"To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world. " - Orhan Pamuk

Istanbul: Memories and the City is a melancholic evocation of Istanbul’s history and fate refracted in the form of memories of past and present, connecting with Pamuk’s life experience. Bridge and Watson (2008) described that the effect of the city on the imagination contains a tension between the conditions of the city itself. Proceeding in a dialectical fashion moving between descriptions of Istanbul and the struggle of being an artist, Pamuk comes to realize how the city can constitute a site of constraint and stimulation, and ultimately, act as a catalyst for him to search for self-actualization.

 

The unplayed piano and the untouched Chinese porcelains present as a symbol revealing a melancholic atmosphere that thwarts the artistic life – people are less than enthusiastic if their children wish to embark on an artistic career. Pamuk’s mother also represents the ‘normal, ordinary people… carried a great deal of traditional morality’ (323) in Istanbul who show no respect for art. This huzun permeated the city has acted to consolidate it in collective imagination as tradition. The truth that Istanbul ‘had fallen into poverty, lost its strength, its will and appetite’ (323) constrains the residents’ imagination that no masterpiece can come out of a place like this. It has become a shared consciousness, shaped by the decline of Istanbul and the assimilation of an alien westernization. The city separates the self from imagination and creativity as he writes, ‘I knew my part would be to resist the broken-down, humble, melancholy life that was offering and with it the comforting the ordinariness my mother wanted for me.’ (324) He looks at Istanbul as a source, fit of authority, repression and compunction that forces him to give up being a painter.

 

One may ask: why did he not leave the city? It is paradoxical when Pamuk looks to the city as a source of self-realization. ‘Here we come to the heart of the matter,’ he writes in chapter one, ‘I have never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood. My imagination requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing on the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it made me who I am.’ His muse for literature is inspired by the city as he learns how to read and re-write it through texts and images in his strolls. The photographs he used is not ‘the sun-drenched postcard views that the tourists so loved’, but ‘the semi-darkness of the backstreets (329)’, demonstrating that the city is dominated by shadows and tones of greyness, caught in between the black and white as a parallel to the conflicts he encounters personally, culturally and geographically. His last photograph, showing a dark corner of the street with the blinking neon lights (333), is a moment when reality slides imperceptibly into imagination – a flow of phantasmagoria that causes Pamuk ‘desire to run away’. Nevertheless, his realization of being a writer is stimulated. He later has shown hope to young writers how he witnessed the city of ruins, spent his life battling with the huzun and opened up his own vision of Istanbul.