Haunting the Mediterranean? Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Its Politics of the Afterwardly

Abstract

This chapter identifies a “critically Mediterranean” agenda by means of exploring an affiliation with those efforts at re-membering, re-calling, reaffirming oneself and often also one’s community that operate against the perilous tide of a prolonged alienation of political memory. The chapter begins with the author’s own first-hand account of the dismantling of the old Inci Pastanesi, the Istanbullu patisserie symbolically associated with the cosmopolitan history of the city’s Beyoglu neighborhood. Reflecting on a condition wherein memory comes to be reduced to a desire to recall without an apposite referent or interlocutor, without the fulfilling object of its labor, the chapter broaches the question of an opening up of the resources and symptoms of a melancholy born in the course of the orphanization of cultural-political memory itself. Through a critical reading of salient passages from Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Black Book, this chapter dissects some of the arising implications of a national memory dispossessed by an incumbent political discourse for the possibility of relational and requital-oriented modes of remembrance. Arguing for a perspective on Mediterraneity as a dynamic of affectional and memorial exchange, the author shines a light on a memorial body of writing willing to receive and to re-mediate its anxious accounts into a transregional traffic of accident, of recall, and of fugitive historic affections.