Orhan Pamuk's İstanbul: Memories and city

Abstract

This article is an analysis of Orhan Pamuk’s most recent work Istanbul: Memories and The City, from the view point of its sub-texts. Parallels may be drawn between “memories” chapter of Pamuk’s text which is an autobiography and James Joyce’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (as translated into Turkish by Murat Belge) as both works reflect the typical characteristics of the Bildungsroman and since both draw a picture of “the artist as a young man” with similar stages of development, into maturity and to a similar ending. The sub-texts of the chapters about the city are actually mentioned in the text by Pamuk himself; they are the writers, poets and artists past and present who have written about, painted and photographed Istanbul. Among them Istanbul chapter of the early 20.century Turkish novelist Tanpınar’s work Beş şehir (Five Cities) provides the most powerful similarities between the two texts, with a view that the use of other writers’ texts as sub-text is a post-modern textual strategy used widely by many writers in the West. The article ends with the statement that at the end of Pamuk’s autobiography the life story and the story of the city are united to form a whole, which as Pamuk himself has pointed out earlier, is the writer’s fate.