s use of lighting, primarily in The Arcades Project, offers a pertinent critical model. The following analysis illustrates that, in “Text on Beyoğlu,” the opening narrative of Black Waters, light and darkness function as the central leitmotif serving to portray bygone Beyoğlu, especially its interiors. Petersen views Benjamin’s discussion of the transition in the lighting modes of nineteenth-century Paris from oil lamps to gas lighting and finally to the introduction of electric

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light by Haussmann as an allegory of the process of modernization (see also Akın 1998, 127-29). She convincingly shows how Benjamin relates the motif of darkness to the concepts of dream, awakening, and recognition, and thus, to the central concept of the “dialectical image”: The methods of lighting are important for the perception of space in regard to the contrasting aspect of darkness that Benjamin was looking for and that he saw as the realm in which the overlooked, unperceived [dimensions] in history were to be found. (2010, 431)1

After the technological innovation of electric lights, some of the Parisian passages still preserved their dark corners, which Benjamin describes as “a past become space” (2002, 817; 1991h, 5.1-2:1041). Darkness as the container of the unknown in these niches leads Benjamin to find and read “dialectical images,” which provide historical knowledge of the past (Petersen 2010, 432). When we approach the dark corners, rooms, entryways, cellars, and passages in Karasu’s narrated Beyoğlu, we discern these examples of “dialectical images.” Through them the historical knowledge of the forgotten and the neglected of Pera-Beyoğlu becomes legible. These images reveal the old neighborhood’s marginalized characters and its diminished pluricultural fabric. I will first focus on the house in Sakızağacı Street, that primordial model of the bygone Pera-Beyoğlu. The “house at Sakızağacı” (“Sakızağacındaki ev”), recalled from childhood memories, serves as a leitmotif throughout Black Waters. Appearing early in the first narrative “Text on Beyoğlu,” the house also represents the prototype of memory: The house at Sakızağacı must have remained from the years before the defense of Plevne, as I have been told. Each time I attempted to envision it, first its darkness came and occupied my mind’s eye. Its façade was relatively narrow. Underneath the slim straight iron bars of the first-floor windows there was the iron door, also ornate with grating, of a basement-like repair place. The entrance door stood in the darkness of the awning-like structure, above the steep staircase with seven or eight steps. A little to the right of and below the windows, the mailbox. 1 “Die Beleuchtungsarten sind wichtig bei der Wahrnehmung des Raumes im Zusammenhang mit dem von Benjamin gesuchten kontrastierenden Aspekt der Dunkelheit als demjenigen Bereich, in dem das Übergangene, nicht Wahrgenommene der Geschichte zu finden sei” (Peterson 2010, 431). Translations from Petersen are mine.

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Spatiality as the Inscription of the Past    CHAPTER 8

(Sakızağacı’ndaki ev Plevne savunmasından önceki yıllardan kalma olsa gerek, bana anlatıldığına göre. Kaç kez gözümde canlandırmak istedimse, önce karanlığı geldi kapladı ortalığı. Yüzü oldukça dardı. Birinci kat pencerelerinin ince uzun demirli düz parmaklığı altında bir bodrumsu onarımevinin gene parmaklıkla bezeli demir kapısı. Sokak kapısı pencerelerin solundaki sayvansı yerin karanlığında, dimdik yükselen yedi sekiz basamağın üstünde duruyordu. Pencerelerin sağında, biraz altlarında, bir posta kutusu.) (Karasu, 1999b, 18)

The passage accounts for the house’s history by setting the erection of the house in a time before the Battle of Plevne during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78.2 Since the narrator knows this by hearsay, the exact origins of the house remain in the dark, like the history of the console table in the aunt’s household that the narrator could follow back only to a certain dwelling but not to its first residence. This uncertainty alternates with the precise depiction of the exterior of the house. In the next paragraph the narrator vividly recollects his fascination in early childhood with the mailbox described above. The interior of this house is portrayed by sensory impressions, principally darkness and a peculiar smell that, in the narrator’s recollection, was also characteristic of his aunt’s house and, indeed, all of the Beyoğlu houses he knew. The odor seemed to be stemming from stone, patio, moisture, age, dust, and mold, and stirred in with the smell of perfumes, sweet basil, and cat urine: “The cleanliness of the house or the doorkeeper seemed to be in reverse proportion with the sharpness of the smell.”3 This subjective account stands in stark contrast to Duhani’s seamless testimony, presenting the narrative of an observer who at the same time speaks as an insider of the neighborhood, and thus implies a claim 2 The Battle of Plevne is also known as the Siege of Plevna (Pleven) and it refers to the Russian siege of the Turkish-held Bulgarian town of  Pleven  (Russian: Plevna). The Turkish army, under the command of Osman Nuri Paşa, defended the town in successive battles until its final defeat and surrender to the Russians. The Treaty of San Stefano, signed at the end of the war, marked the independence of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire (see https://www.britannica.com/event/Siege-of-Pleven). Schmitt states that, in the aftermath of the Crimean War, there was a decline in moral norms in Pera. The influx of foreign soldiers, and the rise of prostitution and criminality caused this change (ibid., 259). Thus, the Crimean War, mentioned in conjunction with the history of the house in Sakızağacı, functions as a watershed between an earlier notion of Pera in the nineteenth century and the transition to a new life style. 3 “Evin ya da kapıcının temizliği, kokunun keskinliğiyle ters orantılı sayılırdı” (Karasu 1999b, 42).

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to objectivity. While Duhani’s voice in his social topographies of Beyoğlu exudes narrative authority and represents agency, the child witness of bygone Pera in Black Waters is defined by passivity: “I climbed up those stairs with the help of hands I was holding tight, by lifting my legs as much as I could.”4 The memory of the Sakızağacı house is surrounded by ambiguity. Despite the narrator’s intimate familiarity with this abode, the reader never finds out how he was related to its inhabitants. We may conjecture that they were close family friends. The name Adile comes up in conjunction with the house, as do the names Nevzat Hanım and Leman Hanım, Adile’s older sisters. Their cat Kız (Girl) is omnipresent in the Sakızağacı recollections. Before examining further the signification of the Sakızağacı household as a mnemonic site, let us focus on the proper names of those identified with the house. The name “Adile” unambiguously signifies a member of the Turkish majority. As with “Adile,” “Nevzat” and “Leman,” and the address “Hanım,” suggest Turkish identity. Christian and Jewish minority women are commonly addressed as “Madam” while “Hanım” is added to Turkish names. The name Münir (Bey) also comes up. Then, in “Mother of Black Waters” there is a Beyoğlu romance, involving the characters Inayet Hanım and Hüsnü Bey, transmitted from the old, Ottoman days. The narrator declares: This is a story that was passed on from grown-ups to the young ones— especially through women narrators—and that has reached me, and this page after 75-80 years. (Büyüklerden küçüklere–özellikle kadın ağızları aracılığıyla—aktarıla aktarıla 75-80 yıl sonra bana, bu sayfanın yazısına ulaşmış bir öyküdür bu.) (Karasu 1999b, 82)

Finally, Karasu’s Beyoğlu includes Meryem, a distorted figure evoking a Turkish Maria through her name, as will be examined in the conclusion. In contrast, the narrator does not reveal the proper names of his own family members, except for that of his Aunt Marruş, which remains opaque in its linguistic and cultural origins. A contextual explanation can be found in Eldem’s thesis maintaining that the Turkish Muslim demographics around old Pera and Galata were 4 “Sıkı sıkı tuttuğum ellerin yardımıyla, ayaklarımı gücümün yettiğince kaldıra kaldıra çıkardım o merdivenden” (ibid.).

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Spatiality as the Inscription of the Past    CHAPTER 8

higher than is assumed by cultural histories that focus on the “exotic” fabric of the neighborhood (2006b, 20, 26, 30). Accordingly, the Turkish names in “Text on Beyoğlu” may be understood in line with Eldem’s point. Furthermore, as I concluded previously, Karasu chooses to blur boundaries and mix cultures in his construction of Beyoğlulu identity rather than representing ethnicities and religious and cultural traditions as distinct and unambiguous entities. At the same time, his use of Turkish names expressly leads us back to the author’s narrative strategy of concealment and revelation. In this case, introducing characters carrying names of the majority culture at the outset would indicate that Karasu diverts the reader’s interest from the pluricultural image of Pera-Beyoğlu toward an uncomplicated uniformity of Turkish culture, remaining apparently silent about the communities of local Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Levantines that were the predominant natives of bygone Pera. By suppressing the proper names of the minorities, except for Aunt Marruş, and by operating instead with a few Turkish names, Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives seem to create a tension between presence and absence. The frequently mentioned name “Adile” displays such a tension insofar as its connotations of Turkishness exclude non-Turkish identity from the narrative. Christian and Jewish names that once resonated in Beyoğlu’s universe stand as mute (non-)markers of Black Waters. The parallel between the house at Sakızağacı and the aunt’s house consists not only in the distinctive smell but also in the furnishings of the interiors. As memory trace, the Sakızağacı house is reinscribed primarily as darkness. The narrative does not provide an overview of the entire house; in fact, the narrator does not remember having visited all of the three floors. The preponderant darkness presents a trace enacting the original affect, leaving an atmosphere of foreboding. Related to the darkness is a sinister painting the narrator recalls having seen in one of the dark first-floor rooms of the house. Adults tell him that this is a portrait of Doctor Faust. Although the child does not understand the story, he does not like the picture that has the devil in it. The dark red upholstery of the furniture intensifies the dimness; and whereas the gas lamps used to reflect a soft light, the transition to electric light seems to have increased the gloomy ambiance of this European-style bourgeois interior, a remnant of the fin de siècle. The decor includes a round table covered with a plush, fringed tablecloth, a heavy redgilded Chinese vase, and, just as in the aunt’s house, a lighting fixture with a fringed red shade hanging low over the round dining table. As in most

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dwellings of Pera-Beyoğlu, the dining room window overlooking the back street had a view of another dining room window. As the narrator remembers, “[t]he dining room’s window, the eye of the house looking toward the back side, was quasi-blind.”5 It was said that the doctor in the apartment opposite did not use this room since his wife’s death. The curtains never moved, a detail reinforcing the morbid atmosphere. The narrator finds out much later that that physician was his mother’s doctor, the one into whose hands the narrator was born, an indication of the interconnectedness of the history of the dwellings and the Beyoğlulus inhabiting them. The living room facing the front is also described as dark with heavy curtains. An orientalist tapestry adorns the wall. Through these interchangeable bourgeois interiors, Karasu draws the typology of an old world doomed for demise: “Among this furniture, created by the bourgeois Europe, and determined to block the light day and night, the fair-skinned women’s fate seemed to remain homebound.”6 We should recall here Benjamin’s “the terrors of the Berlin household” (1996c, 350). As Huyssen states, “[t]he arrangement of nineteenth-century furniture is to him ‘the site plan of deadly traps, and the suite of rooms prescribes the path of the fleeing victims’” (2007, 37). Whereas the childhood memories of Karasu’s narrator are primarily situated in the interwar period, the household at Sakızağacı and the maternal family of the narrator summon up the bourgeois culture of Pera-Beyoğlu, reaching back as far as the time before the First World War. Karasu’s narratives touch on macro-historical events by way of few references to the world wars. The narrator reanimates the past epoch primarily through memory fragments from childhood, anecdotal renderings that he overheard from adult conversations: the arrival of the seductive operetta singer “La Milovic” who visited Istanbul during the years of the Great War; incidents of drunkenness and molestation during the occupation years following the Ottoman defeat; and, finally, the illness of Adile’s father that marks, along with the deaths of other father figures, the end of the old world.

5 “Yemek odasının penceresi, evin arkaya bakan gözü, kör gibiydi” (ibid., 43). 6 “Kentsoylu Avrupanın yarattığı bu, gece gündüz ışığı boğmakla görevli eşyalar arasında, süt aklığındaki kadınların yazgısı evde kalmaktı galiba” (ibid., 19). The verb evde kalmak means in Turkish both “to stay, remain at home” and “to become a spinster.” Karasu clearly implies both meanings, since Pera’s single women, young and old, either never married or later widowed, constitute a thematic thread in the Beyoğlu narratives.

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As a mnemonic site, then, the house at Sakızağacı and its dark interiors stand for a multifaceted object-symbol of historicity. To be sure, despite the lack of light, the Sakızağacı dwelling is not envisioned as an empty ghost house. On the contrary, lived lives pertaining to that house, people who grew up in it, cried and laughed, sang, and played the piano are vividly conjured up. Alluding to the dim interiors, the narrator wonders: How did they do homework in that darkness, how did they read the newspaper, I still cannot fathom. I cannot imagine, how they invited and entertained Austrian and German officers. Did the darkness help women’s complexions remain fair as milk or appear that way? (Okul ödevleri nasıl yapılırmış o karanlıklarda, kitap gazete nasıl okunurmuş, hâlâ akıl erdiremiyorum. Avusturyalı subaylar, Alman subaylar nasıl çağrılıp eğlendirilirmiş, gözümün önüne gelmiyor. Karanlık, kadınların süt aklığında kalmasını mı sağlıyordu, yoksa öyle görünmesini mi?) (Karasu 1999b, 19)

It is important to be aware that in the Turkish original the first two sentences of the quote use the passive voice, withholding the agency of those who performed the actions in this micro-historical narrative. The entertainment of the foreign officers leads us back to the First World War era, possibly also to the preceding years in which the Ottoman Empire’s alliance with the Habsburgs and Wilhelmine Germany was formed.7 Again, Karasu provides no political context and no clue as to what status Adile’s family held in order to host the Austrian and German officers. Was the father an Ottoman state official or an influential professional in the Pera neighborhood? These parties are reminiscent of the grand events at Levantine households in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where a cosmopolitan crowd, including Western diplomats, high-ranking Ottoman officers, and the members of Pera’s upper bourgeoisie were entertained. 7 In Mario Levi’s epic novel Istanbul Was A Fairy Tale, we encounter the character Officer Schwartz, a member of the Austro-Hungarian Army, who was “lost” in Istanbul, while his army was stationing there before the First World War broke out. He is seen strolling through the streets of Pera, “in a striking officer’s uniform decorated with medals and wearing a sabre. . . . So far, so good! The strolling of foreign army officers in uniform in the streets of the city was nothing out of the ordinary at the time” (2012, 100; my emphasis). Schwartz cannot tell much about his past, because the shock of being forgotten led him to amnesia, fabricating instead different stories. Levi masterfully interweaves the sagas of dispersed Jews: The mysterious character Schwartz is Jewish, and during his long-exiled life in Istanbul he gets involved with other displaced Jews who have fled the Russian Revolution.

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Moreover, the pale complexion of women, mentioned twice in the above passages about Pera’s interiors, establishes an interesting connection to the depiction of the Levantine women who were famous for their beautiful fair skin.8 They also lived in the confinement of their homes, venturing out only to shop or stroll in the Pera. Yet the Turkish names given to the residents of the Sakızağacı house undercut the association with the Levantine milieu. Here, Karasu employs the same kind of ambiguity and evasion regarding ethno-cultural identification. By making the Sakızağacı house the abode of an old Turkish family, he seems to transport the largely Levantine ways of social life in bygone cosmopolitan Pera to the Turkish household at Sakızağacı (see Duhani 1990, Akın 1998). However, as Nur Akın explains, beginning with the mid-nineteenth century, dinner parties and evening receptions also took place in upper-class Turkish Muslim households and at the mansions of Ottoman politicians (1998, 58-59).9 Through multilayered memories and historical allusions the house at Sakızağacı in Karasu’s “Text on Beyoğlu” metonymically signifies Pera itself. Nevertheless, since the author evades a referential narrative, the context of the receptions at the house remains obscure. The representative spatiality of the Sakızağacı house is also severed from any association with Pera’s minority identity or its otherness.

The Spartan as the Harbinger of Death The author conveys the theme of death that permeates his Beyoğlu stories through the passing of relatives and other Pera residents and, figuratively, through the dissolution of the old households. In “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” he conveys the idea of demise via interjected text fragments depicting the “Spartans.” The figure serves us here for elucidating the representation of the bourgeois interiors. The Spartan will be revisited in chapter 9 and the conclusion in the context of the Meryem narratives. 8 In his discussion of the lifestyles of the Levantines, Schmitt refers to the diaries and correspondence of Pierre David, Consul General of France in Smyrna in the early nineteenth century. David, impressed by the beauty of the young Levantine daughters, praises the pureness of their fair skin (2005, 254). However, since the beauties David admires are in Smyrna and there is no mention of dark interiors, the association I draw here with the appearance of fair-skinned women in the dark Beyoğlu interiors, as Karasu’s narrator alludes to, remains as conjecture. 9 Akın also refers to the grand soirees at the mansion of the Kamondo family, among the wealthiest Ottoman-Jewish bankers.

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The narrator explains that at the conception of the Beyoğlu project the trope of the Spartan, embodying death, seemed most appropriate to represent the old Beyoğlu: At that time, I wanted to tell, write about a world formed extensively by Beyoğlu. I wanted to call my narrative “The Spartans.” This appeared to me one of the best terms designating a bourgeois world: the Spartan prepares himself throughout his whole life for a “tomorrow.” This “tomorrow” is in reality not fame, might, power, do not be deceived by the appearance, it is death. Sheer death. The only victory of the Spartan’s strivings is death. . . . The only task that the Spartan completes, accomplishes is death. For him, all other stops are transitory. Death is the only beauty the Spartan has created. (O sıralar, Beyoğlu’nun geniş ölçüde biçimlendirdiği bir dünyayı anlatmak, yazmak istiyordum. “Ispartalılar” adını vermek istiyordum bu yazacaklarıma: Bir kentsoylular dünyasını dile getirmekte kullanılabilecek en iyi deyimlerden biri gibi geliyordu bu bana: Ispartalı, bütün yaşayışı boyunca, bir “yarın”a hazırlanır. Bu “yarın”, ün, güç, iktidar değildir gerçekte, siz görünüşe bakmayın, ölümdür. Düpedüz ölüm. Ispartalının çabalarının tek utkusu ölümdür. . . . Ispartalının bitirdiği, sona erdirdiği tek iş, ölümdür, öbür durakların hepsi geçicidir Ispartalı için. . . . Ölüm, Ispartalının yarattığı tek güzelliktir.) (Karasu 1999b, 49; italics in the original)

Here the figure of the Spartan is, first, the harbinger of the historical demise of the Pera-Beyoğlu culture; and second, it serves as a critique of the bourgeois mentality embodied in the Spartan-Beyoğlulu or Perote equation. The Perote bourgeois type projects itself into the future in anticipation of material gain, unaware of the danger of its own disappearance that “tomorrow” would bring along. This bourgeois typology of the bygone Pera resonates with Benjamin’s representation of the Berlin apartments in Berlin Childhood. The vignette “Blumeshof 12,” depicting childhood memories at the maternal grandmother’s stately apartment, conveys the dialectic of the notion of “bourgeois security”: What words can describe the almost immemorial feeling of bourgeois security that emanated from this apartment? . . . Here reigned a type of furniture that, having capriciously incorporated styles of ornament from different centuries, was thoroughly imbued with itself and its own duration. Poverty could have no place in these rooms, where death itself had none. There was no place in them to die; and so their occupants died

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in sanatoriums, while the furniture went directly to a dealer as soon as the estate was settled. (1996b, 369) (Mit welchen Worten das fast unvordenkliche Gefühl von bürgerlicher Sicherheit umschreiben, das von dieser Wohnung ausging? . . . Hier herrschte eine Art von Möbeln, die auf Grund des Eigensinns, mit dem sie Ornamente vieler Jahrhunderte auf sich vereinten, von sich und ihrer Dauer durchdrungen waren. Das Elend konnte in diesen Räumen keine Stelle haben, in denen nicht einmal der Tod sie hatte. Es gab in ihnen keinen Platz zum Sterben; so starben ihre Bewohner in den Sanatorien, die Möbel aber kamen gleich im ersten Erbgang an den Händler.) (1991c, 411-12)

The downfall of the old socio-economic order in Karasu’s representation begins with the deaths of the father figures and leads to the transformation of Beyoğlu households. Karasu sets the transition of the surviving female characters from houses to apartment buildings as a leitmotif in “Text on Beyoğlu.” While the dislocations of Adile and her sisters constitute a prototype, Black Waters offers other stories suggesting similar predicaments. The specific story of the three Sakızağacı sisters with Turkish names stands for the hopeless lives of the Pera collective of women, of the widows, and of the old virgins with no economic or social prospects in the decades following the First World War. The eldest sister has to take care of their ill father, the only male and the lord of the household, then of her mother. After the parents’ death, some of the furniture is dispersed and sold, and the top floor rented until they move out from the parental house. Following her two younger sisters, the eldest daughter begins working too (Karasu 1999b, 19). The narrator does not reveal what happened to Adile but follows up on the lives of the other two daughters of the Sakızağacı household, Leman Hanım and Nevzat Hanım. Apparently, he has visited their new dwellings several times as an adult and seems to have intimate knowledge of these interiors. Decades have passed, for the narrator refers during one of his visits to an old photograph of Nevzat Hanım from 1928 that still adorns the vanity table in the same old frame and broken glass as becoming more faded “in the deadly light of 23 years that have passed since I first saw it.”10 The old furniture, familiar to the narrator from the house at Sakızağacı, looks displaced. In the bedroom “the closets, the bed, the vanity table were 10 “. . . onu ilk görüşümün üzerinden geçen 23 yılın öldürücü aydınlığıyla biraz daha silikleşmiş, biraz daha sararmış” (Karasu 1999b, 22).

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screaming their strangeness in the deafness of a totally different age.”11 The half empty jars of powder and blush on the vanity are symbols of the past. The juxtaposition of old jars with the new boxes of make-up, still used by the aging women, signals transience and decay more than nostalgia. The paternal family’s household in Taksim stands in some distinction to the dark Beyoğlu interiors with their narrow façades, long corridors that used to scare the narrator in his childhood, and back views facing a dead window or a wall. Karasu calls up the narrator’s paternal house in his third Beyoğlu narrative “Mother of Black Waters” and again in “The Courtyard of Death.” These descriptions occupy much less space than the representation of the maternal dwellings and the Sakızağacı house. Because of its difference from other Beyoğlu places that are perpetually present throughout Black Waters, the paternal household deserves some thought. As noted in chapter 7, the narrator’s childhood abode is not situated in Beyoğlu proper but at Taksim Square, located at the north end of Istiklâl Caddesi. According to the fashion of the times, the lobby of this dwelling, probably an apartment house for the more affluent families than for their counterparts in the backstreets of Beyoğlu, is adorned with orientalist frescoes. The narrator observes that the artists who painted them were Russians who had sought refuge in Istanbul. This allusion to the Russian émigrés in Beyoğlu during the interwar years is a further example of Karasu’s enmeshing of history in the depiction of personal stories. The Russian painters had also decorated the living room walls. Dark vines on an unappealing pinkish background induced more anxiety than pleasure in the child. The testimonial nature of the narrative manifests itself in the narrator’s recollection of the Russians painting in the paternal grandmother’s bedroom. With respect to the frescoes, the narrator emphasizes the contrast between the paternal and the maternal households: There were only a few undecorated walls in our house. At my aunt’s house, on the other hand, the adornments were not on the walls, but on the curtains, the upholstery, the tablecloths; just the opposite of ours. (Nakışsız duvar azdı bizim evde. Teyzemlerde ise nakışlar, duvarlarda değil, perdelerde, döşemeliklerde, örtülerdeydi; bizdekinin tersine.) (Karasu 1999b, 86)

11 “. . . dolaplar, yatak, konsol bambaşka bir çağın sağırlığında, yabancılıklarını haykırıyorlardı” (ibid., 25).

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This difference might situate the father’s household at the more “modern,” well-off end of Pera-Beyoğlu, while the handmade decorations on fabrics in the aunt’s household signify the old order. The narrator’s childhood home in Taksim also does not share the darkness of Beyoğlu’s apartments. Yet, his beloved childhood friends, the cats that appear throughout Black Waters as staples of the Beyoğlu abodes, were absent in the Taksim household: “I guess the only household without cats was ours. After years, when we acquired a cat, the house would not accept the cat.”12 Thus, the “house” acts as a cruel agent that sent the cat on an unknown journey by the child himself.13 These depictions of the father’s domain clearly demonstrate that the narrator recollects this sphere without the affection and self-identification that characterize his attachment to the matrilineal households. My close reading in chapter 7 suggests that the reasons for this distance are not laid out, even though they certainly resonate with the portrayal of the father or peder as authority figure. If we recall the fact that Karasu changed his name from “Israel” to “Bilge” during his university years, we may notice a parallel between biography and the fictional construction of selfhood in Black Waters, in that in both cases self-identification through the (Jewish) father is rejected. This analysis of the interiors shows how Karasu represents the dissolution of Pera-Beyoğlu’s old socio-economic order and the impoverishment of the Beyoğlulus in the transition to the new era through numerous negative symbols associated with decay, disease, and desolation. Along with markers of sensory perception, such as darkness and stench, these symbols include rats and other rodents that inhabit the apartment buildings, described as sites of relocation from better households for long-time Beyoğlulus. Finally, the overarching metaphor of the sewage itself, subsuming the stories in its current, clearly triggers negative associations. At the same time, the symbolism entailed in the sewage or black waters attests to a profound ambiguity in Karasu’s representation of Beyoğlu. We have seen that the imagery implied through the title Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu points to the feminine component as a primal principle, reminiscent of all figures of the 12 “Kedisi olmayan tek ev bizimkiydi galiba. Yıllar sonra bir kedi aldığımızda ev kediyi kabul etmeyecek, . . . ” (ibid., 40). 13 The narrative does not reveal in what way the child aided disposing of the cat. The phrase “with my own hand” is repeated, the second time in italics. We might think that the child was forced to help carry away the cat to a remote place and abandon it there, which was or perhaps still is a common practice.

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maternal family to which the narrator is affectionately attached. The flow of the sewage also embodies the passage of time into which everything is enveloped and which, carrying away the stagnation, brings about change (Karasu 1999b, 80-81). In its configuration as historical transformation, Karasu’s Beyoğlu becomes an ever-eroding trope. Karasu’s narrative project aims at mimicking this current. As demonstrated in chapter 2, his inscription of remembering surfaces from the flow of Beyoğlu’s black waters, carrying the author’s signature: Karasu or “black water”. By treating change as a universally recurrent element, Karasu seems to depart here from the implied historical context that determines individual and collective predicaments in Pera-Beyoğlu throughout Black Waters. However, these stories offer abundant historical codes, embedded in memory fragments and conveyed through dates, fashion styles, names of period artists, and through significant places in Beyoğlu, such as the movie theaters. By way of suggesting these ciphers in his inscription of memory, Karasu renders historicity the condition of possibility of writing remembrance. As in Benjamin’s memory narratives, historicity is not conveyed through a grand referential narrative but rather hides in the figurations through which the world of remembrance is evoked. Even though Black Waters delivers old Pera-Beyoğlu and its transformation only through the broken lens of personal memories and never explicitly mentions the diverse cultures of Pera where lives underwent profound changes, Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives offer a fascinatingly vivid testimony of the history of a locality.

“Angsträume” as “Angstträume”: The Voice of the Mother As Huyssen illustrates, “spatial terror,” symptomatic of modernity, is experienced not only in outer urban space but also as a force that penetrates the boundaries of the interior, threatening the integrity of the bourgeois self. With reference to Benjamin and Kafka, Huyssen argues that The house of the self in both senses caves in. It caves in because the boundary between the secure private space of the bourgeois interior and its inwardness, on the one hand, and the public space of the street and the city, on the other, is increasingly blurred—most famously in Benjamin’s analysis of the arcade as an interior street space, which, like the dream, lacks a proper outside. (2007, 37)

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A Beyoğlu arcade that the narrator of Black Waters first describes as a passage he used to walk through with his mother in early childhood on their way to and from visiting the aunt’s house, and later alone, reveals a striking parallel to Benjamin’s definition of the arcade as a dream-space without an exterior. At the same time, it corresponds to what Huyssen has called the Angstraum (“space of anxiety”) and Angsttraum (“nightmare,” “dream of anxiety”) that characterize the “spatial terror” as represented in Central European modernist miniatures. This last section of my analysis of spatiality in Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives focuses on the representation of a Beyoğlu arcade in light of Huyssen’s critical framework. Karasu’s narrator introduces the arcade in the second story of the Beyoğlu ensemble, “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” with the following words: “Among the childhood memories of my mother there is an arcade that triggers a tickling in my throat—which could only mimic on a miniscule scale the shudder she felt.”14 This opening sentence requires scrutiny due to its connection to the term “spatial terror.” Moreover, it initiates a new dimension in the rendering of recollections by uncovering a more remote layer of the past, the childhood memories of the mother. Even though the reconstruction of the past through the mother’s testimony occurs elsewhere in the Beyoğlu narratives, the passage quoted above is unique in that it constitutes the nucleus of a separate story following the body of the Beyoğlu ensemble. As mentioned earlier, editor Akatlı placed this text, titled “Hiç Yoktan Bir Ölüm Daha” (“Another Death out of the Blue”), in the section of the book immediately following the three Beyoğlu stories. Referring to the common thematic threads between “Another Death out of the Blue” and the core narratives of the ensemble, Akatlı states that Karasu would have later included this story, written independently on Beyoğlu and subjective history, in the corpus of his Beyoğlu texts. (Akatlı 1999, 102). Huyssen explores the breakdown of the boundaries between the interior and exterior space in Benjamin’s writings through the concept of “threshold experiences” (Schwellenerfahrungen). He states that the pivotal trope of “threshold” entails not only the distinction between the inside of a dwelling and the street life “but also between dream and waking, past and present, life and death, surface world and myth-laden underworld” (Huyssen 2007, 37; see also Buck-Morss 1995; Menninghaus 1986). Here, Huyssen not only 14 “Anamın çocukluk anıları arasında bende—kendi duyduğu ürpertinin ancak gölgeciği olabilecek—bir gıcıklama uyandıran bir geçit var” (ibid., 61).

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refers to Benjamin’s depiction of the Parisian arcades as containers of the nineteenth century dream-spaces of the emerging consumer culture but also to his representation of apartment dwellings in Berlin Childhood. Both contexts prove relevant for my following reading of the Beyoğlu arcade: the memory fragments pertaining to this arcade in “Beyoğlu is a Legend” and “Another Death out of the Blue” offer such a threshold experience in multiple ways. A threshold is physically evoked in the former. The narrator remembers that on their visit to the aunt, the mother each time found an excuse to go through the passage. On icy winter days the arcade, with its three-tier marble stairs at its entryway, presumably appeared safer. The narrator immediately adds that he then thought the worn-out stairs were slippery even when it had only lightly drizzled. This comment implies that the mother’s motives for passing through the arcade lay beyond these pretexts without revealing them in the narrative. The isolation of this space from the street is strikingly reminiscent of the Benjaminian arcade, which Huyssen likens to a dream-space. Karasu’s narrator reflects on this space he experienced in his childhood from the narration’s present: There is still such an inner world in Beyoğlu to be found. In an instant, you enter a realm of silence, oldness, leaving behind the noise, the crowds, hustle and bustle of the environs. These courtyard-like spaces, where time has stopped and which seem to have remained frozen as if living an unspecified past epoch, are separated from the street, the tumult by an iron gate that you never saw closed. Sometimes, however, an iron gate stands as if closed, though, you have learned that, with a single touch, it would open—without creaking. (Beyoğlu’nda, hâlâ, böyle birkaç iç dünya bulunabiliyor. Çevrenin gürültüsünden, kalabalığından, hayhuyundan bir anda bir sessizlik, eskilik alanına geçersiniz. Zamanın durmuş olduğu, belirsiz bir geçmiş çağı yaşar gibi kalakalmış bu avlumsu boşlukları, sokaktan, patırtıdan ayıran bir parmaklık, kapandığını hiç görmediğiniz bir demir kapıdır. Kimi zaman ise, parmaklıklı bir kapı hep kapalı gibi durur; oysa bir dokunuşta—hem de gıcırtısızca— açılacağını öğrenmişsinizdir.) (1999b, 62; my emphasis)

While “the realm of oldness” denotes the entry to Beyoğlu’s historical past, other elements of the depiction, such as silence, the stopping of time, and being frozen in an unspecified past, suggest a symbolism transcending references to real history. At the intersection of imagination and memory, the

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symbolism embodies a dreamlike space that, akin to the nature of memory, has a timeless quality. At the same time, this space, opened up by the overlapping of memory with the imaginary, becomes both a “space of anxiety” and a “dream of anxiety,” a nightmare. The transition from the external reality of the Beyoğlu arcade to its inward signification as site of affects renders it extemporal or a space frozen in time. Whose “space of anxiety” and “dream of anxiety” does the arcade represent? Ricoeur’s remark on the verb “to remember” helps explore these questions. Ricoeur argues, underscoring the reflexive pronoun, accompanying the verb “to remember” in French, that “[i]n remembering something (se souvant de quelque chose), one remembers oneself (on se souvient de soi)” (2006, 96).15 Following the close connections Ricoeur draws between memory, narrative, and identity, we should first look closely into the subject of the mnemonic experience in Karasu by reiterating one of Ricoeur’s initial questions: who remembers? (3). Second, discerning the function of this specific arcade in the Beyoğlu narratives will further elucidate Karasu’s construction of remembering. This leads us to another question to which Ricoeur gives primacy over the “who”: the “what” of the act of remembrance. In “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the subject who remembers is bifurcated. While the narrator pictures the passageway as he recalls walking through it with his mother, it is originally the mother who remembers the arcade as a site from her childhood. As elsewhere in the Beyoğlu stories, this reminiscence is mediated through the narrator’s construction of the vague imagery stemming from the depth of the mother’s past. Ricoeur points out that in Aristotle’s De memoria, memory emerges as “a spontaneous evocation, hence as pathos” (87). What turns the arcade into a “space of anxiety,” containing the nightmare, can be identified as the affects attached to the mother’s remembering. We may further infer that anxiety constitutes the “what” of the double recollection of the arcade by the mother and the son. But why exactly should the arcade as an object of memory convey such strong emotive undertones? The old Pera arcades included not only shops; often apartment buildings were lined at both sides of the passage (Elliott unpublished manuscript, 15-21). In some cases, a bridge-like closed structure connected the buildings facing each other. The depiction of the passage 15 Similar to French, the German equivalent of “to remember,” “sich erinnern,” is used with a reflexive pronoun. “Erinnern” without the reflexive pronoun is a transitive verb and means to remind someone of something.

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suggests that it was a very narrow path, only half covered by a dwelling built over it at one end. In her early childhood, the mother lived in one of these apartment buildings along the passage. What draws her to the arcade can thus be taken as a wish to return to childhood. Like Benjamin’s Parisian arcades, the passage embodies “a past become space” (2002, 871). The fascination and horror the narrator associates with the passageway indicates the transmission of the pathos related to the memory of the locale from mother to son. This transmission resurfaces in form of complete appropriation of the mother’s voice in “Another Death out of the Blue,” the independent story following the main Beyoğlu narratives. The Beyoğlu arcade represents interiority in two senses: it is physically an enclosed space, separated from the street by buildings on both sides; and it is a site of memory that recalls the Freudian “trace,” stored in the unconscious. As such, the arcade becomes an emblem of interiority, of the retreat of the subject into the realm of imagination. It is a dream-space, even if the dream may not be immediately linked to the dreaming nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, as suggested in Benjamin’s model. As in the case of Benjamin’s reading of the Paris arcades, however, the dim passageway in Karasu’s Beyoğlu turns into a “dialectical image” in which the Pera culture of the turn of the century, the mother’s childhood era, lies buried. In “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the crossing from reality to the space of interiority through the threshold of the steep marble stairs is emphasized by water symbolism. Referring to the peculiar odor, a mixture of disparate smells, at the entrance of the passage, the narrator comments: “The smell intensified as we descended the stairs; it was as if we were diving into some kind of water.”16 Even if water is being used here metaphorically to capture the intense odor, it suggests a vague point of origin—birth and the womb. It is important to note that in “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the episode with the passageway leads expressly to the mnemonic fragments of the maternal family, including the uncle’s photograph that I discussed earlier in light of Barthes’ Camera Lucida. We recall that the retouched enlargement showed the uncle as if he were emerging from water. It was in this concealed lower body where I located in my analysis the punctum of the photograph. As with this photograph, the arcade episode mediates subjectivity rather than history—in other words, the content of the memory traces pertains to lived emotions rather than to a referential account of Pera’s past that 16 “Dik merdivenlerden indikçe artardı koku, bir suya dalar gibi olurduk” (ibid., 64).

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the arcade contains. Subjective history in the form of memory fragments transmitted from mother to son serves as substitute for a linear narrative of macro-history. The supra-individual past of Pera, as experienced by the mother around the turn of the twentieth century, can be extrapolated from the fragments. Thus, historicity enters Karasu’s narrative through the metaphor of the trace. Consequently, the mother’s oblivion as to which building she has lived in has several implications (Karasu 1999b, 65). It underscores the uncertainty of memory, pointing self-reflexively to the merging of memory and imagination and thus, to the question of authentication. A further implication refers to the locals of Pera-Beyoğlu, or Beyoğlulus, as a collective. Like the missing proper names, the nebulous identification surrounding the mother’s childhood home suggests that characters and sites defining the old Pera are interchangeable because they stand for a bygone lifestyle. Yet Karasu stops short of calling this collective by its name, omitting to identify it as a blend of local cultures and ethnicities, comprised largely of non-Muslim Beyoğlulus. Anxiety functions in the diegesis as a leitmotif accompanying the mother’s biography: what the narrator has gathered from his mother’s account is that, as a little girl living in the arcade, she was afraid of the dark cellars when playing hide and seek with her friends. Her older brother, the one represented in the photograph, was the major instigator of the little girl’s fear. According to the narrator’s indistinct recollections, his mother used to tell how, when she was timidly descending the steps to the cellar to seek her friends, the brother (the uncle in the photo), hiding in a corner, used to jump out suddenly to frighten his sister a little bit, not too seriously. The narrator speculates that the beloved brother must have played a major role in the mother’s fondness for horror films and novels. This childhood fright, which is the center for the horror of, and fascination with, the underworld of the cellar, recurs when the child-narrator passes through the arcade with his mother. He turns his curious gaze from the middle courtyard of the arcade to the staircase at a building entrance leading to the cellar. Pera’s dark interiors, such as the corridors connecting the front and back rooms of the narrowly built apartments and the cellars where coal used to be stored, designate horrifying spaces of childhood memories. The stairs to the cellar in this particular arcade entail further dimensions. The narrator recalls that he had the urge to join the children there to play hide and seek and other games, inspired by films, books, and the ambiguous adult conversations he

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used to overhear. The sexual subtext becomes more obvious when he states that such mingling and games were always prohibited in his disciplined upbringing. The cellar as a libidinal site is thus construed by doubling the mother’s memory through the son’s reenactment. The theme of anxiety, however, transcends the personal context. As quoted earlier, the mother had a nightmare as a little girl which led to a long-lasting speech disorder (Karasu 1999b, 65). We also know that an unspecified mental illness befell the brother-uncle, although in both cases, the narrator remains uncertain as to whether they occurred in the apartment located in the arcade. The sections following the arcade episode in “Beyoğlu is a Legend” indicate horrifying historical events of the first decade of the twentieth century, followed by the deaths of the male family members. I indicated in chapter 6 that the date given as “1905, 1906, or 1909” (65), feasibly conjures up the violence resulting from the counterrevolution of 1909 against the Young Turks. Moreover, the threads of anxiety converge in the reference to the mother’s anxiety disorder or paranoia in old age. Altogether, these thematic components convey a sinister feeling, a sense of foreboding which is never fully revealed to the reader. In light of this ominous undertone, we can read the mother’s illness in her later life as the outcome of the earlier crises that are mentioned in the arcades episode in “Beyoğlu is a Legend.” The depictions of angst and illness in childhood seem to anticipate the demise of a world at the wake of the First World War. When Huyssen situates what he calls “the crisis of perception,” manifest in modernist miniatures, into the broader framework of the urbanization of literature, he gives two reasons for the genre’s flourishing in Central European literature. One factor is the rapid urbanization of Berlin and Vienna in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The second factor, the collapse of the German and Austrian Empires, coincides with our context of historical transformations that Ottoman Turkish society underwent following the First World War. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that the theme of anxiety and the menacing imagery exuded by the childhood arcade in Pera-Beyoğlu point to a collective trauma brought about by these transformations. While the passageway in Karasu’s narrative represents the space of subjectivity, the signification of this space as an Angstraum can be only fully understood in its relation to the context of Ottoman history. Establishing such a connection between the personal and the collective reveals the historical forces to which Karasu’s textual markers of anxiety

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allude, and it consequently helps discern why the arcade, defining the mother’s childhood, carries such traumatic connotations. “Another Death out of the Blue” (“Hiç Yoktan Bir Ölüm Daha”) picks up the threads of anxiety that we encountered in the arcade episode in “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” weaving them into a narrative of ghouls and horror, created in the childhood imagination. “Another Death out of the Blue” exhibits a tripartite narration of time and space carried out as an interior monologue. The first layer represents an unspecified present when the narrating voice, looking out from the window, witnesses the felling of an old walnut tree. Even though the location of the event remains obscure, certain clues indicate that the space is no other than a street of Beyoğlu. When the tree is brought down, the narrator suddenly perceives a stream of light pouring into the otherwise dark street: The close walls, doors, and windows of the narrow street that knew no light other than at noon hours, all of a sudden saw for the first time a ray flowing from that angle [the space opened up by the fallen tree]. It was dark again a few steps away from the open windows. Unless one side of the street would be torn down, these rooms were not going to become light. (Dar sokağın öğle vaktinden başka bir aydınlık bilmeyen yakın duvarları, kapıları, pencereleri yıllardan beri ilk olarak bir ışının bu açıdan sokulduğunu görüyordu. Açık pencerelerin iki adım ötesi gene karanlıktı. Sokağın bir yanı yıkılmadıkça aydınlanacak gibi de değildi bu odalar.) (Karasu 1999b, 93)

The imagery of dark, narrow streets and the recurrent motif of lack of light are all too familiar to us from Karasu’s core Beyoğlu texts. The narrator in “Another Death out of the Blue” observes that the leaves of the walnut tree are leaning against the walls surrounding the courtyard of a big house, “— of our old house—” (“—eski evimizin—”) that stands on the other side of the street, not to be demolished (93). The parenthetical appropriation of the house opens up a space of memory reminiscent of the three main narratives of Black Waters. The mighty walnut tree embodies the past, its death the vanishing of the texture of a neighborhood. Who is telling the story? Given the links of continuity to the preceding Beyoğlu stories and the reflective mode of observation, one would be tempted to identify the narrator as the same voice as in these previous three pieces. However, the close reading of this narrative offered shortly proves this assumption wrong. In the second section of “Another Death out of the

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Blue,” the narrator is in an in-between state of sleep and wakefulness. The voices of the children in the street establish continuity with the incident of the walnut tree. Looking out the window to the noisy street, the narrator remarks at the outset that each year, new, unfamiliar children replace the old ones, and they become increasingly more alien as the years pass. This is a clear indication that the narrator is an insider on the street, someone who has witnessed its past with children who were not perceived as “alien.” The narrator, in a semiconscious state in the second part, mentions that he or she has taken medication and is lying without pain except for the weight of wooden boards that she imagines feeling on the eyelids. After being compared with orange and egg boxes (it is telling that Karasu uses the Turkish word for “casket” [tabut] for “egg box”), the boards are compared with dark, more precious wood, such as walnut, “just like the old armoire in our old household and the old radio case standing in our new house.”17 The reference to aches and pains, as well as the clear association with a casket that the image of wooden boards evokes, suggests that the narrator may be aging, not too far away from death. Through the recall of a casket and the semiconscious state, the narrator seems almost already dead. While the “sleep with the walnut” or “sleep accompanied by the walnut” (“[c]evizli bir uyku”) implies the ultimate sleep in a walnut coffin, the narrator’s fate seems at the same time to be intertwined with the walnut tree, the killing of which stands for the ending of an era. The old Beyoğlulus, then, were uprooted, just like the walnut tree. Furthermore, this section of “Another Death out of the Blue” suggests a classical dream landscape, associatively connected to Ephesus, yet still does not give away the identity of the narrator. The narrator’s musings on the dream images are twice interrupted with the children’s voices playing in the street, hence bringing the narrative back to the indefinite present with which it started. The late afternoon light entails again the symbolism of the end. The third section of the story, focusing first on the hide and seek play and then on the loss of the big cavity of the walnut tree as a traditional hiding space, reveals the narrator’s identity with the following abrupt declaration: “I had never played under this tree. I never played in the street. When I had reached the age when I was able to go down to the courtyard and

17 “. . . [b]izim eski evimizdeki elbise dolabının, yeni evimizdeki eski radyo dolabının tahtaları gibi” (ibid., 94).

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play, we had already moved out of here and to the house at the passage.”18 Juxtaposed with the statement, “[a]mong the childhood memories of my mother there is an arcade” from “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the above quote demonstrates that it is now the mother’s voice recounting her memories. Thus, by regressing to a layer of family history that lies further back than the personal memories from the interwar period and thereafter, as conveyed by the narrator of the core Beyoğlu narratives, Karasu gives voice to a form of remembering akin to collective memory. Whereas in “Beyoğlu is a Legend” the mother’s childhood is mediated through the son in a third-person narrative, “Another Death out of the Blue” attests directly to fin-de-siècle PeraBeyoğlu. Karasu conflates these two personal accounts of the past, thereby surrounding at the outset the narrator’s identity in “Another Death out of the Blue” with ambiguity. This strategy accounts for the initial confusion of the reader in taking the first-person narrative voice in the addendum, “Another Death out of the Blue,” to be identical with the narrator of the core Beyoğlu texts. An abundance of signals, in addition to the passage cited from the fourth section of “Another Death out of the Blue,” indicates that the first-person narrator in this episode is the mother whose childhood memories we encountered in “Beyoğlu is a Legend” and that the arcade is the same one that mother and son used to cross in this earlier narrative. Because we do not have any information about the genealogical order of these posthumously published texts, we can only guess as to whether the author first worked on the mother’s memories as a separate story (“Another Death out of the Blue”) and later included segments of them, passed on through the son-narrator in the main group of his Beyoğlu texts, or whether the genesis occurred in reverse order. If the latter is the case, the impetus for Karasu’s construction of a deeper layer of Beyoğlu’s past would have emerged from the arcade episode in “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” narrated from the perspective of the son. Regardless of which of these possibilities the author pursued, he clearly established an intertextual connection between the two narratives. The narrator-mother in “Another Death out of the Blue” recalls that the entrance to their house in the passageway was set back, leaving room for a courtyard between the steps leading to the passage and the house. One of the several pointers identifying the self that is recalled in that house 18 “Ben bu ağacın dibinde hiç oynamamıştım. Sokakta oynamadım hiç. Avluya inip oynayabilecek yaşa geldiğimde zaten buradan çıkmış, geçitteki eve taşınmıştık” (96).

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is the gender polarity manifest through the emphasis on boys who used to play with marbles at the courtyard. The narrator-mother recalls the embarrassment she felt when she tripped and fell in the courtyard, scattering the boys’ marbles and ruining their game. Blushing deeply and coming faceto-face with an equally blushing boy as she raises herself from the ground, she passes the boys arrogantly, only to start crying outside of the courtyard. When the boys mock her, she wishes that her older brother would come to her rescue: I knew that my mother couldn’t hear. But I wished my big brother would hear. I wished that he would come and beat those boys. But he was doing his homework, I knew it. (Annem duyamazdı, biliyordum. Ama ağabeyimin duymasını istiyordum. Gelip o oğlanları dövmesini dilemekteydim içimden. Ama ağabeyim de ders çalışıyordu, biliyordum.) (Karasu 1999b, 97)

While the sexual tension between the little narrator and the boys, manifested in the mutual blushing, does not necessarily suggest that the remembered self in “Another Death out of the Blue” is a girl, the plausibility of reading this brother figure in continuity with the maternal uncle of the son-narrator (familiar to the reader from the other Beyoğlu stories) identifies the narrator of “Another Death out of the Blue” as the mother. The temporal reference of these childhood memories being set in the pre-First World War era, the arcade stands for the old world of Pera-Beyoğlu. As elsewhere in the Beyoğlu narratives, the impending catastrophe is conveyed through gloomy imagery and retrospective commentary: Not too long after that time, ten years later, while my brother was perishing in his bed from the Spanish influenza, all of those boys had died at different fronts. In this new game, the marbles had become bullets. (98) (Çok değil, on yıl sonra ağabeyim İspanyol nezlesinden yatakta erirken o çocukların hepsi ölmüştü başka başka cephelerde. Zıpzıplar mermi olmuştu bu yeni oyunda.) (98)

The reader should recall that the brother-uncle figure succumbs to the influenza epidemic at the end of the First World War (66). Going back ten years, the above-described recollections summon the Pera of 1908. By representing the reminiscences of the mother figure through a first-person narrative, that is, with the semblance of immediacy, Karasu extends

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the mnemonic process backward from the interwar years that comprise his narrator-double’s childhood in the main Beyoğlu narratives to the mother’s testimony of life at the turn of the century Pera in “Another Death out of the Blue.” Thus, in the literary imaginary, the enclosed passageway becomes a dreamlike space, a Benjaminian “dialectical image,” containing a sunken world. Karasu uses several markers to identify this era: there is reference to “Bazar du Levant,” the original name of the variety store on Grand’rue de Péra, with the remark that the later name “Şark Pazarı” (Oriental Market) was not used in those days (98-99); the word used for the dimmed “night light,” idare lambası (kerosene lamp) also implies a time further back in the past. Because the interiors of the dwelling in the arcade never received the sunlight, the narrator-mother recalls that she used to shiver under her covers. Even the older sister with whom she shared the bed was not able to make it any warmer. As indicated, the first-person narrator’s memories in this story are framed through a narrative in an indeterminate present at an unspecified location of Beyoğlu when the narrator witnesses the felling of the walnut tree. The third section ends with a return to the narration’s present when she awakens from her daydreaming at a call from her older sister. My intertextual reading of “Another Death out of the Blue” in tandem with the main stories of the ensemble evinces the continuity of a family history, that is, a microscale collectivity, throughout Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives. Based on this diegetic continuity, the older sister in “Another Death out of the Blue” arguably represents the same figure as the seamstress-aunt whose later death inspires the narrator of Black Waters to write his Beyoğlu book. In comparison with the present-time narration that Karasu employs elsewhere in his Beyoğlu stories, the unspecified present of “Another Death out of the Blue” is situated in a further removed past. Yet, ultimately, another sort of ambiguity surrounds this accompanying narrative: “I always do this, I keep sliding toward deaths in such moments of dozing off. . . . My big sister is calling from the other room. I should go.”19 Recalling that the aunt dies earlier than the mother, could we read the sister’s call from the other room as a continuation of the aging mother-narrator’s daydreaming? Does she in fact witness the walnut tree being cut off in a Beyoğlu street, or is the mother fantasizing at old age from 19 “Her zaman da bunu yaparım, kayıp kayıp giderim ölümlere doğru böyle daldığım sıralarda. . . Ablam çağırıyor içeriden. Gitmeli. . . . ” (ibid., 98).

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her displaced existence in Ankara, where perhaps another walnut tree was felled? Do these reminiscences occur indeed in Beyoğlu, perhaps on a visit to the still-living older sister, or could the call from the sister simply be a delusion after the real sister had passed? By way of introducing these open questions for the reader, Karasu blurs the boundaries of imagination and memory, thereby destabilizing a rational ordering of the memory pieces. The fourth section of “Another Death out of the Blue” starts with a depiction of the dark and cold interiors of the childhood home. The creaking floors and all kinds of imaginary creatures terrify the little girl in bed at her home in the Pera arcade. The spooky mood is intensified by this section’s further focus on childhood imagination. At the center of the Gothic-style narrative is again the play of hide and seek involving cellars and subterranean spaces of the passageway. The child-mother, usually designated as the “it” of the game, used to descend into these dark spaces to find the hiding playmates: You descended twenty-four steps. . . . There was a landing there. The door of a “room-house” where an ugly, obstinate, loud old woman used to live opened to that landing. She used to cover the broken glass of the window with a pillow, until the father of the child who had broken the glass had it fixed. (Yirmidört basamak inilirdi. . . . Bir sahanlık vardı orada. Çirkin, huysuz, bağırgan, yaşlı bir kadının oturduğu bir “oda-ev”in kapısı açılırdı bu sahanlığa. Çocukların kırdığı camını, kıranın babası yaptırıncaya değin bir minderle kapatırdı.”) (Karasu 1999b, 99)

The little girl has to go down passing by the “witch’s” door, always shut tightly, on her way to a pitch-dark underworld, a world of demons. In the rest of the description, the Gothic is undone as childhood fantasy when the terrifying squeaks are revealed as coming from a hiding mate. The little girl shares nuts with the friend, saving the walnuts she had hidden in another pocket of her apron for herself. The story ends in a circular fashion with another memory of walnuts. Here, the girl sits by an old lady peeling walnuts at the countryside. The child silently begs to receive them from Hesna Hanım Teyze, the old woman with a Turkish name. Despite the playful undoing of the Gothic mood, something ominous adheres to the passageway, turning it, in Huyssen’s terms, both into a “space of anxiety’ and a “nightmare” (2007, 38). While the old “witch” in the cellar

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room points to desolate existences in the social order of Pera at the turn of the century, the landing at her door remains as a creepy image beyond sociological explanations. Similar to the slippery entrance of the Beyoğlu arcade that mother and child traverse in “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the landing in front of the cellar room functions as a threshold in the Benjaminian sense. Topographically, it is the entrance to the space of memory, of dream and imagination. These fearful fantasies may be read as universally belonging to a child’s world, and the simultaneous terror and attraction the little girl experiences in these “perilous” zones may be explained away as part of childhood development. However, Karasu’s mnemonic narratives do not draw a nostalgic image of childhood. We should recall here the mental crises that both the mother as a little girl and the older brother experienced. The past thus entails a traumatic dimension, the causes of which remain unrevealed. In reference to Freud’s terminology, I would suggest that, in the passageway section of “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the son-narrator as child “acts out” the mother’s trauma. However, the narrative performs the function of a “working through” the past traumas through the act of writing.20 Read in this light, the personal traumas connect with the disappearance of the old Pera culture, resulting from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The violent political events coinciding with the mother’s and maternal uncle’s childhood in the first decade of the twentieth century mark the beginning of the end phase of the empire. Given the dates provided in the narrative, we have linked them to the removal of Sultan Abdülhamid II from the throne by the Young Turks and the following counterinsurgence by religious sects. These upheavals and the ensuing defeat in World War One would ultimately lead to the end of Pera-Beyoğlu’s multiethnic culture.

20 Freud’s essay “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (“Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten”) is a point of reference here (1994, 12:145-56)

Chapter 9

Crazy Meryem as the Saint of Beyoğlu’s Marginalized: Toward a Final Reading of Difference

Reconsidering the Primacy of the Feminine As signaled by the title Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu, Karasu’s site of remembrance is populated with women actors. The Beyoğlu narratives tell of unmarried daughters and of aging, marginalized female figures, spinsters and widows who are forced to work with the demise of the patriarchal heads of their household. In these portrayals, Beyoğlu is the habitat of women as outsiders. Although references to the socio-historical context are sparse, Karasu draws a typology of women that projects the dissolution of the socio-economic order of the old Pera after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The gloomy depiction of these women in Beyoğlu’s dark interiors, whose fate was “staying at home” in its double meaning in Turkish, as explained earlier, or to become day laborers such as the girls at the aunt’s sewing atelier, suggests that they partake in the decay, death, and decline permeating the neighborhood. Yet, against the socio-economic backdrop, the reader may view them with empathy as the true actors carrying a larger predicament than just their own existence on their shoulders. These figures stand in stark contrast with the images of their counterparts, the glamorous bourgeois women, depicted in Levantine households of the bygone

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Grand’rue de Péra in prevailing cultural histories. In his construction of the desolate women of Beyoğlu, Karasu anticipates Edhem Eldem’s dictum that the history of the old Pera does not exhaust itself in the representation of its main street. Thus, women in Black Waters embody difference with respect to glossy discourses about Grand’rue de Péra, and in their forsaken existence, they point toward various modes of alterity: In these streets, becoming a widow is no lesser evil than being divorced or even remaining unmarried [“staying at home”]. It doesn’t occur often that widowed girls find a husband again. They work, they come and go, they age, become very old. For most them, life becomes an endless torture after the point when they realize clearly that they have stepped onto a road with no return. When all their hopes have dissipated, their outfits, hats or scarves will become colorful, striking; all those years will be compensated for, when they endured the attempts to suppress, break down all signs of life. Fashions will change, colors, fabrics will change, but in every new system a new outfit will be found that will disregard the respectability of all those years. (Dul kalmak bu sokaklarda boşanmış olmaktan, daha daha, evde kalmış olmaktan daha az kötü değildir. Dul kalan kızların yeniden koca bulduğu sık görülmez. Çalışır, gidip gelir, yaşlanır, kocarlar. Bir noktadan sonrası, dönülemez bir yola girdiklerini açık açık anladıkları günden sonrası bitmez tükenmez bir işkence halini alır çoğu için. Bütün umutları kuruyup gittiği zaman giysileri, başlık ya da örtüleri, renklenecek, çarpıcı oluverecek, her türlü dirim belirtisinin söndürülmeğe, kırılmağa çalışıldığı yılların acısı çıkarılacaktır. Modalar değişecektir, renkler, kumaşlar değişecektir, ama her yeni dizge içinde, bunca yılın saygınlığını hiçe sayacak bir giyim bulunacaktır.) (Karasu 1999b, 21)

The emphasis placed on women in my reading of Karasu’s narratives could be placed in a larger framework exploring the connection between gender and memory. As Weigel has shown in the context of Benjamin’s opus, Benjamin’s images of women render these figures on the one hand “keepers of the past” (Weigel 1997, 141). However, while Benjamin participates in the then predominant notion of the feminine in cultural memory as representing the past, the forgotten, and the repressed, his women no longer abide in the realm of the forgotten, but stand for the return of the repressed (141-43). Read in a similar vein, Karasu’s bygone women figures

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Crazy Meryem as the Saint of Beyoğlu’s Marginalized    CHAPTER 9

enter the stage of memory as writing, thus liberating themselves from the realm of the forgotten. Among Karasu’s female characters, Crazy Meryem (“Deli Meryem”) stands out as the most unforgettable. In “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” we encounter this old woman, embodying the abject, and a flâneuse of sorts, strolling in the rectangle between Sakızağacı Street, Galatasaray, Balıkpazarı, and Tarlabaşı. With her worn-out clothes, remnants of a vanished era, a rubber shopping bag in hand, supposedly full of tripe and lungs she gets daily from the neighborhood store to feed the street cats, and a skinny tabby following her on the streets, Meryem has become an inseparable image of the streets. Her identity remains opaque, except for the name “Deli Meryem,” given to her by the Beyoğlu dwellers, as the narrator’s mother explains. I propose reading Crazy Meryem as an archetype of the disenfranchised women of Beyoğlu; as an anachronistic cipher, she points toward unspecified old times—her old age beyond imagination and her ragged clothes turn her into a metonym of the decline of Pera-Beyoğlu. These figurative functions manifest the dual temporal framework the author employs to present the character. The first temporal layer depicts Crazy Meryem as a timeless and immortal being, a specter of the streets, who is ever-present, from the narrator’s first encounter with her in his childhood to the present-time of narration. The extra-temporal dimension of Meryem is rendered in the general present tense in Turkish (geniş zaman that implies continuity or recurrence). Accompanied by the conditional clause, “if she is still alive,” the narrator conjectures: If Crazy Meryem is still alive, she must be carrying in her rubber bag, as wrinkled as her own face, and its lining showing here and there, her own groceries along with the share of the cats, lungs, tripe, and returning to her home, unknown to me where, with some cats following her. Perhaps she was not alive even then. Now her bones must have faded. If Crazy Meryem, who was a part of Beyoğlu’s late afternoons, is still alive, she must still be feeding the fifteen or twenty cats. (Hâlâ sağsa, Deli Meryem, elinde yüzü kadar kırış kırış, bez astarı yer yer ortaya çıkmış muşamba torbası içinde kendi yiyecekleriyle ciğerleri işkembeleri kedi paylarını bir arada taşımakta, önünde arkasında üç beş kediyle birlikte nerede olduğunu bilmediğim evine dönmektedir. O zaman bile sağ değildi belki, şimdi kemikleri çoktan ağarmıştır. Beyoğlu ikindilerinin bir parçası olan

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Deli Meryem, hâlâ sağsa, onbeş yirmi kediyi de hâlâ beslemektedir.) (Karasu 1999b, 49-50, italics in the original; Karasu 2008b, 64-65)1

On the second temporal layer, we see Crazy Meryem in her ever-sameness included in the narrator’s autobiography. Here, the reader encounters several memory images of Meryem, pertaining to the narrator’s childhood and his strolls as an adult through Beyoğlu: It has been twenty-five or twenty-six years since I found out that she was called Crazy Meryem. I do not recall when I first saw this incredibly old woman, white haired, her fair skin lined, wrinkled, dried out, walking upright though she was tiny, ignoring the mocking gaze and voices of the youth among Beyoğlu’s afternoon crowds, emerging from somewhere between the Saray Movie Theater and Şark Movie Theater and going down with her small steps toward Galatasaray. However, I recall squeezing my mother’s hand and looking up to her, and since we were walking toward Taksim, turning around and looking at the woman. (Adına Deli Meryem dendiğini öğreneli yirmibeş yirmialtı yıl oluyor. Beyoğlu’nun ikindi kalabalığı içinde, gençlerin alaycı bakışlarına alaycı seslerine aldırış etmeden dimdik ama küçücük, ak saçlı, apak yüzü kurumuş, bu inanılmayacak ölçüde yaşlı bu kadının Saray sineması ile Şark sineması arasında bir yerden ufacık adımlar atarak Galatasaray’a doğru indiğini ilk olarak ne zaman gördüğümü hatırlayamıyorum. . . . Ama annemin elini sıkıp gözlerimi yüzüne doğru kaldırdığımı, Taksim’e doğru yürüdüğümüz için de arkama dönüp kadına baktığımı hatırlıyorum.) (Karasu 1999b, 50—italics in the original;2 Karasu 2008b, 65)

1 Regarding the sentence, “Perhaps she was not alive even then. Now her bones must have faded” (“O zaman bile sağ değildi belki, şimdi kemikleri çoktan ağarmıştır”): this sentence is an addition to the earlier version of the story, “Kedili Meryem” (“Meryem of the Cats”), that Karasu incorporated in the later rendering in “Beyoğlu is a Legend.” However, in contrast to the interspersed commentary sections in “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” this sentence is seamlessly integrated in italics into the rest of the citation from “Meryem of the Cats.” It is unclear whether the author chose to do so or whether it was an editorial decision. I will discuss “Meryem of the Cats” and its inclusion into the Beyoğlu narratives in the following pages. Editor Serdar Soydan included “Kedili Meryem” in Susanlar (The Silent Ones), a compilation of the early works of Karasu. Corresponding passages in “Kedili Meryem” (64-68) will be shown in parenthesis through references to Susanlar, and indicated as Karasu 2008b. 2 The ellipses in the quotation are mine. I substituted them for the narrator’s commentary in the cited passage in “Beyoğlu is a Legend.”

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Although the moment depicts a specific point in time (holding the mother’s hand, walking toward Taksim) conveyed in the past tense, it still implies an element of the recurrent, semper idem, essence of Crazy Meryem. In a vein similar to the statement that the encounter may not have been the first one, thus suggesting a recurrence, Meryem is described at this childhood sight as already “incredibly old.” The fact that the narrator in his adulthood meets Crazy Meryem, much older but still walking in the same way as when she caught the narrator’s gaze in his childhood, indicates the nonrealist mode of narration. Through her eternal wanderings in the locale, Meryem becomes a type, an immortal image. As will be discussed in the following, the most striking symbolism of her extra-temporal being is her stopping her clock, that is, time.

From “Meryem of the Cats” to “Beyo˘glu is a Legend”: The Production of a Montage Before exploring this trope further, a brief excursus to the production history of Meryem’s story is necessary. Crazy Meryem, as represented in section 20 of “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” is not an original figure but, rather, a montage. The genesis of this figure in Karasu’s oeuvre goes back to the early story entitled “Kedili Meryem” (“Meryem of the Cats”) and published first in 1961.3 In an interview conducted in Ankara in 1966 with Halûk Aker and Güven Turan, emerging poets and literary critics of the time, Karasu refers to his story “Meryem of the Cats” as the beginning of a larger project, perhaps a novel yet to be written, that he called “Ispartalılar” (“The Spartans”) (Karasu 2008a, 216). The original story of Meryem begins with an italicized section about the Spartans, and it addresses the Spartans within the narrative.4 In his introduction to the interview document, Turan regretfully notes that the larger narrative, “The Spartans,” in which Karasu planned to include “Meryem of the Cats,” was never written. “Beyoğlu is a Legend” incorporates the early story as montage. “Meryem of the Cats” is cut and pasted in this second narrative of Black Waters almost verbatim, with only slight changes. The montage also includes the opening 3 Editor Soydan notes that after its first publication in Son Çağ, no. 5, July 1961, the story was reprinted in Istanbul, no. 13, 1995. (Karasu 2008b, 64). 4 Based on the interview, Soydan suggests reading the italicized opening of “Meryem of the Cats” as independent from the story, an introduction of sorts to the greater project under the rubric “The Spartans.”

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paragraph on the Spartans of “Meryem of the Cats.” However, the earlier narrative “Meryem of the Cats”—this time italicized, in order to indicate the self-citation—is expanded in this later rewrite through an exegesis by the narrator of “Beyoğlu is a Legend.” Here the narrator explains that in this book he revisits the themes and tropes of the earlier text. This self-referential play pushes the boundaries of fact and fiction and raises renewed the genre question of the narratives comprising Black Waters. Despite Karasu’s tireless insistence on not confusing the narrator, who himself may appear as a writer, with the author of the fiction, the boundaries of the separation in this instance become uncertain (see Karasu 2008 c, 248-49). In another interview, held with the writer Murathan Mungan in 1983, Karasu defines his work in progress, Black Waters, as fiction: This too is a text that I anticipate for it to become very long. It is being written at a very slow pace. For some reason, some people thought that I was writing my “recollections.” Certainly, I may have used some of my memories. However, I am not writing my recollections. This too is a novel. (Bu da çok uzun olacağını sandığım bir metin. Pek ağır yazılıyor. Nedense “anılarımı” yazdığımı düşünenler olmuş. Birtakım anılarımı kullanıyor olabilirim elbette. Ancak anılarımı yazmıyorum. Bu da bir roman.) (237)5

By having his narrator of “Beyoğlu is a Legend” in Black Waters borrow from the published story, “Meryem of the Cats,” the author deliberately plays with the neat separations he himself set. More importantly, in the later version with the commentary, he develops the cipher of the Spartan. What remains only as a faint guess, an uncertain hermeneutic step on the reader’s part in “Meryem of the Cats,” unfolds fully in “Beyoğlu is a Legend”: “Spartan” reveals itself as a reference to the past bourgeois society (of PeraBeyoğlu), of which the Crazy Meryem figure is a remnant. The opening statement about the Spartans in both versions of the story of Crazy Meryem, placed in “Meryem of the Cats” to the very beginning and in “Beyoğlu is a Legend” to the beginning of section 20, reads as: The Spartans threw their stumpy children off the cliff, and they started to educate their children who survived due to their strong build at the age of seven.

5

“Karanlık bir Yalının Karasularında” (“In the Black Waters of a Dark Seashore Mansion”), interview with Murathan Mungan (Soydan, 2008, 234-38).

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(Ispartalılar, güdük çocuklarını dağdan atarlar, sağlam yapılı olduğu için sağ kalan çocuklarını da yedi yaşında eğitmeğe başlarlardı.) (Karasu 1999b, 49, italics in the original; Karasu 2008b, 64)6

In both versions, the narrator identifies Meryem as one of the stumpy or defective children of the Spartans. Meryem’s classification as one of the “defective” Spartans highlights her outsider status, a member of the marginalized of Beyoğlu. Her Spartan origin manifests itself through her upright gait: But she still stood upright. This was all that had survived from her Spartan identity. To be more precise [this was the only thing that remained] not from her Spartan-ness, but from her parents whose Spartan identity I do not doubt. She was the child of Spartans: one could see that in her stumpy build. . . . The Spartans either killed the one who laughed at them or they laughed at them. To be silent is what they taught their defective children. They remained silent but often they also did not care about the ones who laughed at them. (Ama hâlâ dik duruyordu. Ispartalılığından bir bu kalmıştı kendisin(d) e. Daha doğrusu, Ispartalılığından değil, Ispartalı olduklarından şüphe etmediğim anasından babasından bir bu kalmıştı. Kendi Ispartalı çocuğuydu: güdüklüğünden belliydi öyle olduğu.  .  .  . Ispartalılar kendilerine güleni ya öldürürler, ya da ona gülerlerdi. Susmak, Ispartalıların güdük çocuklarına öğrettikleriydi. Sustular, ama çoğu zaman, kendilerine gülenlere aldırış etmediler.) (1999b, 51, italics in the original; 2008b, 65)

Meryem’s banishment is twofold: she is both a defective Spartan child, thrown out of her society, and an anachronistic figure for the present-day Beyoğlu society ridiculed by the crowds due to her strange outfits, deteriorating bag full of offal, and the street cats following her. Just like these cats, she stands for the ostracized. Her symbolism embraces multiple categories of outcast: the outsiders of the former bourgeois society; old Beyoğlulus who have become misfits in modern mass society, embodied through Pera-Beyoğlu’s forlorn women; and stray cats and dogs. This primordial figure of Beyoğlu arguably encompasses the diminished ethnic minorities of the area. Moreover, she occupies a liminal space between change, that is, 6 The earlier version varies only by one comma and a minor stylistic difference from the above quote.

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temporality, and stasis. Judging by her bell-shaped hat that, although outdated, is always adorned with a fresh ribbon, the narrator speculates that she must have ceased changing that hat around 1917: Her clothes indicated that. Because she stopped her clock, she eradicated the time; in a nonexisting time, the nonexisting laughs and mockery of nonexisting youth could also not exist. What existed were the cats, the offal shops the location of which never changed. Beyoğlu itself, crowded more and more by some ghosts who escaped the time, [Beyoğlu] whose face changed a little, but whose bones, walls remained the same underneath that façade; the old women in black who greeted her, and whose number decreased year by year.7 (Giysileri bunu gösteriyordu. Saatini durdurduğu için zamanı yok etmişti, var-olmayan bir zamanda var-olmayan gençlerin var-olmayan gülüşleriyle alayları da var-olamazdı. Var olan kedilerdi, yerleri değişmeyen ciğercilerdi, birtakım zaman kaçkını hortlakların gitgide çoğalarak doldurdukları, yüzü biraz değişen ama o yüzün altındaki kemikleri, duvarları aynı kalan Beyoğlu’ydu; kendisini esenleyen, sayısı her geçen yılla azalan kara giysili yaşlı kadınlardı.) (1999b, 53, italics in the original; 2008b, 66-67)

By introducing the image of old women in black, Karasu unmistakably conjures up Pera-Beyoğlu’s non-Muslim minorities through every component of the sentence: while the black outfits of these old dwellers suggest their ethno-cultural background as Rum-Orthodox or Armenian, the clothes also identify them as the old widows of the neighborhood, referred to in “Beyoğlu is a Legend” and elsewhere in Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives.8 Their number diminishes due to old age but possibly also due to expulsion and emigration, as the historical facts demonstrate. Unlike the vulgar young crowds that increasingly populate Beyoğlu but that Karasu qualifies as ghosts escaping time, the old women in black exist; they are the real beings in this tableau. Similarly, despite superficial changes, the space Beyoğlu itself continues to exist as the same in its essence. As opposed to 7 “ . . . who greeted her” (“kendisini esenleyen”): “her” can refer to Meryem or Beyoğlu as a female figure. 8 Local Christian women in mourning wear black. Widows possibly continue wearing black. It is not customary among Muslim women to wear black in mourning. As attire, black is associated with veiled Muslim women, who wear a çarşaf that covers head and body. However, in the timeframe of narration in “Beyoğlu is a Legend” (1960s and 1970s), these traditional Muslim women were not the typical dwellers of Beyoğlu.

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the mocking crowds, the old women in black greet Meryem, a gesture that suggests a kinship between them as minorities in every sense of the word.9 The resistance to temporality that unites Meryem, the women in black (with their impending disappearance from their old habitat), and Beyoğlu, compellingly opens up a mnemonic landscape. As in Walter Benjamin’s Tiergarten, in which the maze leads vertically to the depths of a primordial past, the figure of Meryem functions for Karasu’s reader as a trajectory for discovering Beyoğlu as a remembered place. She leads us, ignoring the changes of later decades, into a past that surfaces as the world of the Spartans.

Meryem as the Spartan Outcast Although Crazy Meryem is voiceless, she carries her expulsion from the old and new societies with pride and is indifferent to mockery. As the narrator observes, her Spartan origin is manifest in her upright gait. It is interesting to note that already in section 14 of “Beyoğlu is a Legend” the narrator describes his aunt as tall, just like his grandmother, and walking upright (Karasu 1999b, 41). This anticipates a linkage between the narrator’s maternal family and the figure of the Spartan. Was the seamstress aunt, later widowed, also a defective Spartan child? The Spartan, first introduced as a figure in “Meryem of the Cats” and later elaborated in the second version of the story, is the emblem of a bourgeois world. As noted earlier, the narrator of “Beyoğlu is a Legend” confirms that he wanted to describe a world that was shaped to a great extent by Beyoğlu (49). What defines this world is the preparation for tomorrow, which means for death. Looking back at his earlier introduction, the narrator scrutinizes his concept: I said this in the introduction.  .  .  . Yet today, I neither would consider writing about the “Spartans” nor naming that world “Spartan.” In the end, I wouldn’t have told about anyone else but some tiny little bourgeois with rigid customs.10 The truth of the matter is that the term “Spartans” was out of place, just because the term is associated with an image that they themselves 9 Even if “kendisini esenleyen” (“who greeted her”) has Beyoğlu as object, the bonding suggested in my reading of the relationship between Meryem, the old women, and the locale, remains. 10 The original does not explicitly say “petty bourgeois.”

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wanted to offer, to present with their way of life, their lives. At that time, I was angry with them. Today, not much remained of them. At the very most, I could pity them now. (Girişte öyle demiştim ya. . . . Bugün ne “Ispartalılar”ı yazmağı düşünürüm, ne de o dünyayı “Ispartalı” diye adlandırmağı. Eninde sonunda, küçücük, töresi katı, birtakım kentsoylulardan başka birilerini anlatmayacaktım. Ispartalıların yaşam anlayışı ile, bunların yaşamlarıyla vermek, sunmak istedikleri bir imge andırışıyor diye “Ispartalılar” demek yersizdi doğrusu. O zaman onlara kızıyordum. Bugün onlardan geriye kalan pek az şey var. Olsa olsa acırım şimdi.) (49)

Through the abstraction of the Spartan, Karasu offers both a critique of the Pera bourgeoisie and defends it against the mass culture. We should recall here Gülersoy’s cultural history of Beyoğlu, rendering the influx of labor migrants from the Anatolian rural areas and small towns that intensified beginning with the mid twentieth century. As we have seen, socio-historical events that transformed Beyoğlu are sparsely mentioned in Black Waters. Despite Karasu’s withholding of such context, the crowds that make fun of Crazy Meryem undoubtedly evoke the “decline” of Beyoğlu following this inner migration (see Millas 2009, 96-98). Meryem’s bell-shaped hat signifies the fashion trend before 1917, and she herself represents the Pera bourgeoisie of the era before the First World War, albeit as their outcast. The demise of this social stratum set in the wake of the Great War. The foundation of the Turkish nation state left Levantine business owners facing an unknown future that they perceived as insecure, and resulted in their gradual withdrawal from Pera. As discussed in chapter 4, the forced migration of the Greek-Orthodox of Turkey in the 1920s and the discriminatory policies of the 1930s and 40s resulted in further decline of the erstwhile non-Muslim Pera bourgeoisie. After the Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, more locals of Beyoğlu, mostly Rum-Orthodox, left or were forced to leave. A similar exodus ensued in the 1960s when Beyoğlulus carrying Greek passports had to leave their native abode. Against this backdrop, the alienated figure of Meryem emerges as a specter of the past, an epoch long forgotten by the modern Turkish crowds that now populate the street, once called Grand’rue de Péra. Due to her anachronistic identity, the crowds consider her to be crazy. Only the old (minority) women in black, on the verge of disappearing from the street scene altogether, seem to recognize the past in Meryem’s mnemonic image. Karasu leaves his narrator in “Beyoğlu is

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a Legend” seemingly impartial, neither succumbing to nostalgia for the old, that is, the Spartan, order of the bygone Pera, nor approving of its collapse. Following his overall strategy of avoiding mimetic references, Karasu evades any identification of the Spartans as Levantine or predominantly comprised of non-Muslim minorities. While the narrator’s family carries indicators of ethno-cultural difference, the tale of the sisters who inhabit the house at Sakızağacı entails Turkish names and intimates the demise of a Turkish “Spartan” order.11

Benjamin’s Fan of Memory In her study on Benjamin’s Berlin memoirs, Anja Lemke underscores the distance between autobiographical writing and life itself. In reference to Benjamin’s statement that autobiographical writing does not concern itself so much with what has been lived but with the weaving of memory, Lemke emphasizes the making, or the creating, of this texture (of remembrance) in language.12 In his essay on Proust, Benjamin compares the work of memory to the process of unfolding a fan, a process without end. Regarding Benjamin’s simile of “to open the fan of memory” (“den Fächer der Erinnerung auf[zu]klappen”) (1991b, 467; 1996a, 597) Lemke writes: Hereby, a double difference is marked between lived experience, remembrance, and representation, which is as constitutive for autobiographical writing as it is problematical. In this difference, memory is the name for the impossibility of an unmediated representation of the past. What is remembered is always only constituted in the tension field between the present and the past. The difference between them becomes the moment

11 As discussed in chapter 8 with reference to Eldem, Turkish families did reside in the old Pera-Beyoğlu district, and it is reasonable to imagine upper-class families among them, like the one of the Sakızağacı household with Leman Hanım, Nevzat Hanım, and Adile, even if they were not representative of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century bourgeois culture of Pera. The original abode of the sisters before their socio-economic downfall, the house at Sakızağacı, stands as the central symbol of the bourgeois order. 12 Regarding the challenge of autobiographical writing, Benjamin states: “For the important thing to the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory.” (“Denn hier spielt für den erinnernden Autor die Hauptrolle gar nicht, was er erlebt hat, sondern das Weben seiner Erinnerung”) (Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust”—1996f, 237-47, here 238; 1991k, 311; quoted in Lemke 2005, 10).

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of impetus for the autobiographical text and excludes a successful fusion of the horizons. (2005, 10; my translation)13

In accordance with the Benjaminian principle, Karasu’s narrator opens the fan of memory through which he inscribes images of the remembered Pera-Beyoğlu culture without presenting a complete historical picture. Not only does Karasu pursue the principle of incompleteness, but he also leaves the actors of the vanished culture diffuse. Nevertheless, our analyses have shown that Karasu’s Beyoğlu does call up a socio-historical context. Gerhard Richter’s argument that, despite evasion of referentiality, Benjamin’s memoirs entail a historical component, informs our reading of the Beyoğlu narratives. As in Benjamin’s mnemonic tableaux, historicity in Karasu’s Beyoğlu is inherent in figuration. The vignette “Tiergarten” offers a good example of the resonance between the sunken Spartan world Karasu evokes and the upper-bourgeois German Jewish milieu of the Old West, as remembered in Benjamin’s Berlin memoirs. We recall that, during his stroll through the park and neighborhood Tiergarten with his friend Franz Hessel, Benjamin looks at the façades of villas adorned in Jugendstil and belle époche styles. He notes that the façades have remained the same since his childhood, although the interiors must have undergone a great deal of change. He remembers the bourgeois work ethos, as inscribed on these façades: I still know the verses that filled the intervals between my heartbeats when, after school, I paused while climbing the stairs. They glimmered toward me from the colored pane where a woman, floating ethereally like the Sistine Madonna, a crown in her hands, stepped forth from the niche. Slipping my thumbs beneath the shoulder straps of my satchel, I would study the lines: “Work is the burgher’s ornament,/Blessedness the reward of toil.” The house door below swung shut with a sigh, like a ghost sinking back into the grave. (1996b, 354)

13 “Damit ist eine doppelte, für das autobiographische Schreiben ebenso konstitutive wie problematische Differenz zwischen Erlebnis, Erinnerung und Darstellung markiert, bei der Erinnerung der Name für die Unmöglichkeit einer unvermittelten Repräsentation des Vergangenen ist. Was erinnert wird, konstituiert sich immer nur im Spannungsfeld von Gegenwart und Vergangenheit, deren Differenz zum Antriebsmoment des autobiographischen Textes wird und eine gelingende Horizontverschmelzung strukturell ausschliesst” (ibid., 10).

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(Die Verse weiß ich noch, die nach der Schule die Intervalle meines Herzschlags füllten, wenn ich im Treppensteigen halt machte. Sie dämmerten mir von der Scheibe, wo ein Weib, schwebend wie die Sixtinische Madonna, einen Kranz in Händen haltend, aus der Nische trat. Die Riemen meiner Mappe mit dem Daumen auf meinen Schultern lüftend, las ich ab: “Arbeit ist des Bürgers Zierde/Segen ist der Mühe Preis.” Die Haustür unten sank mit einem Seufzen, wie ein Gespenst ins Grab, zurück ins Schloß.) (1991c, 395)

The engraved epitaph from Schiller’s 1798 poem, “Das Lied von der Glocke” (The Song of the Bell), announcing work as the ornament of bourgeois life, itself adorns the portal to the bourgeois interior (see Eiland 2006, 56; Skoggard 2010, 186-87). Through this epitaph, Benjamin implies the tragic irony underlying the predicament of the Wilhelmine Empire’s assimilated Jews. By appropriating the cultural heritage of German classicism, German Jewry was aspiring to be integrated fully into German society. Making Schiller’s early bourgeois ethos of “work endowed with meaning” the motto of their lives speaks of such hope. With its appeal to peace in the last stanza, the poem also conjures up the notion of German national unity. Of course, these aspirations of late nineteenth-century German Jewish community were not fulfilled. However, as Szondi has shown, Benjamin may have seen a genuinely redemptive moment in the attempts of his forebears to take part in Germany’s literary tradition. By defining it as ornament, Schiller’s verses place work among the abundance of material ornaments with which the bourgeois defined his world. We should recall that, in the context of Karasu’s Spartans, work as emblematic of the bourgeois was equated with labor as preparation for death. Redemption through work, that “blessedness” expressed in the second verse of Schiller, is to be understood negatively, then, as nothing but the redemptive aspect of financial self-reliance unto the grave. In the above quote, Benjamin emphasizes the connection between the bourgeois work ethic and death through mnemonic imagery. In the recollection of the schoolboy entering his bourgeois home, the front door appears as a ghost and the house itself as a grave. Clearly, Benjamin depicts his childhood world more with a critical distance than nostalgic yearning. Karasu’s narrator speaks of empathy, at most, for the Spartans, rather than sympathy. The ambivalence that surfaces in both authors indicates their sentiments toward the loss, the final destruction of their childhood worlds, not toward the values that formed this world.

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As in Karasu’s Beyoğlu, the aunt figures appear as founding components of Benjamin’s lost childhood world. In contrast to the seamstress aunt in Black Waters, the aunts and grandmothers in Benjamin’s Old West are represented as old ladies living in spacious, stately apartments. Clearly, Benjamin’s bourgeoisie appears to be a wealthier class in comparison with Karasu’s Beyoğlu households, perhaps because Karasu’s Beyoğlu offers glimpses of life after the decline of the old Pera had already begun. In Benjamin’s depiction, the women of these Berlin apartments acquire an immutable, timeless quality, always expecting the little visitor with their ever-same Victorian dress in the armchair by the bay window. One such apartment that Benjamin used to visit in his childhood is the residence of Aunt Lehmann at the corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner Streets:14 This apartment with its window alcove was doubly secured, as was fitting for places that were called on to shelter such precious things. A little beyond the main entrance, to the left in the hallway, was the dark door to the apartment with its little bell. When it opened before me, I saw leading upward, breathtakingly steep, a staircase such as later I would only find in farmhouses. In the dim radiance of the gaslight, which came from above, stood an old maidservant, under whose protection I would immediately afterward cross the second threshold, which led to the vestibule of that gloomy apartment. (1996b, 359) (Doppelt verwahrt war diese Erkerwohnung, wie es für Räume sich gehörte, die so Kostbares in sich zu bergen hatten. Gleich nach dem Haustor fand sich links im Flur die dunkle Tür zur Wohnung mit der Schelle. Wenn sie sich vor mir auftat, führte, steil und atemraubend, eine Stiege aufwärts, wie ich es später nur noch in Bauernhäusern gefunden habe. Im Schein des trüben Gaslichts, das von oben kam, stand eine alte Dienerin, in deren Schutz ich gleich darauf die zweite Schwelle, die zur Diele dieser düstern Wohnung führte, überschritt.) (1991c, 400)

The entrance to the house at Sakızağacı in Black Waters entails a threshold experience, similar to the steep stairs in Benjamin’s mnemonic imagery. As previously noted, the entry door to the house stood at the top of steep stairs; and, like the child in the Berlin memoirs who is welcomed by a maidservant, the child in Karasu ascends the stairs to the threshold of the entrance 14 In his “Commentary” on this vignette Skoggard states: “Obliterated in World War II, this block of Steglitzer Straße no longer functions as a through street” (2010, 196-97).

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with the help of adults who hold his hands tightly (1999b, 18). The threshold experience itself, the child’s step into the in-between space, replicates the workings of memory in the Berlin and the Istanbul narratives.

From Human to Animal: Meryem as Threshold Figure With her bell-shaped hat harking back to an era prior to 1917, Crazy Meryem of Beyoğlu occupies a similarly liminal space between the past and the streets of the neighborhood in the present time of narration. Her movement between the trajectories of time and stasis renders her a threshold figure that leads Karasu’s reader back to the image of the Spartans. The narrator reflects on Meryem’s death or final disappearance. He pictures Meryem in her immortal identity in the same frozen tableau, still walking on the streets in her outdated clothes, and with her rubber bag and street cats. In her temporal existence, the people wandering in Beyoğlu may have gotten tired of her and possibly threw her into the garbage bin. However, the narrator also speculates that, if she had set up her clock again, she must have vanished into dust. Meryem’s neighbors, who detested the horrific smells of her cats and mostly despised her, may have noticed her passing by the bewilderment of the cats in front of her house door, not from the stench of Meryem’s body, for “I am certain that Meryem’s smell was only an odor that the noses of cats would perceive, even days after she died.”15 This idea is interesting given the fact that Karasu’s Beyoğlu contains ample references to olfactory sensation. The smells described are mostly those of decay. In the opening of the first narrative of Black Waters, “Text on Beyoğlu,” the narrator stands at the window in Paris: I stuck my head out, I smelled the air. In half an hour, as usual, one would not be able to smell the air. Something stirred in me. This was the smell of Istanbul, no, not Istanbul, it was the smell of Beyoğlu. The smell of old buildings that were getting moldy, decaying from the inside.16

15 “Kalıbımı basarım, Meryem’ın kokusu, yalnız kedi burunlarının alabileceği bir kokuydu öldükten günlerce sonra bile.  .  .  . ” (Karasu 1999b, 54; italics in the original). “[ö] ldükten günlerce sonra bile” (“even days after she died”) is an addition to the montage of “Meryem of the Cats” in “Beyoğlu is a Legend.” 16 It is likely that the phrase “one wouldn’t be able to smell the air” refers to bad air quality and means “the air would become un-breathable.” However, the original does not explicitly state this.

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(Başımı dışarı çıkardım, havayı kokladım. Yarım saati bulmadan gene koklanamaz olurdu hava. İçim kıprandı. İstanbul kokusuydu bu, İstanbul da değil, Beyoğlu kokusu. İçin için küflenen, gizli gizli çürüyen eski yapıların kokusu.) (Karasu 1999b, 15)

Meryem participates in the atmosphere of decay. The smell of offal emanating from her rubber bag and also her disheveled clothes integrate her into this scene. However, the question of her corpse having no odor may indicate her mutating identity, entailed in her symbolic function. As an extra-temporal being, she is even transformed from human to animal. After I had moved to Ankara, I visited Istanbul many times. In the afternoon hours, Beyoğlu seemed to me each time more crowded. I assume that, since Meryem would have become even smaller, she would have become invisible like a water mouse, a water rodent among the people that cover the street like reeds, this street that is becoming ever narrower, ever deeper and hollowed out, turning into a swamp. Otherwise, that immortal woman must be walking somewhere between Sakızağacı and Galatasaray, with a few cats around her, wearing the same hats, same clothes, and holding the same rubber bag. (Ankara’ya göçtükten sonra İstanbul’a çok gittim. Beyoğlu ikindi saatlerinde gözüme, her kezinde, daha kalabalık göründü. Meryem daha da küçülmüş olacağı için bu gitgide daralan, derinleşen, çukurlaşan, bataklık haline gelen caddeyi kaplayan saz gibi sık insanlar arasında bir su faresi gibi, bir su memelisi gibi, görünmez olmuştur, diye düşünüyorum. Yoksa o ölümsüz kadın, önünde ardında birkaç kedi ile birlikte, başında aynı şapkalar, sırtında aynı giysiler, elinde aynı muşamba torbayla, Sakızağacı ile Galatasaray arasında bir yerlerde yürüyor olsa gerek. ) (54; italics in the original)

As a cipher of alterity, Meryem provokes a wide range of associations that define the mnemonic space of Beyoğlu in Karasu’s narrative. Her name, Meryem, connects her to the primal mother figure, Maria. We can peer through her as through a palimpsest to the marginalized, from human to animal. As a threshold figure in the Benjaminian sense, she leads the reader toward Beyoğlu’s pluricultural bourgeois past, from which she herself is an outcast, a defective Spartan child. Her allies are the others of Beyoğlu, not only the old (Christian) widows in black and the street cats, but also the narrator as the remembered child. In Meryem’s first entry into the narrative of Black Waters, in section 18 of “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” we encounter a

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Crazy Meryem as the Saint of Beyoğlu’s Marginalized    CHAPTER 9

recurrent tableau in which mother and child, hand in hand, stop in front of the Saray Movie Theater to talk to the aunt they have met. At this moment, Meryem enters, with her street cats following. The narrator describes her as “something incredible passing by,”17 saying that, years later, he would call this woman “Meryem of the Cats” and that he would understand that her attire was composed of elements left over from an indefinite past. In this initial scene, the child attempts to run after the old woman and imagines himself as the tabby following her: “I am that cat. No, that cat is a tabby walking in front of me. No, for I am that cat, too.”18 In this identificatory enactment, that is, by becoming the tabby, the child himself enters the world of the ostracized. The narrator thereby enunciates his own identity as a defective child of the Spartans. Thus, the inscription of Crazy Meryem in Karasu functions as a pivotal “dialectical image” that flashes up, providing the reader access to the memory space of a lost past.

Meryem’s Transformation from Modernist Bizarre to Postmodern Inscription Finally, it is important to observe that Meryem’s meanings multiply between the earlier story, “Meryem of the Cats,” and the montage version in “Beyoğlu is a Legend.” In the conclusion of the Meryem episode in “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” the narrator explains that, whereas in the former story Meryem was presented as an “interesting” character, in the latter she is nothing but a drop in the current, flowing through Beyoğlu (Karasu 1999b, 55). This differentiation seems incomprehensible at first, since the passages depicting Meryem in both versions are almost identical. I argue that the reference to such difference indicates the change in the concept of Karasu’s Beyoğlu project. The Meryem figure in the early story is presented as “interesting,” following the modernist attraction to the bizarre, the odd, such as exemplified in Baudelaire. In this context, Meryem’s siblings can be found in Edgar Allan Poe’s uncanny flâneur in “The Man of the Crowd” or Rainer Maria Rilke’s hopping wanderer of Paris’ streets in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In the modernist paradigm, these outsider figures are an intrinsic part of the big cityscape. 17 In original: “yanımızdan inanılmaz bir şey geçiyor” (47). 18 “Benim, o kedi. Hayır, o kedi önümden yürüyen bir tekir. Değil, çünkü o kedi de benim” (ibid.).

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We encounter a prime example of the metropolitan outsider in Brassaï’s The Secret Paris of the 30’s, a collection of photographs and stories documenting the eccentric actors in the streets. Among them, La Mome Bijou, or Miss Diamonds, stands out as the doppelgänger, of sorts, of Crazy Meryem. Like Karasu’s anachronistic character, whose memory image is constructed in fragments, La Mome Bijou is presented, in her attire and appearance, as a collage of disparate pieces. Brassaï observes: Fascinated, I devoured her with my eyes. Miss Diamonds was a palette come to life, refined. The dark mass of her old-fashioned black velvet cape, ragged and torn, shiny in spots, topped off with a moth-eaten fur collar, her black evening dress in the style of 1900, all silk and lace, brought out the greens, purples, pale pinks, the nacreous colors of fake pearls, the glitter of paste jewelry, of fake rubies, fake turquoises, fake emeralds. The palette of Gustav Moreau. . . . Her face, with its white clown make-up, was softened by a green veil decorated with roses.19

As with the enigmatic Meryem, we don’t know much about Miss Diamonds’ identity. Brassaï wonders whether she really had been a demimondaine, a younger sister of Proust’s female figures of that type, or a simple prostitute. When Brassaï discovers La Mome Bijou in 1932 in the early morning hours at a bar in Montmartre, she is nothing but a relic of her past. As with the other literary moderns, such as Poe, Baudelaire, and Rilke, Brassaï is attracted to her eccentricity: “I was struck by this fantastic apparition that had sprung up out of the night, like an entomologist by a rare and monstrously beautiful insect. I had discovered what had to be the queen of Montmartre’s nocturnal fauna.” Karasu’s narrator in “Beyoğlu is a Legend” allies himself with the writers of modern urban experience when he explains that, in the early version of the story, he depicted an “interesting” character. In contrast, in Black Waters, the author’s goal shifts from representing the city streets as the site of modern experience to the problematic of textualizing memory. This later concern with a self-reflexive autobiography brings Karasu’s project in proximity to Benjamin’s writings on memory. As examined in Benjamin scholarship by critics that I have discussed—such as Weigel, Richter, Jacobs, Huyssen, Pethes, and Petersen—Benjamin’s reflection focuses on the constitution of the subject through writing. In Black 19 Brassaï’s The Secret Paris of the 30’s (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976) has no page numbers. My special thanks go to Damien Jack for referring me to the book.

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Waters, Meryem becomes a drop in the current, as the narrator maintains. Clearly, the current that flows through Beyoğlu is the sewage that signifies Beyoğlu in the title of Karasu’s book. As earlier remarked, the current kara su, black water(s), while alluding to the color of the sewage waters, also playfully inscribes the author’s own signature to this flow. Accordingly, the black water, in which Meryem is a drop, is the writing, the flow of the text itself. Meryem is now seen as a textual construction, one image among many that builds the narrative body of Black Waters. I would suggest that, although Meryem in the second version becomes a drop in the river of narration, she holds a privileged position among other textual components by virtue of her name. As Meryem, or Maria, she represents a primal mother figure, much like the evoked image of the elemental feminine in the title Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu. Through this mythic identity component, Meryem as a drop in the current contributes to the discourse on Beyoğlu as legend.

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Homage to Walter Benjamin: The Stage of Memory Before presenting my concluding comments on Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives and the insights reached through the close readings of these texts, I would like to return to Benjamin’s construction of remembering in reference to a few exemplary passages from Berlin Childhood. Vignettes such as “The Moon,” “Loggias,” and the aforementioned “Mummerehlen” illustrate anew that for Benjamin, memory emerges as a stage for excavating the fragments of remembrance. Rather than delivering a finite meaning, these fragments emerge as distorted inscriptions. As transcriptions of memory traces, they evince various modes of displacement, thus always implying a sense of alterity. “The Moon” conveys the reminiscence of a nocturnal experience, when the moonlight illuminating the child’s bedroom induces a profound effect of defamiliarization. In this “alternate earth,” objects seem to be stripped of their former identity. The remembered child himself is not spared this onset of alterity: the moon that has entered the room renders the child “unhoused” (ausquartiert), which resonates with Benjamin’s exilic reflections in his foreword to Berlin Childhood. The opening vignette of the Final Version, “Loggias,” also powerfully expresses the sense of displacement through the imagery of the “homeless” (obdachlos) palm tree and the later gaze at the loggias, recognizing their “uninhabitability for one who himself no longer has a proper abode” (Benjamin 1996b, 345-46).1 In “The Moon,” the nightly experience results in complete self-alienation: “When I returned to my bed a moment later, it was invariably with the fear of finding

1 “ . . . in ihrer Unbewohnbarkeit für den. . . , der selber nicht mehr recht zum Wohnen kommt” (Benjamin 1991c, 387).

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myself already stretched out upon it” (383).2 Figurations, such as the moonlit room as the stage for dreams and memory, displace the familiarity of everyday perceptions, making a “nonbeing” of the world. The notion of otherness permeates the subject as well: “Of my own existence, nothing was left except the dregs of its abandonment.”3 In accordance with Benjamin’s memory model, the episode of this night intrusion deals self-reflexively with remembering itself, evoking a split between a contemplative and an active self, or the unconscious and the conscious states, in order then to dissolve the self altogether. Similarly, remembrance in “Mummerehlen” surfaces through metaphors beyond the structures of consciousness. Benjamin writes: I was distorted by similarity to all that surrounded me. Like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear. What do I hear? Not the noise of field artillery or of dance music, à la Offenbach, not even the stamping of horses on cobblestone. (Benjamin 1996, 374-75) (Ich war entstellt von Ähnlichkeit mit allem, was um mich war. Ich hauste wie ein Weichtier in der Muschel im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, das nun hohl wie eine leere Muschel vor mir liegt. Ich halte sie ans Ohr. Was höre ich? Ich höre nicht den Lärm von Feldgeschützen oder von Offenbachscher Ballmusik, nicht einmal Pferdetrappeln auf dem Pflaster.) (Benjamin 1991c, 417)

What Benjamin hears from the departed era does not relate to macro-historical events, but rather to remnants of everyday perceptions—in the form of sounds belonging to the city life and, last but not least, in the sounds of language, like the “little nursery rhyme” of “Muhme Rehlen.”4 Our brief return here to the Berlin vignettes reiterates that Benjamin’s way of writing memory counteracts conventional autobiography and its authoritative representation of the past through a stable “I.” I have employed Benjamin’s theory of remembering for explicating the inconclusive, incomplete, and nonreferential fragments in Karasu’s Beyoğlu book. We should emphasize 2 “Trat ich dann ans Bett, so war es immer mit der Angst, mich selbst schon darin ausgestreckt zu finden” (ibid., 427). 3 “Von meinem eignen Dasein war nichts mehr übrig als der Bodensatz seiner Verlassenheit” (ibid., 428). 4 See also Benjamin’s 1933 essays on the philosophy of language: “Doctrine of the Similar” and “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1996f, 2:694-98 and 2:720-22); “Lehre vom Ähnlichen” and “Über das mimetische Vermögen” (1991h, 2.1:204-13).

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here that, despite the affinities between their narratives of memory, my authors’ configurations of the past do not always converge. While Benjamin operates more radically within the associative web of language (as does Freud) to resist a referentially transmitted life story, Karasu proceeds with the strategy of covering and uncovering selfhood. Nevertheless, as my study has illustrated, the position of displacement, defining a German Jew in exile and a Turkish minority writer who “stayed home,” is the common denominator in their memory texts.

Karasu in the Context of Multiculturalism This book has traversed the memory spaces of Old Berlin-West, Walter Benjamin’s childhood environs, and more extensively, Bilge Karasu’s Beyoğlu, the former abode of Istanbul’s non-Muslim minorities. In my authors’ representations, these lost places of the past, now stripped of their diversity, flash up as fragments of remembrance. Like Freud’s theory of the trace, they invite us to read them interpretively, without attempting to reconstruct the absolute meaning they might imply. The multivalent figure of Meryem has guided our final analysis as a thread, holding together the main themes and tropes we have explored. In particular, Benjamin’s concepts of remembering—“dialectical image,” “sudden illumination,” “now-time” as the moment of recognizing the historical residues in forgotten corners of the past, “rescuing critique”—that Benjamin understood as his attempt to grasp the past (albeit only as a “snapshot”) at the moment of danger, just before it ultimately perishes, have informed our encounter with the symbolism of Meryem. As a distorted but legible memory trace, the figure of Meryem points toward incompleteness rather than standing for a three-dimensional entity. Furthermore, Meryem embodies the categories, which helped us to examine Karasu’s discourse on alterity, even if as subtext, in his Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu. Being an outcast in space and time, Meryem represents minority identity in multiple ways, and she comes to encompass all the marginalized, or the genuine subject of Karasu’s memory narratives. Hercules Millas’ classification of Karasu under the “Humanist” novelists, as referred to in my introduction, offers a path to understanding the significance of Karasu’s outsider figures. We have seen that the categories Millas employs for investigating the representation of multiculturalism and non-Muslim identities in Turkish novels have a heuristic function rather

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than being rigidly defined trends. Millas illustrates how these different types of novels often overlap, pointing to porous boundaries. In Millas’ typology, the “Humanists” and the “Anatolianists” are groups closely associated with multiculturalism and cultural memory. He describes the common characteristic of the “Humanists” as follows: The most important is that they are all critical, directly or indirectly, of the policy of the Turkish state vis-à-vis its non-Muslim minorities. In this respect, too, they resemble the Marxists. On the other hand, they do not perceive only “classes” but rather are well aware of the existence of ethnic difference that they respect. (2009, 83-84)

Placing Sait Faik Abasıyanık (1906-54) close to the “Humanist” and the “Marxist” novelists, Millas addresses Sait Faik’s sympathetic portrayal of the (impoverished) non-Muslim minorities. This brings to the foreground the discourse on the disadvantaged, the “underprivileged” (83) that emerges in tandem with the portrayal of multiculturalism. The examination of Karasu’s Beyoğlu narratives, presented in Excavating Memory, stands in proximity to Millas’ assessments: in Karasu’s intimation of the remembered childhood environs several modes of difference resurface, and it is due to these kinships and equations that my critical reading has been able to point toward a larger reflection on alterity by the author, enveloping ethnicity, class, and gender. Two further points from Millas’ discussion shed light on perceiving Karasu in the context of multiculturalism. In his overview of the literature of Turkey’s minorities on the subject, Millas states that “[i]n general, a concealed and hesitant protest is felt in these texts” (88; my emphasis). Although Karasu has not been placed within the group of minority writers, neither by himself nor by critics, the adjectives used by Millas match with my conclusions. Finally, the “indirect” cosmopolitanism that Millas observes in Karasu along with other prominent Turkish novelists, such as Elif Shafak, Orhan Pamuk, and Aslı Erdoğan, fits in well with my argument, insofar as these authors explore difference out of interest, spontaneously; it indicates their mood rather than an agenda. Therefore, Millas argues that “indirect” cosmopolitanism may constitute the “’most’ genuine form of cosmopolitanism” (92-93). However, even though diversity in Karasu’s memory texts is reflected through a mood, instead of manifesting a plan, my argument differs from Millas’ in that I focus on belonging (Pera-Beyoğlu) and the search for establishing selfhood through remembered space. For Millas, in

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contrast, difference is envisioned by transporting the story to a “foreign” environment, as in the case in Karasu’s A Long Day’s Evening (Uzun Sürmüş Bir Günün Akşamı) (Millas 2009, 92). With this emphasis on place as the predicate of identity, we return to Karasu’s Beyoğlu. I have followed the hypothesis that ethno-cultural minority identity does not prevail as a subject in Karasu, while at the same time he intimates various modes of otherness both thematically and by way of employing figurative language. In Black Waters, Karasu unfolds his discourse on difference expressly through the depicted space of Beyoğlu. Compared with his other writings, the Beyoğlu group stands out as unique, the author’s most cohesive testimony to ethno-cultural alterity. The examination of the Beyoğlu texts has shown how Karasu places his markers of difference at the site of narrated memory. The covered mirrors, the lit candles at the deathbeds of family members, ambiguous nicknames, the Venetian allusions, Greek singers of the 1930s, evocations of Ladino-Spanish as with the word jileco, and last but not least, the neighborhood’s (Christian) widows in black, present an army of tropes the reader encounters. Karasu, on the one hand, omits specific designations of identity, announcing them, on the other hand, through these descriptors. His narrative strategies reveal his negotiation of identity, as exemplified in the veiling and unveiling of the console mirror at the grandmother’s deathbed. While through the image of the covered mirror Karasu evokes the rituals of non-Muslim communities, the replacement of the covered mirror with the uncovered one destabilizes any reference, leaving identities without closure. In his preface to The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig writes that, during his homeless wanderings in his exile years, he did not carry the material documents pertaining to his perished Viennese culture. The author addresses this loss as a kind of advantage for his book, defining his memory-work as follows: For I look upon our memory not as an element which accidentally retains or forgets, but rather as a consciously organizing and wisely exclusionary power. All that one forgets of one’s life was long since predestined by an inner instinct to be forgotten. Only that which wills to preserve itself has the right to be preserved for others. (1964, xxiii)5 5 “Denn ich betrachte unser Gedächtnis nicht als ein das eine bloß zufällig behaltendes und das andere zufällig verlierendes Element, sondern als eine wissend ordnende und weise ausschaltende Kraft. Alles, was man aus seinem eigenen Leben vergißt, war

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Akin to Zweig’s understanding, forgetting and remembrance in Karasu’s Black Waters suggest a “consciously organizing and wisely exclusionary power” (Zweig 1964, xxiii). Karasu’s self-fashioned identity as a Turkish writer and the near-deletion of his minority background from his other works may have occurred due to an “inner instinct,” as Zweig puts it, or due to the internalization of the Turkification policies, or both. Notwithstanding this evasion, Karasu inserts into his most intimate, memoiristic narratives of Beyoğlu unmistakable clues of otherness, including both the site and his alter-ego narrator. Among these clues, Crazy Meryem stands as a central mnemonic image that, in Zweig’s formulation, “because it wills to preserve itself has the right to be preserved for others” (1964, xxiii). As a “dialectical image,” Meryem enables for the Karasu reader perhaps a last glance at the lost world of Pera-Beyoğlu. Thus, through her figure Karasu performs a “redemptive criticism,” the method Benjamin describes as bringing forth a memory trace, before the moment of its disappearance. The Spartans, as the actors of that past, embody the interplay between majority and minority. As the representatives of the past bourgeois culture, they appear to hold a dominant position over their own others, the expelled children. Karasu’s protagonists of alterity, Meryem, the tabby, the child in the street scene, and the forlorn women in black all function as inscriptions of difference. Since the author’s reflection on alterity is transmitted through the images of a memory-scape rather than according to the logic of a chronological historical narrative, particularities of Beyoğlu’s actual history are for the most part left out. As in Benjamin’s model of remembering, we only see the excavated fragments. Meryem’s clothing, which seems to be composed of disparate elements of the past, is a good example of such rendering. While this method obscures the bigger picture, it opens up at the same time numerous trajectories for exploring Karasu’s representation of difference. In this way, Beyoğlu’s others point toward various modes of the outsider, including the anachronistic others, like Meryem, ethnic others, and the impoverished. Gender, sexuality, and the human versus the animal world are part of Karasu’s reflection.6 Even if sexuality is not addressed as eigentlich von einem inneren Instinkt längst schon verurteilt gewesen, vergessen zu werden. Nur was ich selber bewahren will, hat ein Anrecht, für andere bewahrt zu werden” (Zweig 2002, 13). 6 At the end of “Bir Söylencedir Beyoğlu” (“Beyoğlu is a Legend”) there is an addendum, titled “’Ispartalı’ Ne Menem Bir Kuştur” (“What Kind of Bird [Creature] Is the ‘Spartan’”) (Karasu 1999b, 77-78). Editor Akatlı explains that this section should be read in connection with section 20 of “Beyoğlu is a Legend,”in which the montage of “Kedili

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a major theme in Black Waters, the diffuse boundaries of alterity in the Beyoğlu narratives establish the connection to Karasu’s oeuvre and his ongoing examination of difference.

Being a Beyo˘g lulu The penultimate section of “Beyoğlu is a Legend” traces the genesis of Karasu’s narrator back to the old British Hospital on Camcı Street. This strange building, described as “a peculiar, towered, awkward structure” (Karasu 1999b, 76), but not identified by the name of what could be considered its obvious referent, stands in the Galata district on a steep slope that descends to Karaköy and the port. However, neither the mother’s account about his birth nor the story of his later medical examinations at another hospital across the street (the Austrian Hospital) interests the child as much as the fact that his extended maternal family lives on Camcı Street. The narrator professes his attraction to the matrilineal household in the present tense. The remembered child’s perspective thus acquires an extra-temporal quality revealing the narrator’s unchanged attachment to the site and the ones who inhabit it: “But all these can be left aside, because my aunt’s family, my grandma live on Camcı Street. My cousins are always ready to tell me strange stories.”7 Through this story of origin, Karasu’s narrator emerges as a true local of the place, authenticating his Beyoğlulu identity. As I have contended, being Beyoğlulu always already entails alterity. By positioning the narrator at this site of difference, Karasu bestows his mnemonic cityscape with the inscription of otherness. The Beyoğlu narratives constitute subjecthood through the narration of remembrance. The adult narrator whose publications bear the same titles as Bilge Karasu’s own works, who has relocated from Istanbul to Ankara, as in Karasu’s actual biography, and whose cat has the same name, Bibik, as Karasu’s beloved cat (Karasu 1999b, 77), begins Meryem” (“Meryem of the Cats”) is presented. She also adds that in one of the many edits of “Beyoğlu is a Legend,” Karasu had incorporated this addendum into section 20 and later partly separated it (see editor’s note 78). In the addendum, the narrator ponders on dogs and on dog owners as defective offspring of the Spartans. Dogs and their owners are depicted in negative imagery. It seems that the narrator’s and, most likely, the author’s sympathies were directed toward cats. 7 “Ama bütün bunlar bir yana bırakılabilir; çünkü Camcı sokağının üstünde teyzemler oturur, ninem oturur. Teyzemin kızları bana hep tuhaf şeyler anlatmağa hazır, beklerler” (ibid., 76).

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his self-exploration with his Beyoğlulu maternal aunt’s death. The visit to the deceased aunt’s house establishes the moment of anagnorisis, when everything suddenly falls into place, insofar as the return to the childhood locale signifies the entry to the space of memory. The remembered child emerges as the subject of this space. Even if Karasu evades the linear continuity of a life story between the child and adult narrator as the subject of his narratives, he moves the latter ever closer to the former through the act of writing the remembered Beyoğlu. In Black Waters, the spatialization of the past leads toward the acknowledgment of belonging to a Beyoğlu nativity. Although the narratives of Black Waters leave identities indeterminate, the world of the child as native of Beyoğlu gives away codes that evoke a past woven of minority cultures. We should recall that the covered mirror was among the codes marking the ritual of mourning in the non-Muslim cultures. Karasu establishes a significant connection between the episode on the narrator’s birth on Camcı Street and the code of the mirror. When describing the end of the visits to the aunt’s home on Camcı Street, the narrator states that the women and girls adjusted their looks in the mirror of the console table. The remembered child mimics the adults by glancing at himself in the mirror, too, although his head is only reflected in a corner of the lower end of the mirror (76). The identificatory gesture, reinforcing the narrator’s belonging to his Beyoğlu community, is anticipated in an earlier section of “Beyoğlu is a Legend.” Here, the narrator notes that strangely, despite his own disinterest in mirrors, the console table with its mirror stands, along with two other mirrors, in his room at the present (57). The heirloom mirror propels the narrator toward self-reflection, which is already in process through the textualization of Beyoğlu as container of difference. To repeat Benjamin’s formula, it is Beyoğlu as “a past become space” (Benjamin 2002, 871) surfacing in the current, the black waters, or kara su of Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu, through which the narrator acknowledges himself as part of this discourse of alterity. In closing, let us revisit the question as to whether the narrator is the mouthpiece of the author. While I have postulated a projection between these poles, Bilge Karasu himself already provided the best answer: “The only thing that can be the ‘spokesperson’ for the author is the totality of the text.”8 8 “Yazarın ‘sözcüsü’ olacak tek şey, metnin bütünüdür” (Karasu 2008 c, 249).

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Prospectus for New Trajectories in Karasu Studies and Beyond The current book was initially motivated by my interest in the representation of “lost places.” Walter Benjamin’s manner of calling up the past in his recollections of fin-de-siècle Berlin and his reading of the derelict Paris arcades as residues of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, inspired me to consider transferring Benjamin’s thought to a Turkish context. In order to do this, I envisioned a study which would be informed by Benjamin’s reflections, as well as by other critical ideas about the interrelationship between place, memory, identity, and historicity. Representations of Istanbul’s Beyoğlu and the capture of its cosmopolitan past in an array of narratives would have been the subject of my inquiry. Thus, the scope of the project was much broader, and it would have included, along with Karasu, texts by Turkish, Levantine, as well as Turkish minority authors. I have alluded to some of these works in Excavating Memory, such as Duhani’s social topographies of Pera-Beyoğlu and Levantine writer Scognamillo’s memoirs. Modernist Fikret Adil’s narratives, depicting the Beyoğlu bohemia of the 1930s, among them Intermezzo, Asmalımescit 74, Avâre Gençlik (Vagabond Youth), and Gardenbar Geceleri (Gardenbar Nights), presented intriguing documents for my exploration. Furthermore, poet Salâh Birsel’s essays on Beyoğlu and Atilla Dorsay’s tribute to bygone Beyoğlu’s movie theaters suggested other elements in the projected book. Mario Levi’s novels and short stories, set against the background of Beyoğlu and its vicinity, and portraying the lives of Jewish families and other minority characters, can be viewed among the leading contributions to the literature of the minorities. I not only anticipated working on Levi but also including Vivet Kanetti’s Bizans Sohbetleri (Byzantine Conversations, 1988; under the pseudonym Emine E.) and Kurabiye Saatinde (At Cookie Time, 1992) that I consider significant yet less-explored complements to Levi’s prose. In these autofictional narratives, driven by keen observation, wit and, as in Levi, subdued melancholy, Kanetti writes about the lives of Istanbul’s Sephardic families and their relatives elsewhere in the diaspora. Further examination of Benjamin’s theory of remembering, along with the plethora of critical approaches it has attracted, and the affinity with this model discernable in Karasu’s Beyoğlu texts, led me to engage in the comparative context in its own right in a book-long study. Excavating Memory expounds the hypothesis that Karasu repressed his minority identity in light of Benjamin and through models derived from memory studies. Moreover,

Conclusion

modern Turkish historiography on non-Muslim minorities has provided a valuable resource for supporting my position. However, the earlier concept, described above, accompanied me as a framework of reference. Thus, the imagery of Beyoğlu through its multifarious renderings and protagonists has resonated throughout my writing. I see, then, several critical tasks that literary critics and scholars of cultural studies might undertake. Critics could choose specific texts from the aforementioned broad repertoire of approaches, coupled with memory studies, in order to examine representations of place-based identities. Another critical path might further explore the interconnectedness of place and identity construction, with special focus on Beyoğlu, in Karasu’s oeuvre. I already have suggested this comparative framework by addressing the correspondences between Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu and “Six Months One Autumn.” “Room after Room, the World” (“Oda Oda Dünya”), in Karasu’s early fiction Death in Troy, delivers another striking example of Beyoğlu as scenery that encloses multiple modes of difference. This rare instance in Karasu’s authorship, namely the overt portrayal of ethno-cultural difference, offers a compelling point of departure for an intertextual reading. Thus, sketching its thematic composition would be helpful here. “Room after Room, the World” depicts an encounter between the first-person narrator and a friend in the courtyard of the Greek-Orthodox church at Taksim Square. Whereas the ethno-cultural descriptors in Black Waters remain implied, “Room After Room, the World,” set during the night of Easter worship, contains an abundance of Christian symbolism. Moreover, the narrator’s friend at this secret meeting has a name, Aleko, or Aleksandros Vratsis, and is hence bestowed with a Rum identity as part of the local Greek-Orthodox community. Aleko stands for the outsider type in that he is alienated from the religious realm, is gradually forgetting his native tongue, Rumca (Greek), and is seemingly shunned by the community due to his affair with the narrator. It should be added that not only Aleko’s differential construction, but also the first-person narrator’s opaque identity, conveyed through ambiguities, invites for a comparative reading with Black Waters. Another enticing path for Karasu studies would be to examine animals in his writing. Beyoğlu’s street cats and the image of Crazy Meryem as a water creature stand in tandem with other animal figures in Karasu’s work. The fairy-tale narratives in The Garden of Departed Cats, for instance, are populated with fantastic animals that lead humans either to their deaths or

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metamorphize them into a nonhuman existence. We find a corresponding text in Karasu’s collection of essays Ne Kitapsız Ne Kedisiz (Neither Without Book Nor Without Cat), titled “To Live With an Animal” (“Bir Hayvanla Yaşamak”). Here, the author questions the limits of human communication and the unbridgeable rift between humans and animals through the story of Bic, a Brazilian puppy, that eventually turns out to be an agouti, a kind of rodent. The various modes of difference, discussed above, concur with the treatment of same-sex love, thus pointing toward Karasu’s all-encompassing treatment of alterity. In “The Booklet of Humans” (“İnsanlar Kitabı”), included in the collection “Ode to the Pomegranate and the Fig,” the author asks: “Am I not one of those who understands life as the poignancy of a constant feeling of strangeness?”9 Finally, an essayistic text titled “On the 50th Birthday of Someone Called Bilge Karasu” (“Bilge Karasu Adlı Birinin 50. Yaşı Üzerine Deneme”) in the collection Ne Kitapsız Ne Kedisiz, reveals the postmodern play of doubled identities through the split between the authorial voice and the persona Bilge Karasu in a vein similar to such self-reflexive bifurcation in the Beyoğlu narratives. The question of incompleteness that we have observed through Karasu’s construction of memory in Black Waters also prevails here. Speaking in the first-person plural, the narrator of the anniversary essay declares that, in order to consider a piece of writing as complete, one has to live with it intimately and for a long time, constantly forming and revising it. Unless that can be done, the writing must be labeled a “draft” (Karasu 1994a, 86). This suggests that Karasu criticism has ample material at hand to continue examining the author’s fundamental concerns, such as those regarding writing and selfhood. The above discussion, outlining some of the primary components in Karasu’s oeuvre, not only indicates possible avenues for new studies in Karasu criticism, but also for the extension of translation work. As mentioned in my introduction, although an important portion of Karasu’s work is available in translation, this corpus is far from being complete. By way of continuing the task of translation, we would reaffirm Bilge Karasu as a major voice in World Literature.

9 “Yaşamayı, sürekli bir yabancılık duygusunun kanatıcılığıyla bir tutanlardan değil miyim?” (Karasu 1995, 103).

Addendum

Bilge Karasu’s Biography The following is based on the information given by Dr. Füsun Akatlı (1944-2010), editor of Karasu’s posthumous publications, and a renowned literary critic and essayist, during our conversations in Istanbul in 2007-9. Dr. Akatlı provides valuable insights into Bilge Karasu’s biography. Akatlı’s reminiscences stem from a lifelong friendship and literary collaboration with Karasu, which gave her the opportunity to obtain fragments of knowledge regarding his family milieu and their years in Beyoğlu. I take the responsibility for any possible inaccuracy in the following.

Family history Information on Karasu’s family history is sparse. The father, Isak Karasu, worked as an employee at a Jewish business. Isak may have written for the newspaper Journal D’Orient, but this is not confirmed. Bilge Karasu was left a small legacy by the relatives of his father who settled late in life in Brazil. Isak died when his son was seventeen years old. Bilge changed his Jewish name to a Turkish one around the age of eighteen. According to Dr. Akatlı, based on the testimony of a common acquaintance and a close friend of Bilge, at their first year at Istanbul University, Bilge’s name was Israel, which he changed when moving from the first to the second year in the Philosophy Department. Bilge’s mother, Madam Aspasya, was (local) Greek or Rum. Dr Akatlı did not know the dates when the family lived in Taksim Square (Mete Caddesi). (We find a view of this residence in the narrative “The Courtyard of Death” in Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu.) However, Dr. Akatlı was told by Bilge Karasu that the family also lived for a while on a street

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parallel to the main street Istiklâl Caddesi in the Beyoğlu neighborhood. Moreover, Dr. Akatlı, through conversations with a relative of hers, learned that Madam Aspasya shopped at a famous shoe store in Beyoğlu and that Madam was the patient of the physician Necmettin Hakkı, who had his practice in the district. Madam Aspasya in her old age once told Dr. Akatlı of her vivid recollections of Beyoğlu, going back seventy years, despite her dementia. This indicates that she was a true Beyoğlulu, a participant in the intertwined life stories of the neighborhood. Karasu’s maternal aunt and her children lived in Beyoğlu. Dr. Akatlı referred to a visit in Beyoğlu that she paid with Bilge to a very old relative, a Greek lady by the name of Coline. The maternal cousins later migrated to Athens. Dr. Akatlı surmised that Karasu’s parents separated after a series of events—some kind of “guilt” on the mother’s part. They continued living in the same house without communicating, until the father suddenly passed away. After that, Bilge lived with his mother in a love-hate relationship.

Languages Dr. Akatlı assumed that the father spoke Ladino, and she verified that Bilge Karasu knew Spanish. She had no information as to whether he spoke Ladino, although she did not think it was likely. The mother was not JudeoGreek; she was Greek-Orthodox, and her mother tongue was the local Greek that Istanbul’s Greek (Rum) population speaks. Madam Aspasya was buried with an Orthodox ceremony at the Şişli Greek-Orthodox cemetery in Istanbul. She died in the winter of 1980 when mother and son had to relocate in the bitter cold of Ankara to Dr. Akatlı’s apartment where they stayed for two months. (This is almost verbatim from “Beyoğlu is a Legend.”) Dr. Akatlı stated that, in the last stages of her life, Madam Aspasya never spoke Turkish. At home, she spoke Greek; with Dr. Akatlı, she communicated in French.

Bilge Karasu’s Burial Karasu was buried at the Muslim cemetery Karşıyaka Mezarlığı in Ankara. According to Dr. Akatlı, a close friend made the arrangements. Following

Addendum

Karasu’s will, the burial remained a low-key event. Only a small group of friends were present. The friend who arranged the burial was able to convince the Hoca, who was in charge of the burial at the cemetery mosque, not to perform the Muslim ceremony. No prayer (as is customary) was said at the burial site. The same close friend destroyed all photographs in Karasu’s possession, again following the author’s will.

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Index Names Abasıyanık, Sait Faik, 249 Adil, Fikret, 254 Adorno, Theodor W., 32n12, 45, 46, 91 Aji, Aron, 7–8, 23 Akar, Rıdvan, 112, 112n6, 113, 114, 117–118 Akatlı, Füsun, xii, 3, 13, 18, 71, 91, 92–93, 93n8, 100n14, 101, 105, 122, 179, 191n18, 214, 251n6, 257–258 Akın, Nur, 69, 98n12, 180n6, 202, 208, 208n9 Aksoy, Nazan, xi, 26n7 Aktar, Ayhan, 11, 109, 111–113, 124–126 Alexandris, Alexis, 116–117, 124 Ataç, Nurullah, 108, 122 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 10–11, 14, 63, 109, 114, 119, 180, 194 Babaoğlu, Resul, 114–116 Bali, Rıfat N., 11, 107, 108–112, 119–125, 136–139, 156, 182–183, 198 Bareilles, Bertrand, 160n5 Barthes, Roland, 13, 16, 87, 163–174, 217 Batur, Enis, 4, 93–97, 99–101, 120, 124, 154 Benjamin, Walter, x, 254, see also Selected Concepts and Themes Bergson, Henri, 13, 103–104, 128–131, 153, 168n9, 186 Birsel, Cânâ, 180n7 Birsel, Salâh 70, 179n5, 254 Brassaï, 244 Buck-Morss, Susan, 48n30, 214 Carasso, Emmanuel, 72n14 Çelik, Zeynep, 65n6, 180n7 Çetinoğlu, Ali Suat, 112 Çoruk, Ali Şükrü, 6 Cohen, Margaret, 48n30 De Man, Paul, 26n7 Demir, Hülya, 117–118 Diamant, Anita, 188n16 Dorsay, Atilla, 70, 179n5, 254 Duhani, Said N., 70, 140–145, 179n5, 203, 204, 208, 254 Dursteler, Eric, 161

Eiland, Howard, 26n6, 57, 60, 62–63, 73, 85, 88, 90, 91, 239 Eissenstat, Howard, 107 Eldem, Edhem, 30, 78, 98n12, 114, 140– 141n12, 145–146, 176–177, 204–205, 228, 237n11 Elliott, Brian, xi, 12, 14, 47, 64–65, 216 Erdoğan, Aslı, 249 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 181 Feichtinger, Johannes, 64n5 Freud, Sigmund, xi, see Selected Concepts and Themes Gilman, Sander L., 119 Göktürk, Deniz, 3n4, 6n7, 7, 8 Gülersoy, Çelik, 69, 141 Habsburg dynasty, 63, 207 Habermas, Jürgen, 10, 35n15 Halbwachs, Maurice, 133 Hamacher, Werner, 60n3, 195n23 Hançer, Elmon, 180n6 Hanssen, Beatrice, 86n1 Hızlan, Doğan, 69, 122 Hirschon, Renée, 106 Huyssen, Andreas, 17, 59–61, 86n1, 199–200, 206, 213–215, 219, 225, 244 Isenberg, Noah, 10, 87n4 Jacobs, Carol, 25n4, 26n5, 26n6, 86, 89–91, 101, 104, 244 Kanetti, Vivet (E. Emine), 254 Karakaya, Ebru, 180n7 Karaosmanoğlu, Yakup Kadri, 69n11 Karasu, Bilge, x, see also Selected Concepts and Themes Kasaba, Reşat, 64 Keyder, Çağlar, 11, 123, 124 Kracauer, Siegfried, 66–68, 199–200 Landfester, Ulrike, 75, 77–78, 85, 86n1, 88 Lemke, Anja, 86n1, 237 Lessing, Theodor, 119n12 Levi, Mario, 8, 29–30, 70, 135, 207n7, 254 Levin, Thomas Y., 67n8 Lindner, Burkhardt, 43, 46–49 Margosyan, Mıgırdiç, 70

272

Index

Massavetas, Alexandros, 160n5 Menninghaus, Winfried, 214 Millas, Hercules, 4–5, 236, 248–250 Mills, Amy, 97–98, 133 Misztal, Barbara, 132–136, 138–140, 145, 151 Mungan, Murathan, 3n4, 6, 232 Oral, Tan, xi, 69 Ortaylı, İlber, 69, 98n12, 161 Ottoman Empire, 10–11, 32, 62–65, 71, 72n14, 81, 98, 106–107, 111–112, 115, 116, 123, 125, 137–138, 141, 154n17, 160, 173, 180–181, 19, 203n2, 206–208, 219, 226, 227 Özpalabıyıklar, Selahattin, 69 Pamuk, Orhan, 7–8, 97, 115, 154n17, 178n4, 248 Parla, Jale, 6, 97, 135 Pentaris, Panagiotis, 187 Petersen, Leena, 86n1, 201, 202, 244 Pethes, Nicolas, 40–44, 85, 86n1, 88, 101, 184–186, 195–197, 244 Poe, Edgar Allan, 243, 244 Prost, Henri, 180 Proust, Marcel, 43, 62, 131n4, 168–169, 237, 244 Reitter, Paul, 119n12 Richter, Gerhard, 6, 22–24, 26–27, 30–33, 37, 42, 43, 85, 86, 105, 161, 238, 244 Ricoeur, Paul, 13, 16, 96, 128–132, 147, 152–153, 168, 186, 197–198, 216 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 132n6, 199, 243, 244 Schiller, Friedrich, 239 Schmitt, Oliver Jens, 98, 159–161, 184, 203n3, 208n8 Scognamillo, Giovanni, 70, 254 Seyhan, Azade, 6, 23, 64 Shafak, Elif, 249 Skoggard, Carl, 25, 26, 73, 79, 80, 239, 240n14 Stüssi, Anna, 86n1, 197n25 Szondi, Peter, 43–46, 52, 54, 56, 60, 61, 85, 239 Tiedemann, Rolf, 32n12, 67 Tischler, Ulrike, 64, 139–140 Turan, Güven, 231 Turkish Republic, 3, 6, 10, 12, 14, 15, 23, 32, 61, 63, 65, 69n11, 71, 82, 96, 107–109, 113, 119–121, 123–126, 136, 137, 139, 151, 176, 180, 194 Uçak, Zeynep, 72n14 Weigel, Sigrid, 10, 21, 30–31, 33–37, 39–41, 43, 85, 86n1, 195n23, 228, 244 Weimar Republic, 3, 66

Wilhelmine Empire, 3, 58, 63, 67n8, 207, 239 Witte, Bernd, 43, 50–52, 61 Yordanidu, Maria, 70 Zürcher, Erik, 162 Zweig, Stefan, 58–60, 70, 250–251 Zozo Dalmas, 63, 127, 193–194, 196–197 Selected Concepts and Themes Walter Benjamin absence, 29 alterity, 20, 104, 246–247 allegory, 86 arcade (Passage), 8, 12, 15, 19, 24, 34, 45, 46, 47, 49, 56, 64–68, 86, 132, 186n13, 201, 213–214, 215, 217 arena, stage (Schauplatz), 55, 86, 103 authorship, 27n8, 47, 52, 105, 196, 237n12, 247–248 biography, 3, 58 blotting pages, 75–76, 86 bourgeois, x, 8, 16–17, 23, 34, 45, 47, 49, 50, 57–59, 62–63, 66–67, 80, 200, 209–210, 213, 217, 238–239, 240, 254 class, 25, 55, 58, 61, 67, 80–81, 98, 134, see also the political destruction, 45, 46, 58, 59, 79 dialectical image (dialektisches Bild), 12, 52, 62, 103, 130, 149, 169, 174, 180, 184, 224, 248, see also snapshot dialogue with Karasu, ix, 4, 7, 12, 15, 17, 20 dialectical standstill, 30–33, 40, 44 digression, 89, 101 discontinuity and continuity, 20, 26–28, 36, 54, 56–57, 59, 60, 85, 89–91, 4, 101–102, 103 displacement, 20, 25, 27, 246, 248 dream, 21, 35, 40, 46, 47–48, 49, 67, 75, 103–104, 132, 186n13, 202, 213–215, 217 excavation, 15, 86–87, 94, 143, 155, 246 exile 3, 20, 30, 53, 55, 57, 91, 248 fan of memory, 86, 237ff. flâneur, 19 and Freud, 14, 21, 34n14, 35–38, 40–42, 136, 217, 248 fragment, 9, 11, 20, 27n8, 34, 40, 47n28, 87, 94, 103, 136, 143, 197, 246, 248, 251

Index

history and historicity, 22–23, 39–40, 43–45, 46, 51–52, 55, 105, 134–135, 213 homesickness (Heimweh) historical events in Germany, 80–81, 239 inscribing memory, 6, 21, 25, 26, 31–32, 34, 54, 57–58, 80, 134, 135 incompleteness, 85ff., see also nonlinearity, discontinuity and continuity Jewish identity, 10, 20, 57, 58, 63, 79, 81, 238–239 labyrinth, 73–78, 235 lost places, 10–11, 13, 24–25, 28, 55, 64–68, 79 maze, 74, 86, 90, 235 memory model, 8–10, 57, 86, 247 metaphor, 60, 62, 161, 237–238, 248 mnemonic elements, 195–197, 240, see also threshold modernity, 9, 10, 59–60, 199 modernization, 199, 201–202 mothers, 73–78, see also women nonlinearity, 28, 57, 59–60, 88, 90, 104, 197 now-time (Jetztzeit), 6, 9, 30, 31, 32,35, 37, 41–42, 44–45, 52, 151, 248 now-time of recognition (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit), 31n11, 35, 40, 131 Old Berlin-West, 10, 13, 15, 20, 58, 63, 65, 74, 79–81, 98, 152, 238, 240, 248 past become space (raumgewordene Vergangenheit), ix, 9, 16, 56, 253 political, 22–23, 30–33, 42, 47, 48n30, 50, 61, 63, 67–68, 80–81, 134, see also class, bourgeois, destruction, Jewish heritage publication and editing process, 13, 90, 91 redemption, 9, 10, 12, 45, 52, 54, 68 remembering, 39–41, 44–45, 62, 87, 88, 89, 94, 101, 102–104, 129, 131– 132, 186, 248, see also snapshot representation (Darstellung), 33n13, 45n26, 89, 101, 238n13 rescuing critique (rettende Kritik) , 24, 39, 248, 251 self-reflexive, 26–27, 53–54, 104, 105, 237, 246–247 shock experience, 38, 102–104, 149, 153 snapshot, 9, 31, 32, 37–38, 40, 86, 89, 102ff., 146–147, 151, 174, 248 social irretrievability, 53–56, 134, 152 terror, 206

threshold, 49, 62, 214, 226 vignette, 59–60 women, 228, 240 Sigmund Freud alienation of the father, 183 association, 248 childhood, 49 collective memory, 13 consciousness, 36–37 dream, 33 distortion (Entstellung), 14, 20–22, 23, 28–29, 30–31n11, 34, 42, 75–76n17, 132, 136, 156 inscription, 41 legibility, 33, 34 memory trace (Erinnerungsspur), 36–37, 129, 140, 197n26 perception, 35 and Ricouer, 128 self-reflexivity, 25 symbols, 33 topography, topographical model of memory, 20–21 trace (Spur), 9, 11, 20–21, 34, 37, 61, 129, 143, 147, 149, 153, 197 trauma, 226 (the) unconscious, 35, 40–41, 104, 129–131, 143, 186, 197, 217 Bilge Karasu Akatlı’s reminiscences, 18, 257–259 alterity, 17, 20, 37, 39, 100, 108, 146, 187, 251 ambiguity, 11, 24, 46, 100, 102, 104, 122, 123, 146, 149, 188, 204, 208, 212, 222, 224 anxiety, 215–220 authenticity, 101 anagnorisis, 97, 101, 154, 198, 253 Beyoğlu, x–xi, 2, 5–6, 10–12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20–24, 31, 32, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45–49, 51, 55–56, 61–63, 65, 68–69, 72–73, 76–84, 87, 88, 94–96, 107–108, 113–114, 120, 122–124, 127, 129–136, 139, 146–154, 157–158, 161, 163, 165, 170, 173, 174, 176–178, 181, 184, 186–188, 192, 194, 199–204, 208–215, 217, 219, 220, 222–226, 227–229, 230, 233–236, 237n11, 238, 240–242, 243, 245, 248, 250–252, 258

273

274

Index

Beyoğlu literature, x, 3–7, 13, 15, 27–30, 37, 41, 69–70, 86, 90–93, 126, 132, 140–146, 154, 254 Beyoğlulu, 97–105, 108, 128, 133, 134, 135, 184, 187, 190–191, 195, 197–198, 206, 209, 212, 218, 221, 233, 252–253, 258 biography and impact, 3, 7–8 black waters (kara su), 70, 72–73, 76–79, 82, 152, 154n17, 158, 212–213, 245, 253 Capital Tax Levy (Varlık Vergisi), 111–114, 126, 139 console table, see object-symbol contemplative memory, 104, 131 cosmopolitan, 3, 11, 12, 14, 27, 30, 55, 61n4, 63, 65, 68, 69, 70, 78, 80, 82, 107, 120ff., 137, 145, 173, 192, 207, 208, 249, 254 decline, 12, 23, 47, 59, 61n4, 65–68, 83, 139, 175–177, 203n2, 227, 229, 236, 240 difference, 3–7, 11–12, 16–17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 30, 40, 41, 42, 51, 62, 101–102, 122–124, 126, 127, 147, 151, 153, 161, 184, 211–212, 228, 237, 243, 249–253, 255–256, see also alterity disjointed texts, 22, 36–37, 56, 61, 136, 143, see also incompleteness discrimination, 64, 82, 96, 114, 126, 139 displacement, 3, 6, 10, 20–21, 30, 62, 190, 195 distortion, 23, 27ff. diversity, 5, 13, 23, 40, 46, 61, 65, 70, 81, 124, 181, 248, 249 economic order, 227ff. excavation, 15 epoché, 131, 168 ethnicity, 96, 122–123, 151, 249 ethno-cultural difference, 4, 7, 10, 11, 16, 39, 40, 65, 70, 96, 101, 102, 136, 147, 189, 237, 250, 255 ethno-cultural identity, x, 6, 12, 17, 23, 29, 39, 95, 99, 108, 135, 149, 154, 187, 208, 234, 250 ethno-cultural marker, 4, 30, 62, 70, 96, 105, 184, 255 father figures, 16, 62, 161ff., 210 Frenk, 10, 71, 98 Gökberk’s acquaintance with, 1–3 history, 17, 23, 32, 42, 46, 63, 219, 226 homogenization, 82, 107, 123–124

homosexuality, 4, 6, 108, 122, 135, 256 illuminating the past, 37, 40 Incident of Twenty Class Draftees (Yirmi Kur’a İhtiyatlar Olayı) incompleteness, 3–4, 15, 85ff. inner space, 215, 217, 220 inscription of memory, 199, 202–208, 211–213, 238 Istanbul Pogrom (Events of September 6/7, 1955), 46, 113, 114–116, 118, 139, 151, 236 interiority, 141 jileco song, 192–198, 250 kayadez, 119, 124, 136–156, 182, 198 Lausanne Treaty of Peace, 106–107, 117, 125, 137 Levantine, 2n1, 10, 12, 16, 40, 49n33, 63, 70, 71, 98–99, 107, 141, 145, 151, 158–161, 184, 188, 205, 207, 208, 228, 236, 237, 254 lost places, 10–11, 32, 47, 55, 63, 64–65, 68, 82–83, 210, 220–226, 227ff., 243 low profile, 136–156, 182 lullaby, 159, 161 (the) marginalized, 17, 51, 107, 202, 227ff. memory, 6–7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 45, 61–62, 70, 87–88, 102–105, 128ff., 133, 141–142, 152, 182, 218 minority identity, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 23, 42, 61–62, 70, 72, 79, 96, 108, 120ff., 135–139, 147, 184, 188–191, 192–195, 196–197, 252–253, 254–255 montage, 231–232 most-recent past, 47–50 mother figures, 1–2, 31, 50–51, 56, 73ff., 121, 148–151, 162, 175–178, 184, 187, 215, 217–219, 222–226, 240, 245 multiculturalism, 5–6, 17, 39–40, 42, 55, 61, 71–72, 98–99, 145–146, 157–161, 194, 205, 248–252 multiethnic past, 98, 153 nationalism, 11–12, 15, 23–24, 30, 40, 51, 72, 106ff., 181 non-Muslim minorities, 3, 5, 6, 11, 12, 20, 23, 28, 62, 69, 72n14, 81, 82, 98, 99, 107–113, 118, 121, 122, 124–126, 130, 136, 137, 150, 151, 163, 177, 184, 188, 190, 191, 194, 218, 234, 236, 237, 248–250, 255

Index

nostalgia, 5, 27, 53, 62, 68, 71, 78, 132, 140–141n12, 166, 193, 195, 211, 237 object-symbol, 185–190 outsider, 108, 227, 233, 243–244, 248, 251, 255 Pera, 1–3, 11–13, 16–17, 20, 27–28, 30–31, 40, 42, 46–47, 49, 51, 55, 61–65, 69–71, 78, 80, 82, 94, 95, 98, 107, 124, 126, 130, 132–133, 135–136, 139–141, 143–147, 151, 154, 158–161, 163, 165, 173, 176–177, 179–180, 184, 186, 188, 190–195, 198, 200, 202–210, 212–213, 217–219, 222–229, 232–234, 236–238, 240, 249, 251, 254, see also Pera-Beyoğlu Pera-Beyoğlu (question of names), 2n1, 71–72, 153 Peran, 98–101, 139–140, 147, 170, 175–177, 184 Perote, 98, 139, 157–161, 173, 184, 187, 209 political critique, 46, 51 postmodernism, 7, 23, 26, 43, 96, 256

publication and editing history, 13, 20, 90–93, 154–156, 214 recognition, 130, 153 redemption, 12, 24, 39, 51, 68, 239 remembering, 216 repression, 12, 23–24 34, 123, 147 Rum, 1, 40, 107, 113–116, 118, 121, 123n18, 137n9, 187–188, 190– 191, 234, 236, 255, 257, 258 self-confrontation, 24, 96, 156, 198 self-referentiality, 5, 27, 41, 52, 99, 155, 256 smell, 241–242 Spartan, 40, 49–51, 144, 147, 208–209, 233, 235–237 suppression, 122, 133, 139, 191 Taksim Square, 1, 13, 14, 76, 81, 120, 178, 180–181, 211–212, 230, 231, 255, 257 threshold, 215 topography, 140–144, 177, 204–205 Turkification, 15–16, 109, 113, 115, 118–120, 122n17, 137, 140, 182, 251

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