lucian li

In his ethnography/autobiography Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk describes the archetype of Huzun (Melancholy) in Turkish cinema: the forlorn and defeated protagonist wanders the poor and decrepit back alleys of Istanbul before gazing wistfully at the Bosphorus. Urban Istanbullu existence is a recurrent theme in Turkish literature and  especially in the work of Orhan Pamuk and Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar. With the focus of Tanpinar and Pamuk on the city of Istanbul, it is no surprise that observation, depiction, and exploration of the city play critical roles in their works. 

Pamuk and Tanpinar’s characters are overwhelmingly male, well educated, cultured, and bourgeois. They wander the city aimlessly, observing and mingling with crowds of people. In this way, they resemble the Parisian flaneur (literally in French a ‘stroller, lounger, saunterer, or loafer’). Although these characters are not flaneurs in the original French sense, they occupy comparable social and cultural positions, interact with the world in a similar fashion, and observe and dissect the city and its denizens. At least on a superficial level, the characters parallel the archetype of the flaneur. Despite the similarities, Pamuk and Tanpinar’s works challenge and problematize the literary role of the flaneur and its association with and assertion of modernity.

In this paper, I will first establish the definition and historical context of the 19th century Parisian Flaneur before moving into a comparative analysis of how characters in A Mind at Peace, Istanbul, and The Black Book both conform to and challenge the original boundaries of the flaneur’s societal role in the following themes: the flaneur as an individual within the crowd, his ability to construct and undermine narratives of modernity and historical memory, his insightful gaze’s sense of chaotic urban life, and his ability to synthesize cultural meaning from those observations.

From Tanpinar and Pamuk’s treatment of the flaneur and careful adaptation to the Turkish context, there is a clear challenge to the Western and modernist roots of the flaneur. In creating characters who observe and document urban life in Istanbul, Tanpinar and Pamuk problematize the imposition of an observer’s imagined narratives, while Pamuk rejects the idea of empirically constructed narrative altogether and seeks to construct subjective experiences and motivations for flanerie.

Overview of Authors

To his contemporaries, Tanpinar was known as a professor of literature, public intellectual, and political figure. It was only after his death that he became regarded as an author of fiction. He was intimately involved with the project of Turkish modernization and Westernization after the establishment of the Turkish Republic and the Kemalist Cultural Revolution. His novels and poetry reflect this involvement in the nation building project and can generally be described as modernist due to their belief in progress and support of a nationalist social project. 

Tanpinar’s 1948 novel A Mind at Peace chronicles the deteriorating mental condition of a bourgeois Istanbullu, Mumtaz, as his faith in modernity collapses with Europe’s steady progress towards the chaos of the Second World War. The novel chronicles the struggles of and depicts Istanbul’s citizens and their surroundings.

Orhan Pamuk is a contemporary Turkish author whose works focus on the failures of Kemalism and Turkish modernity. He utilizes extensive archives of historical memory as well as stories and tropes from the Ottoman past. Pamuk is generally categorized as a postmodern author because of his rejection of objective truth, narratives of historical progress, and his utilization of multiperspectivalism and nonlinear chronologies. 

Pamuk’s Black Book is essentially a postmodern detective novel. The narrator’s wife disappears mysteriously, and the narrator embarks on a journey through Istanbul searching for clues. The narrative is interspersed with newspaper columns composed by the narrator’s brother-in-law Celal, who he is intensely jealous of. Eventually, the detective search is transformed into a spiritual quest for meaning and clarified identity as the narrator becomes involved with Sufism, or the mystical practice of Islam. 

Pamuk’s Istanbul serves as both an autobiography of the author’s youth and a history of representations of the city. Istanbul’s chapters focus on different visitors to, and observers of Istanbul and analyzes the impact of their ideologies, goals, and intellectual contexts on their interpretations of the city.

Defining the Flaneur

Originally, the flaneur was a bourgeois man who had an excess leisure time to stroll through Paris aimlessly, observing the crowd around him and documenting interesting urban sights and spectacles. He collected his observations and published them in “Physiologies” of the city, categorizing his observed subjects into different types based on their behavior and traits. The flaneur can be seen as a forerunner to “the reporter, to the detective and even to the international hyper-bourgeoisie, to dandies and travelers moving around the world with the aim of proving themselves and testing new experiences.”

In this way the flaneur participated in an effort to empirically document the progress and impacts of modernization, but as the role developed through the 1800s, it abandoned its ambition to depict the world through realism. During this period, the intellectual context shifted to favor more romantic and aesthetic representations in lieu of realism. As such, the flaneur’s role changed. The “avant-garde incarnation was uniquely committed to the defense of imagination against a narrowly scientific conception of modernity.” From the empirical physiologies, 19th century poet and social critic Charles Baudelaire’s “artist-flaneur” duplicated his “urban observations and description” on the “level of analogy and metaphor.” 

In contemporary sources, flaneurs, both original and avant garde, were assigned near-superhuman abilities of decoding and translating the chaos of urban existence into coherent modernist narratives. With their refined artistic sensibilities and impressive creativity, they could interpret images, experiences, and observations and essentially “read” and “write” the city as a text. Consequently, flaneurs were generally coded as cultured and well educated. 

Later on, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin played a critical role in reviving the role of the flaneur in literary criticism through the works of Baudelaire. He connected the flaneur with not only modernity, but specifically with the impacts of capitalism on urban life. He “stressed the flaneur’s embeddedness in commercial mass culture and his intimate links with mid-century journalism and popular literature.” To Benjamin, the flaneur was a professional observer, whose role in a capitalist society was to see and document everything. This participation in the capitalist market complicated the flaneur’s cultural production, drawing critiques as a “literary prostitution” functionally commodifying both cultural production and the flaneur himself.

Individuals and the Crowd

As a product of modernity, the flaneur is placed into a hybrid state vis-a-vis his individual creative talent and his reliance on his ability to observe crowds and society from an insider’s perspective. This tension is best described in the literature as being “alone in the crowd.” This state causes the flaneur to be “melancholic but also open to contacts” and both a passive spectator and an active participant in interpreting and rewriting reality with his own work. 

The flaneur’s “peculiar combination of private and public qualities that distinguished him from both heroes of antiquity and the modern bourgeois. Like modern life itself, the flâneur was anonymous in his outward appearance. He lacked all recognizable images or physical traces that would have distinguished him from others.” This lack of individuality in terms of outward appearances is starkly contrasted with the enormous creative individuality necessary for the flaneur’s existence. 

Thus, even in this hybrid state, the individual nature of the flaneur still took precedence: “Rather than being a type, defined by codes applicable to all members of the class, the avant-garde flâneur was a unique individual, who represented...originality. His identity was based...on masks, disguises and incognitos, through which he defined his empathic identification with modernity”.

In Baudelaire’s reformulation of the flaneur as an artist, we see this underlying tension resurface. “The pre-I850 flaneur strives to understand the individual Other in his or her otherness, the homme desfoules (man of the crowd), as described by Baudelaire, seeks to lose all selfhood in a quasi-mystic (or quasi-orgasmic) fusion with 'la foule' considered as an undifferentiated and anonymous mass. Flaneurs rejoice in their anonymity and long to become one with the crowd. This status as “I with an insatiable appetite for the non-I” reflects a desire to “take part in universal communion” with the “non-I.” Despite this desire, the act of flanerie distinguishes the flaneur from the urban crowd and imposes an extreme individualism, almost solipsism, upon the flaneur, bearing interesting similarities to the Sufi journey and their unrequited desire for unity and annihilation with their ‘beloved.’

With the democratization of urbanism and the mixing of bourgeois with the urban poor in the boulevards of Paris, flaneurs and other bourgeois were plunged into “jostling crowds” and confronted with the stark reality of “urban poverty.” The power of the individual flaneur to decipher the meaning of modernity and the characterization of the nature of modern existence as positive were challenged by confrontation with these harsh truths. “At the end, flanerie was an ideological attempt to re-privatize social space, and to give assurance that the individual's passive observation was adequate for knowledge of social reality.” Fundamentally, the flaneur channels the mass communal experiences of poverty and urbanization and reframes them as an individual’s observations and personal reflections. 

In Istanbul, Pamuk’s conception of Huzun inverts the expectations of flanerie. A man wanders the streets of the city, but instead of becoming a “flaneur alone [taking] possession of the streets” or a “unique individual who represented a principle of differentiation and originality,” he is subsumed by the crowd, and his individual story, experiences, and struggles are made unimportant. Pamuk’s final definition of huzun is the erosion of an individual’s will to stand against the values and mores of the community. He tellingly contrasts this with the furious ambition of glorifying the spirit of the modern city. The weight of history from the city’s “sights and streets and famous views” forms huzun, not the individual story of the protagonist. Pamuk’s huzun seeker is not searching for images of progress and modernity to creatively narrativize; he has instead chosen to surrender to the weight of communal and historical destiny and turns to the ruins of lost empire. Through huzun, the flaneur “in the crowd but not of the crowd” can achieve the unity with the “non-I.”

Constructions of Modernity and History

The flaneur’s intimate connection with modernity cannot be overstated. He could not have existed without the mass urbanization associated with industrialization and modernization. Although some aspects of the flaneur type-parodied and challenged aspects of social norms and expectations, flanerie depended upon and reinforced ideologies of modernity. 

Contemporary depictions of the flaneur “stressed the public and heroic potential of the city. They suggested that modern life, despite its anonymity, had the capacity to produce epic images of its own greatness that would render itself transparent to observers.” Through empirical documentation, early flaneurs supposedly used their “power of vision [to] humanize the urban landscape and overcome the inherent illegibility of the modern world.” Modernization depends on clear and rational narratives of progress to perpetuate and legitimize the social upheaval and fundamental reform necessary for transition, and flaneurs provided the empirical evidence and creative frameworks necessary to support such narratives.

Beyond their actions and ideological allegiance, the figure of the flaneur itself captures and reflects the modern urban experience. Within the experience and fundamental assumptions of flanerie, we can see common themes of alienation, psychology of distraction from stimulation, and social and gender configurations of the city which define consumer capitalist societies. The inability of the flaneur to escape alienation even as he is amidst a crowd, the constant search for interesting diversions to document and publish, and the almost exclusively male and upper class composition of real-world flaneurs all reflect fundamental truths about 19th century modernity.

The flaneur’s dependence on and reinforcement of modernism obviously did not guarantee unflinching support. Although the flaneur’s uniform of a “black coat and top hat” mirrored bourgeois fashions exactly, “they signalled...ironic detachment from the dominant social order.” This irony presented a “subtle challenge to bourgeois norms of propriety, discipline and conformity” and “problematized conventional bourgeois definitions of modern life.” This is similar to the postmodernist “complicit critique” posited by Hutcheon.

As modernization efforts progressed, the role of the flaneur became more incompatible with some realities of modern urban life. The flaneur “could no longer claim to embody the totality of the social and cultural values of an emerging urban modernity. He stood in increasing opposition to the new city emerging out of Haussmann’s monumental urban renewal project, which was transforming Paris into a rational, predictable, visually coherent, but emotionally alienating urban landscape.”

Tanpinar writes in support of Turkish modernism and nationalism in a period of precarity for the new Turkish Republic. In Pamuk’s view, Tanpinar and his friend poet Yahya Kemal “had a political agenda” to “look for signs of a new Turkish state, a new Turkish nationalism” in the ruins. Tanpinar’s “Stroll Through the City’s Poor Neighborhoods” (both the text and the real life action) fits neatly into the framework of flanerie and modernism: he is searching for images of “beautiful sights that endowed the city’s dwellers with the huzun of the ruined past” and the “poor, defeated, and deprived Muslim population, to prove they had not lost one bit of their identity.” In A Mind at Peace we see the juxtaposition of scenes of poverty and “backwardness” with the “lone electric lamp burning as if to augment the dimness of the mosque,” a symbol for the interplay between Western and modern “enlightenment” and the darkness of religion and the past. This is followed by the claim that “everything that might be termed national is a thing of beauty...and must persist eternally.” A Mind at Peace uses images of poverty and deprivation to support the Kemalist modernization project; the images serve a dual purpose: a reminder of the progress still left to be made and of a unifying national self-image found in the purity of impoverished Turks.

Could we say then that Pamuk’s characters reinforce a “postmodern ideology” through their underlying assumptions, observations and literary production in the same way that the flaneur and Tanpinar reinforce modernist ideology?

In Istanbul’s Huzun chapter, Pamuk also gives a laundry list of huzun-filled experiences and observations, most of which include poverty, backwardness, and inferiority. He uses this in an effort to construct an Istanbullu identity, a more cosmopolitan and historically informed identity not based on the coerced modernity of the Turkish nation. Pamuk as “flaneur becomes an allegorical figure who reveals the transformation visible in the urban cityscape and the early harbinger of a major economic transformation.” 

In The Black Book’s chapter “Who Killed Shams of Tabriz”, we gain some insight into the motivations of the characters’ strolling through the streets of the city. Rumi’s (and Galip’s) search through “every street in that city” is not a search for images with which to construct narrative, it is a part of a mystical Sufi journey. Although it is framed in modernist terms evoking the idea of the traditional flaneur (a detective’s empirical and rational search for a missing beloved), it is clear that the outcome is predetermined, and the journey is not about finding objective truth at all. Pamuk sources alternate motivations for the experience of urban observation and exploration from Islamicate tradition, and provides an alternate motivation: a subjective spiritual exploration instead of a search for objective representation. 

The Gaze

The flaneur’s most important characteristic is his ability to observe and interpret daily scenes of urban existence. The flaneur “observes the city with intelligence and distinction” and uses his “overdeveloped sensibilities to dwell on mysteries and telling details.” In the logic of the flaneurs, “all objects were capable of yielding beauty and pleasure and the products of popular culture were as worthy of admiration as elite art.” The gaze of the flaneur itself determines the aesthetic quality, not the subjects of his observation. This conception of the flaneur privileges the observer over the observed, and this power imbalance has rightfully attracted postcolonial and feminist criticism.  “The flaneur...as a man who takes visual possession of the city...has emerged in postmodern feminism discourse as the embodiment of the 'male gaze'. He represents men's visual and voyeuristic mastery over women.”

The power dynamic of the flaneur’s gaze can also be compared to that of a western tourist. “The tourist may merely impose his/her ideas and values on to the host culture and come away more confirmed than ever in gender, race, age and/or ethnic superiority.” Similarly, the flaneur represents the urban poor using his refined aesthetic sense and creativity. Their daily rituals and lives are used as a canvas upon which the flaneur can project his own ideas and images. The unique relationship between the flaneur and the urban environment was invariably characterized by the metaphor of the city as text and the flaneur as reader and writer. This relation obviously implies a degree of domination and control as to which images are represented and how they are conveyed and framed. 

In the capitalist logic of division of labor, the flaneur’s “single occupation...is to see and see everything.” He is represented as almost superhuman in his perceptive abilities. “Nothing escapes the investigative gaze of the flaneur as he centers the “seen world” on his reflections and observations.” Engaging in observation as a profession not only makes him the most qualified possible observer, it also means that he is able to devote enormous amounts of time and effort. One anecdote about a flaneur and a scarf display describes this devotion: “the flaneur remains transfixed before the same object for hours, engaged in complex reflection about the fashion trends indicated by the cloth, about the factory processes that went into its making, about the far-off places where the raw materials originated. What had appeared as an isolated and self-contained commodity to the common observer was transformed by the flâneur’s imagination into a coherent story of exotic adventure and heroic creation.”

In A Mind at Peace, Tanpinar’s Mumtaz witnesses a street porter and immediately converts his observation into a grotesque analogy to European sculpture:

“A street porter approached in slow motion, bearing a massive load on his back, his neck and torso weighted down under the burden...in a rather bold economy of line...For Mumtaz, this anatomical geometry recalled Pierre Puget’s caryatids in Toulon. But he immediately doubted his own description. Did such an economy of line truly exist? Voila, this was a head that had been adjoined to the torso. But that wasn’t quite accurate either.” Mumtaz aestheticizes the suffering of the porter, and projects a westernized cultural reference onto the body of the porter. The man is decomposed into a series of lines and shapes and reconstituted as a beautiful geometric statue. Mumtaz realizes the futility of this cause:

“He doesn’t resemble Puget’s giants at all. They display an expression of taut muscle and might emanating from the entire body. Meanwhile, this poor man has been swallowed whole by the load on his back. In his mind’s eye, Mumtaz once again conjured the man’s face in all its vividness. It bore neither any expression of strength nor any trace of thought.”

Tanpinar heavily relies on the techniques and idea of the flaneur in his work, but he also critiques the power dynamic inherent between observer and observed. Although Tanpinar is cognizant of the problems with representation and the power of his gaze and he works to challenge notions that his observations can represent objective truth, the practice of flanerie is too important to his ideological and political project to abandon. 

In Istanbul, Pamuk discusses Melling, a baroque Western traveler who lived in Istanbul and flaneur-adjacent figure, and upholds him as an “insider” who saw “the details and materials of Istanbul as its own inhabitants saw them and was not interested in exoticizing or orientalizing his scenes.” We see again the same imbalance in power between observer and observed, but surprisingly, Pamuk seems to accept it as a matter of course: “the İstanbullus of his time did not know how to paint themselves or their city—indeed, had no interest in doing so...he saw the city like an İstanbullu but painted it like a clear-eyed Westerner, Melling’s Istanbul is not only a place graced by hills, mosques, and landmarks we can recognize, it is a place of sublime beauty.” Through painting, Melling represents the Istanbullus who are unable to represent themselves; he isn’t tapping into any kind of communal huzun to understand Istanbul, he is simply present, observant, and creative. Rather than documenting modernity, Pamuk’s Melling focuses on a smaller project: the realist depiction of scenes of daily life in Istanbul. 

Conclusion

Clearly, both Pamuk and Tanpinar are heavily influenced by the flaneur. As a character archetype, the flaneur plays a significant role in most works by these authors, and flanerie takes center stage in many of their plots. Tanpinar explicitly uses urban observation to construct a modern Turkish identity and thus parallels the original literary construction of the flaneur closely. He begins to critique certain aspects of flanerie, particularly the power imbalance between observer and observed, and the projection of narratives and aesthetic judgments onto the observed subjects. Pamuk echoes most superficial aspects of the flaneur in his characters: their actions, class, and education, but abandons the fundamental assumption that they can produce coherent narratives based on objective observations. He also attempts to end the dominance of the archetype of the flaneur by finding historical antecedents for urban observers in non-Western traditions.

Bibliography

Buck-Morss, Susan. “The flaneur, the sandwichman and the whore: the politics of loit- ering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99-140.

Gluck, Mary. “The flaneur and the aesthetic: Appropriation of urban culture in mid-19th-century Paris.” Theory, Culture & Society 20.5 (2003): 53-80.

Hutcheon, Linda. The politics of postmodernism. Routledge, 2003.

Laschinger, Verena. “Flaneuring into the Creative Economy: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City.” The Explicator 67.2 (2009): 102-105.

Lauster, Martina. “Walter Benjamin’s Myth of the” Flâneur”.” The Modern Language Review (2007): 139-156.

Nuvolati, Giampaolo. “The flâneur: A way of walking, exploring and interpreting the city.” Walking in the European City: Quotidian Mobility and Urban Ethnogra phy (2014): 21-40.

Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul. Editions Gallimard, 2018.

Pamuk, Orhan. The Black Book. Vintage, 2006.

Shaya, Gregory. “The Flaneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860-1910.” American Historical Review 109.1 (2004): 41-77.

Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi. A Mind at Peace. Archipelago, 2011.

Wearing, Betsy, and Stephen Wearing. “Refocussing the tourist experience: The flaneur and the choraster.” Leisure studies 15.4 (1996): 229-243.