Between Terror and Taboo: Monumentalisation as the Matrix of History and Politics in Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book and Snow

Abstract

This essay explores monumentalisation as an idea and a practice that function as the matrix of history and politics in Orhan Pamuk's novels The Black Book and Snow. I examine the politics of Pamuk's negotiation of ‘monumentalisation’ in the two novels through its different textual trajectories: the surreal image of the apocalyptic agency of Ataturk statues in Turkish space and history; the elliptical and marginal representation of a centrally significant event in a tabooed monumental space, as in the instances of a carnivalesque performance around an Ataturk statue and of Kurdish attacks against these statues; and the textual monumentalisation of Armenian architectural remains that bear the traces of past violence. The main argument and conclusion are that Pamuk's imaginative rendering of monumental space allows a rethinking of the significance of monumentalisation on theoretical and material levels specifically with respect to its relations to various manifestations of terror and taboo in twentieth-century Turkey.