The invisible dome and the unbuilt bridge: Contemporary fiction and the mythologies of Ottoman architecture

Abstract

This essay investigates the representation of sixteenth-century architecture during the Ottoman Empire in Elif Shafak’s The Architect’s Apprentice (2014) and Mathias Enard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants (2018). Working with Walter Benjamin’s concept of architecture as testimony to mythology, the essay classifies the novels as architecture-ologies which demythologise empire at a moment of literal construction. The essay argues that, via the symbols of dome and bridge, the novels intervene in contemporary Ottoman nostalgia, both by treating architecture as memorialising transcultural exchange, and by reconstructing memories of transcultural violence founding the architecture and the Ottoman Empire. Building on the dialogue between literature and architecture, particularly Henry James’ ‘house of fiction’, the essay reveals how the novels’ ekphrases – their trans-mediation of dome and bridge into different forms of historical fiction – put into narrative perspective the imperial conquests and transcultural violence supporting the architecture of Sinan and Michelangelo.