Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu's Istanbul and Walter Benjamin's Berlin

Abstract

Despite its subtitle “Bilge Karasu's Istanbul and Walter Benjamin's Berlin,” this book is not an ordinary comparative study of two writers' memories of their respective cosmopolitan cities. Istanbul and Berlin have often been represented in fictional and critical literature as sites of layered and multifaceted memories. Both cities have served as the setting and even the main character of novels, such as Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz or Orhan Pamuk's Kara Kitap (Black Book), among others. What distinguishes Excavating Memory from many comparative studies is its bold move to bring two writers from different cultural and historical contexts into a dialogue that not only reflectively illuminates their respective works and life stories but also contributes a novel approach to critical comparative studies.As an experimental writer with a philosophical bent of mind and a penchant for nonmimetic expression, Karasu has been a suitable subject for postmodern readings of his work. Gece (1985), his first novel to be translated into English as Night in 1994, can be read as both an allegory of political persecution and a metafiction, where a writer and his or her editor eerily comment on each other's texts in footnotes. Karasu's talent for allegorizing abstract concepts has led to the comparisons of his work with Franz Kafka's parables of transcendent desolation. Night subverts our horizon of expectations to reveal alternative dimensions of reality, in this instance, a reality censored by the state and the subconscious. Despite its singularity of style and context, Karasu's work often necessitates a search for reference points in comparable texts, as it resists any singular interpretation.Although she recognizes the appeal of Karasu's work for postmodern critics, Gökberk endeavors to widen the range of Karasu scholarship by situating his cross-generic writings at the intersection of Turkish and German Studies. In the “Introduction,” she acknowledges that Karasu (1930–1995) and Benjamin (1892–1940), separated in time, place, sociopolitical milieu, cultural context, and even in genre, could not easily be imagined as partners in a hermeneutic dialogue. While Karasu is predominantly a fiction writer, Benjamin is anything but. In any case, Gökberk places both on an equal footing as cultural critics and accompanies them on their way down memory lane to the lost spaces of Istanbul and Berlin, respectively. She braves reading Lağımlararası ya da Beyoğlu, which she translates as “Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu,” a posthumously published collection of Karasu's untranslated (auto) biographical sketches of Istanbul's once cosmopolitan enclave Pera—meaning “beyond” in Greek—or the present Beyoğlu, against Benjamin's by far well-known and multiply translated Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Berlin Childhood Around 1900). Her critical objective is to bring “Benjamin's topographically defined concept of remembrance into dialogue with Karasu's poetics of memory” (9). In effect, this hermeneutic approach facilitates the understanding of Karasu's work by reference to parts of Benjamin's work—specifically to the latter's concepts of “dialectical image,” “now-time,” “past become space,” “threshold,” and “redemption.” At the same time, these concepts are concretized by reference to the whole, to the body of Karasu's and Benjamin's writings.While the major focus of Gökberk's study is on a collection of Karasu's sketches about Pera, posthumously edited and published by the late critic Füsun Akatlı, Benjamin's autobiographical work serves as a heuristic premise for explicating Karasu's nonmimetic figuration of memory. Gökberk restates that Benjamin, son of a wealthy Jewish family, who grew up in the Wilhelmine Germany and the Weimar Republic and was hunted to death by the Nazis; and Bilge Karasu, an accomplished master of the Turkish language, an experimental stylist, whose work crossed genres—short story, novel, essay, radio play, and translation—who grew up in Istanbul, lived both in Istanbul and Ankara, and was not forced into exile, are unlikely subjects for a comparative study. Nevertheless, although Karasu's life and work cannot be cast in the tragic mold of Benjamin's fate, his writings are suffused with a sense of such acute displacement that they call for a work of mourning, a Trauerarbeit to bring the trauma of vanished spaces to a level of consciousness, where it can be addressed in writing. In “Mother of Black Waters,” the remembering child's confrontation with the distress of his mixed cultural identity can only be recalled in the poetic expression of the adult narrator.“Introduction” and chapter 1, “Beginnings: Representing Memory,” outline the book's methodology to illustrate that Benjamin's model of reading and writing the past through its remnants in space, especially in cityscapes, can be transposed to texts beyond the western canon. Benjamin's own rendering of memory is itself predicated on Freud's theory of memory. In Freud, what the subject remembers emerges in consciousness as a trace that is a distorted representation. The fragmented and elliptical nature of memory resists the formation of a consistent autobiographical subject in Berlin Childhood and “Mother of Black Waters.” Reminiscing the spatial traces of old Pera's decaying buildings and their shabby interiors in writing crystallizes memory in space.“Beginnings” underwrites the multicultural past of Karasu's Pera with Benjamin's notion of rettende Kritik (salvaging critique). The rescue operation in Karasu's seemingly apolitical account is predicated on mnemonic images of disappearing spaces that precipitously light up. Benjamin's last essay, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“On the Concept of History”), where he formulates his idea of materialist theology, expresses the urgency of seizing the true image of the past that flits by at the moment of its recognizability. Otherwise, it will forever be irretrievable. This recognition, Gökberk suggests, is the salvaging critique in Karasu's Beyoğlu narratives that restore to history, through flashing images, the memory of the “others” vanished from Beyoğlu's social topography, mostly low-income women, widows, seamstresses of ambiguous ethno-cultural background. Excavating Memory places the remembering child in the tableaux of these fading lives, from which male figures, the grandfather and the uncle of the narrator, are absent. Familial memory of these men is associated with the tragedies of the last years of the Ottoman Empire, like the bloody counterrevolution of March 31, 1909, by religious sects against the Young Turks. The decline of the empire and “the old non-Muslim bourgeois order of Pera is thus projected onto the lives of the male family members” (163).Likewise, in Berlin Childhood, elusive memory is captured in writing that settles over the vanished sites of Berlin's Old West. In chapter 2, “From Berlin's Old West to Istanbul's Beyoğlu: Narratives of Memory, Narratives of Lost Topographies,” Benjamin's and Karasu's constructions or reconstructions of memory connect around the recovery of something to remember from a “lost place.” A comparative analysis of the figure of arcade in Benjamin and in Pera arcades shows that while the promise of pleasure inherent in the arcade was geared toward material consumption, this promise is set, both in Paris and in Istanbul, in the larger context of the drive to modernity. What Excavating Memory does well is not to bring Benjamin and Karasu into a tête á tête conversation but rather interweave their strategies of remembering through an examination of critical literature on both writers, particularly on Benjamin.Throughout the book, Gökberk pursues her critical objective of revealing how distortion and fragmentation of remembrances in Benjamin's and Karasu's autobiographical writings not only resist a historicist-positivist approach but also foreground space as a keeper of memory. She draws liberally on theories of remembering by Freud, Paul Ricoeur, Henri Bergson, and Maurice Halbwachs to illuminate configurations of mnemonic narratives in both Karasu and Benjamin. She also makes judicious use of Benjamin scholarship by German critics. Although the theoretical references elucidate the parallels in Karasu's and Benjamin's respective poetics of memory, it is important to emphasize that theory does not merely function as an overlay here, rather text and theory reciprocally explain each other. Reading Karasu and Benjamin through the lens of memory theories reveals political-historical and cultural imperatives of the structural distortions and discontinuities in their narratives.Karasu's life as a successful Turkish writer, who was neither persecuted nor forced into exile, cannot be likened to the interrupted life and work of Benjamin, first by denial into an academic career, then being forced into a continuous exile from which there was no return. However, Gökberk's study, more than any other biographical information about Karasu, portrays the writer's distinct and multiple “otherness” as a gay man and son of a Jewish father and a Greek Orthodox mother in a predominantly Muslim Turkey. Moreover, Karasu's portrayal as an “other” has implications that go far beyond the persona of the writer and reveal the dark pages of recent Turkish history. In chapter 4, “Bilge Karasu in Historical Context: Identity Formation in the Shadow of ‘Turkification,’” arguably one of the most compelling chapters of the book, Gökberk integrates Karasu's personal history into the larger history of Turkey's nation building, thereby bringing cultural and political critique to bear on literary life. The chapter outlines the Turkification policies of the Republic from its foundation in 1923 through the 1960s, which included the Capital Levy on minorities, the “Citizen, speak Turkish” campaign, and the pogrom of September 1955, predominantly targeting the Greek minority, whose stores and businesses were looted in an assault that was shamefully reminiscent of Kristallnacht. The mass hysteria was fomented by the political party in power, whose leaders are now seen as responsible for planting the seeds of political Islam in Turkey. Gökberk raises the question of why Karasu's work at the time, when he had established himself as an avant-garde writer, reveals no indication of the oppression he may have experienced as the offspring of an inter-ethnic, inter-religious couple. The ethnic otherness suppressed in his major writings emerges through the cracks in 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 profound ambiguity” (123). This to me justifies the sustained analysis of Beyoğlu narratives over Karasu's better known and prized avant-garde work.Chapter 9, “Crazy Meryem as the Saint of Beyoğlu's Marginalized: Toward a Final Reading of Difference,” a kind of excursus, portrays Meryem, the iconic ageless madwoman type, as a composite image of the dispossessed. A threshold figure, she takes the reader to the sights of a pluricultural Pera of a bygone age, from which she is already exiled. This devalued figure of the woman outcast hypothetically represents not only the old Christian widows clad in black and the street cats but also the childhood of the narrator.The “Conclusion” recapitulates major principles of the analytic approaches in the book. Here, Gökberk reflects that despite the connections between Karasu's and Benjamin's poetics of memory, their “configurations of the past do not always converge.” While Benjamin resists scripting a referential life story by operating “within the associative web of language,” à la Freud, Karasu proceeds by “covering and uncovering selfhood” (248). Nevertheless, she argues that the experience of displacement that defines a persecuted and exiled Jewish writer and a Turkish minority writer, who, as I see it, may have pursued a kind of innere Emigration, judging from the “cover” of his major works, remains the associative link between their memory texts.As the abovementioned citations from the book show, not only does the study present a sophisticated analysis of the poetics of memory, it is also written in a fluid style with highly quotable passages. Gökberk's commitment to situating Karasu in a world literary space he justly deserves was clearly a strong motivation for this comparative study of poetic remembrance. The final section of the book, “Prospectus for New Trajectories in Karasu Studies and Beyond,” suggests several directions for future Karasu criticism. Yet for many a reader the appreciation of Excavating Memory may remain incomplete—like the texts it analyzes—until the Beyoğlu narratives are translated. For this reviewer, the fact that neither author—especially Benjamin—lived to see the growing body of the posthumous laudatory reviews of their works, bathes these mnemonic narratives in the poignant light of their authors' fates.