A Global World

Paul Auster, Orhan Pamuk, and the Postmodern Allegory in a
Global World
Nesrin Degirmencioglu
Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 58, Number 1, 2021, pp. 124-145

(Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/781866
[ Access provided at 7 Mar 2021 02:03 GMT from CNRS BiblioSHS ]

paul auster, orhan pamuk, and the postmodern
allegory in a global world
Nesrin Degirmencioglu
abstract
Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book both gener-
ated critical reception from deconstructive and poststructuralist angles. In
this article, by pursing a historical materialist analysis, I explore how these
postmodern city novels of the 1980s, which emerge from drastically different
geographic, political, and cultural circumstances, respond to the impositions
of global economic dynamics. In this context, I argue that the conflict between
the apparent freedoms of globalization and the increasing entrapment of the
postmodern subject constitutes the main dilemma of postmodern aesthetics.
Auster’s City of Glass and Pamuk’s The Black Book register this postmodern
dilemma in their respective forms through recourse to the metaphor of the
“city as illegible text” and to the broken signifying systems of postmodern
allegory. Focusing on these two literary techniques, I examine their differen-
tial appropriations in the core and the periphery of the world literary system
in order to gauge how the experience of urban modernity—as shaped by
particular cultural, social, and economic developments—contributes in turn
to the shaping of literary form.
keywords: Postmodern allegory, neoliberal economy, world literature, Paul
Auster, Orhan Pamuk
The central paradox of the postmodern era arises from the incongruity
between what David Harvey calls “the collapse of spatial barriers” in his
time–space compression thesis1 and Fredric Jameson’s notion of the impos-
sibility of cognitive mapping, which shows the postmodern subject’s inability
to securely locate himself within the multinational network enveloping the
doi: 10.5325/complitstudies.58.1.0124
comparative literature studies, vol. 58, no. 1, 2021.
Copyright © 2021. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
124
THE POST MODERN ALLEGORY IN A GLOBAL WORLD 125
postmodern urbanscape.2 The conflict between the apparent freedoms of

globalization and the increasing entrapment of the postmodern subject
constitutes the main dilemma of postmodern aesthetics. The more spatial
barriers collapse on the global scale, the more the subject is confined by a
set of prescribed and weightless consumerist choices on a local, often urban
scale. In spite of the fact that New York increasingly became a global city
hosting the headquarters of international firms from the 1960s onwards, it is
striking that the postmodern art, which takes New York as its setting, tends
to leave economic globalization and the collapse of international barriers
out of its scope.
In line with this assumption, Paul Auster’s The City of Glass and Orhan
Pamuk’s The Black Book both generated critical reception from deconstructive
and poststructuralist angles due to the ambiguity of the novels’ meaning
and their explicit engagement with deconstructive themes, such as language
and loss of its function, and the obscurity of the novels’ meaning and their
nihilistic endings. Going against the grain, in this article, I explore the his-
torical materialist roots of postmodernism: How does the shift of economic
system from Fordist manufacturing in the 1920s toward finance capitalism in
the 1980s change the individual’s experience of modernity and their ability
to cognitively map their location within an increasingly global economic
system? What impact does this change have on the novel’s form; as a result,
how does the novel’s form reveal the subject’s experience of postmodern city?
By positioning New York and Istanbul as part of a singular world economic
system (in Jameson’s terms),3 I focus on how postmodern allegory evolved
in American and Turkish literary spaces as a response to the changing socio-
economic conditions of the 1980s.
Hans-Georg Gadamer reveals the opposition of symbol and allegory
by noting that they “are opposed as art is opposed to non-art, in that the
former seems endlessly suggestive in the indefiniteness of its meaning,
whereas the latter, as soon as its meaning is reached, has run its full course.”4
This depiction reveals allegory’s centuries-long legacy as a didactic mode
of literary representation in which it stands for, and is limited to, a rigid
meaning, which is not intrinsic to itself. At the birth of allegory as a post-
modern mode of literary representation, Paul de Man’s seminal essay “The
Rhetoric of Temporality,” written in 1968, emerges as a strong defense of
allegory over symbol. He breaks with the Romantics’ reception of allegory
as “dryly rational and dogmatic in its reference to meaning” and defends it
against being regarded as “an anachronism and dismissed as nonpoetic.”5
The 1970s, on the other hand, witnessed a shift in the intellectual climate
of art criticism as Benjamin, Adorno, and other Frankfurt School thinkers’
126 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S
work was translated into English and became influential in Anglophone

criticism. The indebtedness of Benjamin’s early works in allegory and their
availability in English translation, coinciding with the economic changes of
the period, gave rise to the emergence of postmodern allegory in the form
of a broken allegory, in which the correlation between the signifier and the
signified is made so obscure that it opens the narrative to endless interpre-
tation. Therefore, the symbol’s superiority, arising from the relativity of its
meaning, is superseded by this new form of postmodern allegory.
Bainard Cowan notes that “as Benjamin insists, the truth is the form.
Representation is thus not to be viewed for its end product but for its pro-
cess. The activity of representation is the dwelling-place of truth, the only
‘place’ where truth is truly present.”6 Benjamin’s emphasis on the relation-
ship between truth and form evokes the continuity between the modern
and postmodern novel, each of which creates a form that could capture the
condition of its time. Nevertheless, the experimental realism of modernist
works such as Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer and the use of postmodern
allegory in Auster’s City of Glass reveal the transformation in socioeconomic
conditions in the city especially after the 1970s. Manhattan Transfer, depicting
the booming 1910s and 1920s when the city’s high-rise buildings were being
constructed at an accelerated rate, registers the city and its unevenly developed
social and urban infrastructure through the fragmented life stories of the
characters. In an era when the city itself comes into being as a powerful center
of economic relations and begins to grow beyond the subject’s cognition,
Dos Passos constructs Manhattan Transfer’s fragmented form as a substitute
for the city, aiming to capture its totality.7 In contrast, Auster’s City of Glass
captures 1980s New York, a phase when the city has lost its centrality as the
locus of commercial flows. In other words, local circumstances are increasingly
determined by global economic forces. Thus, postmodern allegory, which
could relate the unevenly developed urban environment to abstract global
financial flows, emerges as a new form of literary representation and shifts
the focus of the novel from the city constituted by subjective stories to the
subject’s fragmentary perspective of the urban environment.
Allegory’s relationship with language, and the latter’s transformation
into a system of signifiers, which do not yield into a terrain of signifieds, is a
progressive development. As Graham Gilloch argues in Myth and Metropolis:
“The object, the detail, the forms of nature, in that they can mean anything
and everything, come to mean precisely nothing. Allegory involves the
hollowing out of meaning. Language becomes an expanse of empty signs
‘signifying nothing.”’8 This examination implies an intrinsic analogy between
allegory’s relationship with language and the neoliberal turn’s with the urban
infrastructure. Allegory destroys the one-to-one correspondence between the

signifier and the signified and enhances language with new possibilities of
representation. In the postmodern novel, the emergence of broken allegory
takes this transformation to the point where signifiers become so obscure
that the novels are a maze of signifiers without signifieds.
At this point, one might question: To what extend postmodern allegory
differs from Gadamer’s notion of symbol, which he defines as “endlessly
suggestive in the indefiniteness of its meaning”?9 The key to answer this
question lies in the fact that in postmodern allegory, a set of obscure symbols
should come together to denote to a structure that is beyond themselves and
only the totality of these symbols provide a consistent reading. In Auster’s
City of Glass, for example, Stillman Sr.’s locking up of his son in 1960 (in
reality a date that coincides with the emergence of problems in Fordism),10
building of the new Tower of Babel, which may signify the modelling of
a new economic system (transformation of the economy from Fordism
to finance, insurance and real estate [FIRE] services), and creation of the
mentally retarded Stillman Jr. in the end, which may denote to the creation
of disadvantaged masses, may provide a critique of New York’s economic
transformation between the 1960s and the 1980s, only if these symbols are
perceived altogether as part of a broader narrative structure.
Allegory leads to the death of language, or the death of the signifying
chain, by depriving words of their original meaning, and ironically, through
the destruction of the signifying chain, it redeems the individual subject’s
experience of urban reality in the sense that the physical infrastructure in
the postmodern city can be likened to the words that allegory transforms.
In order to be able to cognitively map one’s location within the urbanscape,
physical infrastructures need to give way to the underlying economic dynam-
ics and should be resurrected through abstraction and cognition to provide
a broader narrative of capitalist modernity. Allegory, providing room for the
abstraction of the concrete urbanscape (or the neoliberal turn that disguises
itself in the form of fragments), captures urban modernity, which is beyond
the perception of the postmodern subject.
With regard to the postmodern subject, Jameson argues, “in lived expe-
rience [postmodernism] makes itself felt by the so-called death of the subject,
or, more exactly, the fragmented and schizophrenic decentering and dispersion
of this last” (“Cognitive Mapping” 351, italics added). When the economic
and urban transformations of the era are considered, this statement appears
problematic. How does integration of the globe lead to disintegration of
the subject? Despite accelerated global economic integration, which turns
the world into a “global village” and makes the whole planet available for
investment and accumulation, on the urban scale the subject, through dereg-
ulation and the retreat of the state from welfare expenditure, is deprived of
social securities and through the political emphasis on individualism, this
transformation leads to the breakdown of social relations and increases the
postmodern subject’s isolation. The lack of social protections and social
bonds leads to the disintegration of the subject, by reducing his perception
of the city into discontinuous fragments, which manifests itself in Auster’s
fragmented narration. In order to understand the conditions surrounding
the subject, the effects of global transformation on the urban environment
are worth investigating further.
Robert Fitch portrays New York as unique in its loss of three quarters of a
million manufacturing jobs since the late 1950s, and as a city where “the whole
structure of employment shifted from a 2:1 ratio of manufacturing to FIRE
[Finance, Insurance and Real Estate] to a 1:2 ratio.”11 The rapid changes in
economic policy were implemented at the expense of social securities for
blue-collar workers, leaving 750,000 people unemployed.12 The cuts in welfare
expenditures that followed the 1975 fiscal crisis sharpened the unevenness
among social classes and created a sense of insecurity especially for lower
income groups. The powers of trade unions were curbed and workers were
hired on short-term contracts, which created flexible labor markets.13 As a
result, “wage freezes and cutbacks in public employment and social provi-
sion (education, public health, and transport services)” were implemented.14
Commodification dominated every aspect of life, including social security
in the absence of state protections. As Harvey explains, “[i]ndividuals buy
products in the market that sell social protections instead. Individual security
is therefore a matter of individual choice tied to the affordability of finan-
cial products embedded in risky financial markets.”15 As a result, social life
becomes increasingly dominated by the rules of flexible markets, creating a
sense of insecurity, ephemerality, and transience in accordance with the turn
to neoliberalism in the economy.
The postmodern subject’s inability to locate himself within the multi-
national network and his perception of the postmodern condition through
“fragmented and schizophrenic decentering” (as Jameson argues)16 can be
attributed to the dilemmas created by the globalization of the economy
through neoliberal decentering of industrial and social services; on the
urban scale, the result is isolated individuals deprived of social protections.
Thatcher’s rhetoric suggests that in neoliberalism all “forms of social solidar-
ity were to be dissolved in favour of individualism, private property, personal
responsibility and family values.”17 Her ideology reflects the paradoxical
relation between neoliberal policies strengthening the global economic
integration in favor of a free-market economy, whereas on the urban scale the

system produces isolated individuals deprived of social bonds and protections.
The adoption of neoliberal policies in the 1980s during the Ronald
Reagan years also exacerbated income inequality in the city. John Hull
Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells note that “For the bottom 20 per cent of
the city’s households, conditions worsened in absolute terms, while the top
10 per cent of the population experienced a real income gain of over 20 per
cent.”18 City of New York’s Human Resources Administration records that
“despite the decade of economic expansion, poverty increased from 15 per
cent in 1975 (about 20 per cent over the national average) to 23 per cent in
1987 (almost twice the national average).”19 As these figures suggest, economic
growth exacerbated income polarization in New York.
Despite the diversity of occupational strata, Mollenkopf and Castells
emphasize that the main opposition within the division of labor is between
the “upper professionals of the corporate sector,” who are “directly linked
to the development of the New York City’s corporate economy,” and the
remaining highly diverse social strata.20 They define this prosperous upper
middle class (or lower upper class) as “executives, managers, and professionals,
whose share of total labour force in New York is now close to 30 per cent.”21
The remaining social strata comprise clerical workers, low-skilled workers,
immigrant manual workers (particularly Dominicans and Chinese), mid-
dle-class native minorities based in the public sector, and informal workers.22
As their analyses reveal, apart from the upper middle class, constituting
30 percent of the occupational strata, the majority of the population did
not benefit from the prosperity that the economic expansion of the 1980s
brought to the city.
This neoliberal transformation in New York’s social and economic envi-
ronment manifests itself in Auster’s City of Glass through the transformation
of New York urbanscape into a palimpsest of two overlapping allegorical
narratives: Stillman Sr.’s project of inventing a new language and Quinn’s
downward trajectory disguised as an author’s obsession with the protagonists
of his detective stories. Mapping all the steps that Stillman Sr. takes, Quinn
deciphers the shape of each day’s journey as a particular letter denoting to
“The Tower of Babel,” and Stillman Sr. associates a new language’s revival
in the 1960s with the construction of a new tower.23 According to Stillman:
Once completed the tower would be large enough to hold every

inhabitant of the New World. There would be a room for each per-
son, and once he entered that room, he would forget everything he
knew. After forty days and forty nights, he would emerge a new man,
speaking God’s language, prepared to inhabit the second, everlasting

paradise.24
It can be argued that there is a link between the building of the new tower
and the establishment of a new economic system in the city. The transfor-
mation to producer services in New York was made possible with the flight
of manufacturing to the suburbs and the further collapse of spatial barriers
to global destinations offering cheap and flexible labor markets.25 This
approach parallels capitalist propaganda, which, like the Tower, claimed to
bring benefit to all mankind. For Chicago school economics, for example,
“the free market is a perfect system, one in which individuals, acting on
their own self-interested desires, create the maximum benefits for all”.26
Although, in theory, both the building of the new Babel and the neoliberal
turn aim to benefit all human beings, in practice they produce the mentally
retarded Stillman Jr. and unemployed and impoverished masses, finding its
representation in Quinn’s downward trajectory.
The latter seems to parallel the middle-/working-class subject’s
downward trajectory in postmodern era. Deprived of the socioeconomic
opportunities, the economic boom of the 1979 to 1987 period brought to the
upper middle class, the middle-/working-class subject experienced economic
growth paradoxically through the deterioration in his standard of living,
through urban displacement as a result of the sharp increase in real estate val-
ues, resulting in his compulsory move out of Manhattan, or, in more extreme
cases, through homelessness and marginalization. Quinn’s postmodern
dislocation, emerging out of the feeling of ephemerality and transience that
creative destruction and gentrification create in the city, seems to embody this
transformation.
Limiting the postmodern subject to a single social class, however, would
be misleading. As the case of Stillman Jr. implies, even the individuals born
into the upper class might suffer from the feeling of insecurity, postmodern
dislocation (manifesting itself in Stillman Jr.’s disappearance in the end), and
identity crisis (revealing itself in his statement “My name is Peter Stillman
[ Jr.]. . . . That is not my real name. My real name I cannot remember.”) (16).
Stillman Jr.’s amnesiac mental state, calling himself as “the boy who can’t
remember” (16), emerging from his mistreatment by his father Stillman Sr.,
might metaphorically embody how the postmodern subject experiences the
postmodern condition through the loss of his urban and individual historicity,
no matter what social class he belongs to.
Although I would tend to interpret the allegorical story of the fall of
the Tower, and of Stillman Sr.’s attempts to reinvent a new language as
representing the failure of the capitalist system to provide for the welfare of
all citizens, the signifying chain in the novel is too obscure to be interpreted
from any single perspective. As Paul de Man argues “[a]llegorical narratives tell
the story of the failure to read. . . . Allegories are always allegories of metaphor
and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading.”27 De
Man, setting up metaphor as the building block of allegory, emphasizes that
neither the literal nor the figurative reading of it can escape ambiguity. In
other words, ambiguity is immanent in allegory.
In line with this argument, in City of Glass, the obscurity of meaning is
mainly created by the construction of two allegorical stories on an impenetra-
ble symbol, the Tower of Babel. By intersecting Stillman’s story with Quinn’s
footsteps in the city, the novel suggests existence of a dialectic between the
city’s built environment and this overarching allegorical framework. The
landmarks of Quinn’s stroll embody two phases of the city’s economic history:
the rise of Fordism and the industrial establishments in the 1920s, embodied
in the image of the Flatiron building, and from the 1970s onwards, the rise
of the producer services, depicted in the images of the World Trade Centre
and the United Nations Headquarters.
These buildings are, however, secluded towers of business mainly
inaccessible to the middle- and lower class inhabitants. Quinn passes three
of the buildings and his only interaction with them is the lunch he has in
one of the fast-food places in the World Trade Centre before his economic
means completely disappear.28 Apart from this interaction, Quinn has no
perception of the role this building plays in the city’s growing economy. As
Matthew Drennan points out, “[t]he strong expansion in producer services
since 1977 has led to their increased dominance of New York City’s export
base. By 1989, they represented 78 per cent of the city’s export industries’
employment, up from 68 per cent in 1977.”29 The increasing dominance of
the producer services in the city’s export output played a significant role in
the economic boom. The World Trade Centre, built in 1973, was mainly
constructed for vitalizing the producer services in the downtown Manhattan.
Despite the building’s significance in the transformation of the economy
from 1977 onwards, Quinn is blind to global economic network the building
is part of and the flow of international capital it attracts. In other words, the
global economic dynamics that change and transform his local environment
are beyond his perception.
Despite the landmarks of the journey, signifying the economic wealth
flowing into the physical construction of the city, New York streets that
Auster depicts are occupied by beggars and a vagrant population. As Fitch
notes, “clearances for the World Trade Centre alone swept out 30,000 [blue
collar] jobs.”30 By making reference to the World Trade Centre and the urban
poor in particular, Quinn’s journey highlights how the change of the system
toward FIRE sectors was inversely proportional with the living standards of
some middle- and lower income groups and reveals the discrepancy between
the globalization of the economy and exclusion of this population from the
benefits of the economic boom between 1977 and 1987.
Auster’s choice of the Upper West Side as an area for Stillman Sr.’s
investigation of the urban detritus might seem contradictory, as the region
is established as a middle- and upper middle-class neighborhood, providing
better standards of housing than the regions mainly associated with lower
income groups, such as the Lower East Side. Despite the Upper West
Side’s seemingly more homogeneous social environment, by examining the
area under a magnifying glass, Auster reveals the existence of drastically
unequal social relations: beside Stillman Jr.’s luxurious apartment on 69th
Street, decorated with precious art objects, and the long apartment block of
the character “Paul Auster” between 116th and 119th Streets, which has “an
air of bourgeoisie sobriety,”31 Stillman Sr. rents a room in the dodgy Hotel
Harmony on 99th Street, “a small fleabag for down-and-outs” surrounded
by “winos” and “vagabonds,”32 while Quinn lives the life of a vagrant in front
of Stillman Jr.’s apartment for months. By locating two middle-class char-
acters—Quinn and Auster—in the same neighborhood, and by juxtaposing
wealthy Stillman Jr. and the vagabond population in the same area, Auster,
respectively, reveals the diversity of the middle-class position and highlights
the increasing inequality between upper and lower classes.
In contrast to the increasing income levels of the upper middle-class
professionals and their increased importance in New York’s economic
scene, Auster’s narration brings the vagrant population into the focus of
his narration, making the invisible subject of the discourse of capitalist
progress visible. In City of Glass, for instance, public spaces—parks, sta-
tions, alleyways—are inhabited by the poor and the producer services
workers’ appearance in the public scene, regulated by their working hours,
is represented as an exception within the lives of the urban poor. Grand
Central Station is depicted as “a grim place, filled with dust and people
with nowhere to go, but now, with the rush hour at full force, it had been
taken over by men and women with briefcases, books and newspapers.”33
Despite their increasing number in the economic life of the 1980s, the
presence of the white-collar middle class in the public sphere is rare in
Quinn’s depiction of the urban environment. Instead, Quinn focuses on
the vagabond population in the streets, as the only real occupiers of New
York’s public space. This renewed focus turns the novel into an aesthetic
document revealing how the living conditions and income levels of the
masses (ranging from the downwardly mobile middle class to the homeless
population) are disproportionate with the increasing wealth the finance
capitalism and neoliberal turn brings to the city.
These macro scale ramifications of globalization on social level (on
masses) is enriched by providing insights into the downwardly mobile mid-
dle-class subject’s—Quinn’s—experience of neoliberal turn on individual
level. At the beginning of the novel, Auster portrays Quinn as a writer with
a reasonable income, which enables him to live a middle-class existence in a
small apartment on 107th Street. Quinn’s story begins with the depiction of
the city as an eternal and timeless space: by breaking all his bonds with the
coordinates of his location, Quinn is left with “the feeling of being lost,” and
by breaking with the historical or social contextualization of the self, Quinn
imagines New York as “nowhere.”34 As Auster notes, “[o]n his best walks,
he was able to feel that he was nowhere. . . . New York was the nowhere he
had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever
leaving it again.”35 Quinn depicts the city as a self-contained space, in which
he is submissively imprisoned. His narration, bereft of any comprehension
of the significance New York holds as a center for global financial economy,
underlies the downwardly mobile Quinn’s inability to grasp New York as a
center of global financial flows.
Although, at the beginning of the novel, the postmodern mode of
thinking—depicting urban space as detached from any historical contextu-
alization—seems to be at Quinn’s discretion, once his downward trajectory
begins, the symptoms of postmodern experience are acquired as the logic
of the era: the loss of memory and the loss of a sense of time, leading to the
depiction of New York as a timeless space becomes the predominant way of
conceiving the world. The leisurely walks taken at the beginning of the story,
where Quinn enjoys intentionally losing his coordinates in the city, turn out
to be a class privilege, absent from impoverished Quinn’s experience of his
urban environment. When Quinn’s observations in his notebook are revealed
to the reader toward the end of the novel, moreover, Quinn’s experience of
the global city resonates with the urban poor’s:
Hulks of despair, clothed in rags, their faces bruised and bleeding,

they [drunks] shuffle through the streets as though in chains. . . .
Some will starve to death, others will die of exposure . . . .
For every soul lost in this particular hell, there are several others
locked inside madness—unable to exit to the world that stands at
the threshold of their bodies . . . . 36
The world standing at the threshold of their bodies, however, is a site in

which global economic policies are employed and understanding the thresh-
old—the underlying dynamics behind their local environment—requires
understanding of the dynamics behind neoliberal programs, resulting in
flow of international capital to New York in order to occupy the office space
the city has accumulated in the last two decades, and how these economic
processes escalate the vulnerability of middle-class position and homeless-
ness—an almost impossible task.
If Stillman’s allegorical story of building a new Babel and inventing a
new language is revisited in light of Quinn’s downward trajectory, two alle-
gorical stories come onto the verge of dialectic enlightenment. Stillman’s
mission of attaining the second everlasting paradise, the new Babel, which
could be accessed through an amnesiac mental state37 finds its correspon-
dence in the gentrification process that fastens Quinn’s socioeconomic
downfall. Quinn’s two months’ arrears, followed by his eviction, result in
loss of child drawings of his dead son, and dispersal of material objects,
his desk and his books, depriving Quinn of his writer identity (the occu-
pation endowing him with the comforts of middle-class life).38 In the final
scene, Quinn, having lost the remnants of his individual historicity and
his logical reasoning behind the development of events, asks fundamental
questions about Stillman case. The answer to the riddle, set at the end of
the story, however, can be sought in the depiction of Upper West Side,
where Auster overlaps and intersects Quinn’s and Stillman’s allegorical
stories.
Stillman Sr.’s attempt to invent a new language is through rescuing
and reviving the urban detritus. On the Upper West Side, Stillman goes
against the grain and rather than focusing on the economic progress and its
extravagant manifestations on the urban infrastructure through high-rise
buildings, he uncovers the adverse effects of capitalist modernization by
bringing urban detritus to the focus of his narration and revealing the city’s
transient nature through these prematurely ruined commodities:
As far as Quinn could tell, the objects Stillman collected were val-
ueless. They seemed to be no more than broken things, discarded
things, stray bits of junk. Over the days that passed, Quinn noted a
collapsible umbrella shorn of its material, the severed head of a rubber
doll, a black glove, the bottom of a shattered light bulb, several pieces
of printed matter (soggy magazines, shredded newspapers), a torn
photograph, anonymous machinery parts, and sundry other clumps
of flotsam he could not identify.39
The objects that Stillman collects carry the potential of reviving the for-
gotten individual histories, and they are suggestive of the deeper socio-
economic logic underlying the postmodern condition with an emphasis
on the transience of the population, the changing urban infrastructure,
and conspicuous consumption that capitalism promotes: the anonymous
machinery parts stand as the last remnants of the closed manufacturing
industries, “a black glove” echoes with the increasing crime rates alongside
the increasing poverty in the city, “a rubber doll” resonates with Quinn’s
long-forgotten childhood that revisits him in his dreams and the memories
of his dead son, the newspapers becoming outdated every day and a pho-
tograph is suggestive of the transience of time, which turns the new into
obsolete at an accelerated rate.
Walter Benjamin argues that “it is not that the past casts its light on
the present or the present casts its light on the past: rather, an image is that
in which the Then and the Now come into a constellation like a flash of
lightening. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill.”40 In contrast
to Benjamin’s emphasis on the redemptive power of a dialectical perspective,
if examined on its own, Stillman’s mission of renaming the detritus seems
to be an attempt to deprive the cast off commodities of all their historic
significance and to recreate them as a product of the present moment. When
Stillman’s mission is juxtaposed with Quinn’s memories of his past, however,
this encounter creates an opportunity of a dialectical understanding of the
past and the present. When Quinn’s deteriorating memory is mentioned, it
is revealed to the reader that “[i]n his dream, which he later forgot, he found
himself in the town dump of his childhood, sifting through a mountain
of rubbish.”41 This image of New York as a site of cast-off commodities
resonates with Stillman’s excavations of the urban detritus, and the “rubber
doll” he finds carries potential of shedding light on forgotten individual
histories.42
Nevertheless, do these seemingly interconnected yet fragmentary sto-
ries—Stillman Sr.’s excavations, Quinn’s downward trajectory and Stillman
Jr.’s disappearance—come into a dialectical constellation in the end of the
novel? The answer to this question lies in Quinn’s words that “[i]n good
mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant,
it has the potential to be so.”43 In other words, even if there seems to be over-
laps between Stillman Sr.’s excavations and Quinn’s childhood memories,
or Stillman Jr.’s appearance and Quinn’s dead son’s, these resemblances stay
only on the level of implying a coherent answer to the riddle set in the text,
yet through Auster’s explosion of linear narratives, no coherent reading could
be deduced. The importance of this novel for a historical materialist reading,
however, lies mainly in this impossibility of reading. Auster, by recreating

allegory as a broken one in which a group of signifiers seem to hold a meaning
as a whole, yet creating a riddle that is impossible to be overcome, enables
his reader to go through a similar feeling of insecurity in meaning-making,
and by making it impossible for the reader to cognitively map where they
stand while deciphering the allegorical narrative that they read, reinvents
allegory as a postmodern form that would capture the postmodern condition
of the 1970s New York.
Like the Tower of Babel story and Quinn’s downward trajectory, in
Pamuk’s The Black Book Galip’s quest to find his wife Rüya in Istanbul’s
sign-ridden urbanscape can be read as an allegory of its time—the 1970s and
1980s. In New York, the postmodern novel and allegory seem to emerge from
the condition of postmodernity, as a result of financialization and global-
ization of advanced capitalist economies. In this respect, Pamuk’s adoption
of postmodern literary techniques seems to be “premature” and borrowed
from the American or European novels of the time, without having a firm
grounding in Istanbul’s economic structure. In other words, as the neolib-
eral transformation in Turkey began in the 1979 with an economic package
imposed by the IMF, but was not fully implemented until 1982 (ÖIn ot era),
Istanbul’s urbanscape seems to be bereft of the accelerated flows of foreign
direct investment experienced in New York in the 1980s. Therefore, how
does “city as text metaphor” or the postmodern allegory used to decipher
the conditions that the postmodern economy creates in advanced capitalist
states relate to the condition of modernity in a semiperipheral location, such
as Istanbul? In other words, how does Pamuk internalize the literary tech-
nique of “postmodern allegory” and recreate it in light of Istanbul’s particular
socioeconomic condition to produce an avant-garde novel acknowledged as
part of world literary space?
In Pamuk’s The Black Book, the main story line depicting Galip’s search for
his lost wife is interrupted by allegorical newspaper columns, written by Celal,
the columnist.44 Here, I will focus on one of those allegorical stories, entitled as
“Uzun Süren Bir Satranç Oyunu” (“A Very Long Chess Game”), which takes
place in the “recent” Republican Turkey and depicts a Turkish dictator, whose
arrogant style resonates with Ottoman Sultans’ seizure of power as absolute
monarchs. In this column, Celal distances himself from the authorship of
his allegorical satire by claiming it to be a dictator’s unabridged letter to his
daughter or son living abroad.45 The protagonist of the story is symbolically
called “Başkan Paşa”46 (“the Pasha President”),47 drawing a parallel between
the Sultanate and the authoritarian governance of the Republic. The story
is said to illuminate some historical facts about the Republic’s transition to
democracy, the 1945 to 1960 period, when more than one political party were
represented in parliament. The story, however, depicting the coexistence of a
several contradictory facts together, transforms into an allegorical labyrinth in
which the identity of “the Pasha President” becomes impenetrable.
The president is depicted as residing in Dolmabahçe Palace in isolation
from the public. He is portrayed as a dictator with a military background,
which might first bring to the reader’s mind Ismet Pasha (the president in
office between 1938 and 1950) due to a reference to his title coming from
pre-Republican times as well as the mention of an avenue named after
“Pasha President” that might be Ismet Inonu Avenue close to Dolmabahçe.
The depiction of Chevrolets in Istanbul streets, however, challenges the first
implication of the story, as the imported cars first became available in the
1950s under Menderes’ premiership. Remembering the military background
of the Pasha President, it may suggest the period of the military coup of
1960; yet, as a curfew is in place, it also resonates with the consequences of
1980 coup. As the story condenses the diverse sociopolitical outcomes of
Republican history in the narrative of one president, the Pasha President
transforms into an allegorical being signifying a multitude of political ten-
sions, yet not finally reducible to any one of them.
Rather than the identity of the president, the indeterminacy of which is
part of the allegorical play in the story, what is significant in this column is
Pamuk’s registration of the increased political tension not from the subject’s
perspective but from a ruler’s point of view, revealing the insecurities lurking
in the president’s subconscious in nightmarish forms. In the deserted avenue
from Findikli to Dolmabahce, the subject—a corn vendor—and the president
(disguised as a villager) meet and while the former fears the latter in the
darkness, the latter, simultaneously, is frightened of a “şey”48 (“thing”)49 that
he feels to exist behind the chestnut trees that lined the avenue:
Korktuğum şey de, ben hızlandıkça ve ben hızlandım diye mısırcı

hızlandıkça, yanımızdan ağır ağır akan ağaçların arkasındaydı;
ama bunun ne olduğunu bilmiyordum ve daha kötüsü bu korkunç
görüntünün bir rüya olmadığını da biliyordum.50
(The faster I [the Pasha President] walked, and the more I tried to
distance myself from the frightening thing moving slowly though
the shadows, the more frightened the corn seller became too, and the
faster he walked; though I had no idea what this thing was, I knew
one thing for certain – and this was what I found most frightening:
it was not a dream.)51
In this scene, the president represents both the authority of the state
and, disguised in a villager’s outfit, the immigrant labor force. If the story is
interpreted in light of the political climate of the 1970s, the vendor’s expe-
rience of insecurity in the streets might depend on the unrest generated by
the right and the left wing radical forces. In addition to his disguise, the
Pasha President as a representative of an authority in the city might strike
fear into the heart of his subject as the military coups, resulting in violations
of human rights, were followed by arrests, torture, and murders. In this
scene, while the vendor tries to escape from some internal political threat,
the president at the same time is threatened by the existence of “a thing,”
an invisible entity, keeping the president under its surveillance. This “thing”
might be indicative of some internal political dispute—as Celal portrays it,
even for the president, the signs that members of some fractions write on
the walls of the palace remain “illegible.” It might, however, simultaneously
suggest an insecure feeling that arises in the president due to the foreign
gaze he feels under the surveillance of, revealing itself in the mention of his
proclamation, “Batılı dostlarımızın perde arkasını sordukları”52 (“that would
prompt our Western friends to interrogate you behind closed doors).”53
Celal’s column “Uzun Süren Bir Satranç Oyunu” (“A Very Long Chess
Game”) reveals how Pamuk recreates postmodern allegory within the context
of Turkish sociopolitical climate that is shaped in relation to international
pressures. Pamuk transforms “Başkan Paşa”54 (“Pasha President”),55 “şey”56
(“thing” [refers to shadow]),57 and “the illegible signs” into signifiers, mean-
ings of which are in flux, and thus, the allegorical stories that they are part
of transform into broken allegories, meanings of which are infinitely diverse
and cannot be limited to a single reading. While Celal’s columns register the
politicoeconomic insecurities of the time through postmodern allegorical
stories, Galip’s wanderings in the city capture the subject’s experience of the
urbanscape through a “city as a text of illegible signs” metaphor. In a city
that has undergone waves of demolition, the replacement of Ottoman-style
houses with concrete apartment buildings and the scarcity of capital turning
the remaining Ottoman ruins into the ghostly figures of a lost empire, the
subject, unable to comprehend the global origins of the social and cultural
transformation the city is undergoing, finds himself among the “illegible”
signs of adopted Western images, overwhelming political fractions of the
left and the right movements as well as the military’s invisible omnipresence.
Galip’s walks aiming to uncover the riddle behind the illegible signs
in the city in order to find his lost wife Rüya are informed by Celal’s
allegorical columns, hinting at the existence of a dialectic between Celal’s
overarching allegorical stories and the illegible signs that Galip, the
protagonist, encounters in the urbanscape. In order to solve the riddle

behind the impenetrable signs of the city, this column should be consid-
ered in the context of the global economic crisis and the particularities
of Turkey’s politicoeconomic situation in the 1970s. Import substituting
industrialization’s (ISI) dependence on foreign exchange in order to import
intermediary goods to ensure the requirements of the state-led industrial-
ization brought the country to economic crisis and political instability in
the 1970s due to the scarcity of foreign exchange within Turkey’s economic
constraints.58 Keyder explains that Turkey’s interference in Cyprus in 1974
and the global increase in oil prices were the two determining factors that
rendered foreign exchange seeking more difficult.59 The former “brought
with it an imbroglio at the diplomatic level forcing Western governments,
and in particular US, to cut back on the official funds they transferred to
Turkey under the categories of grants, aid, long-term loans and military
assistance.”60 Due to limited soft loans, also affected by the world mon-
etary crisis, and increase in oil prices resulting in steep rise in the import
requirements of the industrialization program, Turkey underwent severe
economic crisis in the mid-1970s.61
In such an economic climate, local administrations and municipalities
received only limited funds from central government. As Keyder and Öncü
note “[i]n the absence of commensurately growing funds from Ankara,
however, Istanbul’s chaotic growth led to a disintegrating infrastructure
and progressively widening budget deficits.”62 Pamuk’s depiction of dis-
integration alongside a set of illegible signs—“anlaşılmaz iri iri harfler”63
(“incomprehensible giant letters”)64 and “boyaları akmış duvar yazıları”65
(“graffiti that made no sense”)66—create a sense that the subject is unable
to perceive the dominant logic or the power behind urban disintegration.
The urban decay of Istanbul in the 1970s, on one hand, resonates with the
images of the disinvested American cities that Istanbulites are acquainted
with through American films; on the other hand, the experience of disinte-
gration is so immediate for the subject that perceiving the global origin of
the local condition is beyond the subject’s cognition.
The sense of being alienated from the urban environment, however, does
not emerge only from the abstract global economic forces shaping the local
urban condition, but also from characters’ interrupted relationship with their
traditional roots. In The Black Book, the key to solving the riddle behind the
signs of the city is through revealing the Hurufi code that emanates from
them. Hurufism is a sect of Islam that believes in the existence of a secret
meaning behind Arabic letters. In Republican Turkey, with the rise of sec-
ularism and westernizing reforms, many tarikats (sects) have been shut and
religion—although deployed politically to unite the multiethnic population

after the foundation of the Republic—has been held in contempt. Pamuk’s use
of Hurufism enables him to create a postmodern allegory out of a traditional
coded language that remains illegible to the citizens of the Republic. In the
novel, the Hurufi code seems to be mastered by the imam and Rüya’s conser-
vative ex-husband, who carries on a life in strict accordance with tradition. The
imam, on the other hand, reads the signs on the face of the child who is lost
in the underground labyrinths of the Süleymaniye Mosque; yet, as Hurufism
is a suppressed sect, he retreats from delivering his readings.67
The upper social strata that Galip and Celal belong to are fervent
supporters of secularism and have shunned the traditional beliefs that go
beyond rationalism, such as Hurufism. In Celal’s drawer, however, Galip
finds books on Hurufism indicating that Celal has been secretly learning
to decode Hurufi signs.68 Although it is a suppressed sect, even secular
characters such as Rüya and Belkis seem to know about reading the signs
in the city; moreover, Saim claims that leftist periodicals are written in a
coded Hurufi system that transform the text into allegorical depictions hid-
ing the “real” meaning behind them. The novel implies that the suppressed
religious and traditional past continues to exist within both the conserva-
tive and secular milieus and within the increasing political tension of the
1970s, as they create an opportunity to escape the political censorship of the
time. The rise of political Islam in the 1970s at a time of economic crisis
and the upward mobility of migrant families into the upper class milieu,
such as Mehmet’s conservative family in the Museum of Innocence, signify a
diversity of social structure and the coexistence of “residual and emergent
formations” (in Raymond Williams’s terms), despite the radical political
break from the Ottoman past and imposition of modernity from above in
the Republican era.69
Pamuk registers the postmodern subject’s inability to comprehend the
mounting political tension and urban deterioration and its implicit bonds to
the global economy through the depiction of “an invisible hand” transform-
ing the city into a place overloaded with signs that remains elusive for the
subject. He places the rupture from tradition to the heart of the riddle by
depicting Hurufi techniques of reading letters in people’s faces as the basis
of solving the mystery of the city’s illegible signs:
Mutluluk ve zafer çağlarında, tıpkı içinde yaşanılan dünya gibi, hepi-

mizin yüzü de anlamlıydı. Bu anlamı dünya içinde esrar ve yüzlerim-
izde harfler gören Hurufilere borçluyduk. Hurufiliğin kayboluşuyla,
demek ki, dünyamızdaki esrar kadar, yüzlerimizdeki harfler de

kaybolmuştu. Boştu artık yüzlerimiz . . . boş yüzlerimiz anlamsızdı.70
(In times of happiness and victory, our faces were full of meaning,
as indeed was the world in which we lived. This was thanks to the
Hurufis, for it was the Hurufis who could see the mystery in the
world and the letters in our faces. But now Hurufism had vanished
from the earth and the world had lost its mystery, just as our faces,
had lost their letters. Our faces had emptied of all meaning . . . .)71
It is worth emphasizing that Pamuk’s The Black Book is a novel in which

the illegible signs of the city hint at a secret meaning that are impenetra-
ble to the subject. The mystery, therefore, is at the heart of the novel, but
the road to its resolution is lost. Galip claims that a new method needs to
be invented: “yapılması gereken şey yüzlerimizin üzerindeki bu boşluğu
yeniden anlamlandıracak, yüzlerimizin üzerinde Latin harflerini görecek
yeni bir dizge kurmaktı”72 (“to vanquish this emptiness, give new meaning
to our faces, by devising a new system that linked the lines in faces to the
letters in the Latin alphabet).”73 Symbolically linking the loss of meaning
to the replacement of the Ottoman script based on the Arabic alphabet
with the Latin, creating a rupture from the pre-Republican history, Pamuk
proposes the adoption of lost traditions to the contemporary Turkey as a
method of overcoming the gap between the subject and the urbanscape,
whose past has been eradicated. In the novel, Pamuk internalizes the “city
as text” metaphor, originally produced at the core, and reinvents this con-
cept through the problematics of modernity particular to the Turkish case.
The novel, however, is not limited to Galip’s wanderings in the city where
the “city as text” metaphor is used, and Pamuk transforms the novel into a
literary-political criticism by advancing “postmodern allegory” through the
use of local sociopolitical turmoil.
In conclusion, as my reading of the two novels suggest, although the
economic structure lurking beneath the postmodern allegories of Pamuk and
Auster was denoting to different economic models—ISI and neoliberalism,
respectively—the postmodernity, both at the core and the semiperiphery,
was experienced through a sense of impossibility of cognitively mapping
one’s location from a global economic perspective, and postmodern novels’
form is a response to this situation. David Harvey, however, expressing his
distrust of the postmodern novel’s reliance on deconstructionist techniques,
criticizes postmodernism for deconstructing even the “meta-theory which
can grasp the political–economic processes” that could reveal the dynamics
behind the postmodern condition.74 He argues that
This aspect of postmodernism [inability to narrate material conditions

of change] has been reinforced by the activities of the deconstruc-
tionists. . . . But in challenging all consensual standards of truth and
justice, of ethics, and meaning, and in pursuing the dissolution of
all narratives and meta-theories into a diffuse universe of language
games, deconstructionism ended up . . . by reducing knowledge and
meaning to a rubble of signifiers.75
In this article, however, I have argued that the form of the postmodern novel
that reveals itself in “a rubble of signifiers” does register the subject’s experi-
ence of the condition of postmodernity through ambiguity of its meaning,
and the subject’s inability to grasp the multinational network behind the
local processes by letting the reader go through a similar experience while
deciphering the “city as text” metaphor and also while reviving the “text as
city” in the process of reading it. The obscurity of meaning the postmodern
allegory provides, and despite Auster’s presentation of Quinn’s social decline,
is depicted as an outcome of personal choices at the beginning of the novel,
through a material historicist critique, the novel provides new perspectives on
the impact of global political and economic programs at local level. In other
words, the novel provides insights into how the condition of postmodernity
is experienced on the individual level, and through the personification of
Quinn, reveals how it manifests itself on the level of the urban poor and the
downwardly mobile middle class.
Within the context of 1980s Istanbul in Pamuk’s The Black Book, however,
the local content requires new ways of appropriating the form. Within the
political turmoil of the 1970s, the use of postmodern allegory as a form of
narration in Celal’s columns transforms them into implicit, yet strong political
commentaries, challenging Harvey’s critique of the postmodern novel for leav-
ing all the social and political critique out of its scope. In an era when freedom
of speech is strongly suppressed by political tension and violence, the form of
the columns, which disguises the subject of criticism through an obscure system
of signification, enables Celal to provide a critique of the political turmoil by
going beyond the increased censorship though the form of his narrative. As
the case of Celal’s columns suggest, the foreign form needs to be appropriated
according to the local context, and the latter plays a crucial role in the creation
of innovative works at the peripheries of the world literary system.
If we remember Franco Moretti’s statement that literary history can

be regarded as “a long chain of related experiments,”76 the examination of
postmodern allegory in this article reveals how core literary techniques are
adopted and reshaped by the seemingly local yet inevitably global economic
circumstances within the Turkish literary space. In spite of the economic par-
ticularities of American and Turkish literary spaces, which can be regarded as
“one and unequal” (in Moretti’s terms), examination of postmodern allegory
in both literary spaces reveals how postmodernity is experienced through a
similar sense of impossibility of cognitively mapping ones location within a
multinational network and how the local circumstances are determined by
global economic forces.
nesrin degirmencioglu was a postdoctoral associate in the Department

of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick
(UK) and currently she is a lecturer at the Middle East Technical University’s
Northern Cyprus Campus. Her current research focuses on world literature
debates and manifestations of neoliberalism in contemporary American
and Turkish fiction. She is the coeditor of Cultures of Uneven and Combined
Development (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
Notes
1. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge MA and Oxford UK:
Blackwell, 2011), 293.
2. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New
Left Review 146 (1984): 83.
3. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and
New York: Verso, 2002), 182.
4. Quoted in Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays
in the Rhetoric of Comtemporary Criticism, ed. Wlad Godzich (London: Routhledge, 1989), 189.
5. Quoted in De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 189–90.
6. Bainard Cowan, “Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” in New German Critique (Winter,
1981), 114.
7. Nesrin Degirmencioglu, “Aesthetics of Uneven and Combined Development: Tanpınar
and Dos Passos at a World Literary Conjuncture,” in Cultures of Uneven and Combined
Development, eds. James Christie and Nesrin Degirmencioglu (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 289–313.
8. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity,
1997), 135.
9. Quoted in De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 189.
10. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 141.
11. Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 50.
12. Ibid.
13. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), 168.
14. Ibid., 45.

15. Ibid., 168.
16. Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late”, 71.
17. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 23.
18. John Hull Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, eds., Dual City: Restructuring New York
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), 11.
19. Ibid., 8.
20. Ibid., 402.
21. Ibid., 401.
22. Ibid., 401–02.
23. Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 48.
24. Ibid., 49.
25. For further information on the production of unevenness on global scale, see Neil
Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (London and New
York: Verso, 2010).
26. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (London: Penguin, 2007), 51.
27. Quoted in Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism
Part 2,” October 13 (Summer, 1980): 63.
28. Auster, The New York Trilogy, 106.
29. Matthew P. Drennan, “The Decline and Rise of the New York Economy,” in Dual City:
Restructuring New York, eds. John Hull Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 1992), 34.
30. Fitch, The Assassination of New York, 140.
32. Ibid., 57.
33. Ibid., 52.
34. Ibid., 3.
35. Ibid., 3–4.
36. Ibid., 109–10.
37. Ibid., 49.
38. Ibid., 126. Steven E. Alford states that Quinn’s apartment ‘functions as an anchor to
his selfhood’ (623) and in a similar vein, Sylvia Söderlind argues that Quinn returns home ‘to
reassume his lost identity’ (10). See Steven E. Alford, ‘Space-out: Signification and Space in
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy’, Contemporary Literature, 36.4 (Winter, 1995): 623. Sylvia
Söderlind, ‘Humpty Dumpty in New York: Language and Regime Change in Paul Auster’s
City of Glass’, Modern Fiction Studies, 57.1 (Spring 2011): 10.
40. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City, 113.
42. Ibid., 59.
43. Auster, The New York Trilogy, 8, italics added.
44. Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber and Faber, 2006).
46. Orhan Pamuk, Kara Kitap (Istanbul: Iletişim, 2006), 300.
47. Pamuk, The Black Book, 309.
48. Pamuk, Kara Kitap, 302.
53. Ibid., 315.

58. Çağlar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development (London and
New York: Verso, 1987).
59. Ibid., 188.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 188–89.
62. Çağlar Keyder and Ayşe Öncü, “Globalization of a Third-World Metropolis: Istanbul
in the 1980’s,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 17.3 (Summer, 1994): 396.
63. Pamuk, Kara Kitap,131.
67. Ibid., 197.
68. Ibid., 96.
69. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (London and New York:
Faber and Faber, 2009). Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” in Resources of Hope, ed.
Robin Gable (Verso: London, 1989).
73. Pamuk, The Black Book, 305–06.
74. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 117.
75. Ibid., 350.
76. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in Debating World Literature, ed.
Christopher Prendergast (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 62.

A Global World

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Global World

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Paul Auster, Orhan Pamuk, and the Postmodern Allegory in a

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 58, Number 1, 2021, pp. 124-145

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 7 Mar 2021 02:03 GMT from CNRS BiblioSHS ]

postmodern urbanscape.2 The conflict between the apparent freedoms of

work was translated into English and became influential in Anglophone

infrastructure. Allegory destroys the one-to-one correspondence between the

integration in favor of a free-market economy, whereas on the urban scale the

Once completed the tower would be large enough to hold every

speaking God’s language, prepared to inhabit the second, everlasting

Hulks of despair, clothed in rags, their faces bruised and bleeding,

The world standing at the threshold of their bodies, however, is a site in

however, lies mainly in this impossibility of reading. Auster, by recreating

Korktuğum şey de, ben hızlandıkça ve ben hızlandım diye mısırcı

protagonist, encounters in the urbanscape. In order to solve the riddle

religion—although deployed politically to unite the multiethnic population

Mutluluk ve zafer çağlarında, tıpkı içinde yaşanılan dünya gibi, hepi-

demek ki, dünyamızdaki esrar kadar, yüzlerimizdeki harfler de

It is worth emphasizing that Pamuk’s The Black Book is a novel in which

This aspect of postmodernism [inability to narrate material conditions

If we remember Franco Moretti’s statement that literary history can

nesrin degirmencioglu was a postdoctoral associate in the Department

14. Ibid., 45.

57. Pamuk, The Black Book, 311.

You might also like