Abstract
The present chapter locates the flaneur in the tension of tradition and modernity in the seminal novel A Strangeness in Mind by the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. The flaneur is a predominant archetype in the literary and cultural imaginary of Modernism. As such, rather unsurprisingly, the flaneur plays a significant role in the subsequent explorations of the salient traits, juxtapositions and the nuances that constitute the event of modernity. The evaluation of modernity often involves an inevitable exploration of the performance and essence (often inseparable) of flanerie. The present paper proposes to explore this interspersed relationship between flanerie and modernity through a strategic reading of the novel. The chapter will substantiate Mevlut, the boza seller protagonist in the novel, as a flaneur who is the embodiment of Turkish modernity. The chapter will argue that the perpetual status of Mevlut as a hyphenated self who is characterised by the interplay of apprehension-appreciation and is unconditionally hospitable to the contingence of the temporal-spatial substantiate him as the flaneur in the novel. In doing so, the chapter will also identify the essence of Turkish modernity and will locate it in departure from the unanimous notional conjecture of modernity as progress.
Highlights
Modernity apparently trails with a presumed aura of newness; to be modern is to suggest, almost pre-conditionally, that there is a difference or departure from that which is the archaic, the stable, the established—that which one can half-convincingly categorise as tradition
Jurgen Habermas, one of the celebrated thinkers of the Modern age who explores the nuances of the condition of modernity, observes
We observe the anarchistic intention of blowing up the continuum of history...Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition; modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative.” (Habermas 5)
Summary
Tradition and modernity are often interrelated yet opposed considerations/ conditions where the suggestive material trace of the one assumes the absence of the other. This self-referential claim to progress is substantiated and often validated by the techno-industrial material climate of modernity. While the early attributes in this rather elongated description of modernity constitute its material form, the latter is suggestive of the essence.
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