Between Old and New: Flanerie at the Limits of Modernity in Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind

The present chapter locates the flaneur in the tension of tradition and modernity in the seminal novel A Strangeness in Mind by the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. The flaneur is a predominant archetype in the literary and cultural imaginary of Modernism. As such, rather unsurprisingly, the flaneur plays a significant role in the subsequent explorations of the salient traits, juxtapositions and the nuances that constitute the event of modernity. The evaluation of modernity often involves an inevitable exploration of the performance and essence (often inseparable) of flanerie. The present paper proposes to explore this interspersed relationship between flanerie and modernity through a strategic reading of the novel. The chapter will substantiate Mevlut, the boza seller protagonist in the novel, as a flaneur who is the embodiment of Turkish modernity. The chapter will argue that the perpetual status of Mevlut as a hyphenated self who is characterised by the interplay of apprehension-appreciation and is unconditionally hospitable to the contingence of the temporal-spatial substantiate him as the flaneur in the novel. In doing so, the chapter will also identify the essence of Turkish modernity and will locate it in departure from the unanimous notional conjecture of modernity as progress.

where the suggestive material trace of the one assumes the absence of the other. To be modern is to exist in a state of autonomy where the eclipse of history does not haunt the solstice of the present. Modernity is a valorization of the 'now' of present against the archaic time of history. Jurgen Habermas, one of the celebrated thinkers of the Modern age who explores the nuances of the condition of modernity, observes "Individual epochs lose their distinct forces. Historical memory is replaced by the heroic affinity of the present with the extremes of history-a sense of time wherein decadence immediately recognizes itself in the barbaric, the wild and the primitive. We observe the anarchistic intention of blowing up the continuum of history…Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition; modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative." (Habermas 5) Habermas's contention of modernity does not just substantiate the modern as an epoch that is the arch-other of tradition. What is further suggested is an inaccurate representation of the past/ tradition that modernity accomplishes through a strategic essentialism. In Habermas's opinion, this is done with the vested intention of augmenting the SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH e-ISSN: 2582-3574 p-ISSN: 2582-4406 VOL. 8, ISSUE 8, AUGUST 2020 www.ijellh.com 118 modern as an unprecedented state of exception. The modern self-referentially claims for itself the state of an indisputable apex of progress.
This self-referential claim to progress is substantiated and often validated by the techno-industrial material climate of modernity. With the rise of scientific rationalism and the outbreak of industrial capitalism, modernity acquired a perceivable disposition. The landscape of modernity was easily recognizable and Marshall Berman describes it thus "This is a landscape of steam engines, automatic factories, railroads, vast new industrial zones; of teeming cities that have grown overnight, often with dreadful human consequences; of daily newspapers, telegraphs, telephones and other mass media, communicating on an ever wider scale; of increasingly strong national states and multinational aggregations of capital; of mass social movements fighting these modernizations from above with their own modes of modernization from below; of an ever-expanding world market embracing all, capable of the most spectacular growth, capable of appalling waste and devastation, capable of everything except solidity and stability." (Berman 19) While the early attributes in this rather elongated description of modernity constitute its material form, the latter is suggestive of the essence. We will engage with the latter in due course as we topicalise our study in context of a non-European politico-social culture like Turkey. Let us, for the time being, concern ourselves with the material world of modernity.
For this, we prefer to emphasise the phrase 'teeming cities' that essentially identify modernity as a typically urban phenomenon. Or, to be more precise and accurate, the aspect of the urban is inextricably associated with the origins of modernity.
Although cities are not essential misnomers in history, what distinguishes them in the era of the modern is their urban disposition. The condition of urbanity is often considered as a typical phenomenon of nineteenth century when the agrarian modes of production underwent a substantial transition into industrial, leading to a demographic shift towards the "revolutionary new form of production-the factory run by machinery and fossil fuel" (Davis 433) led to a "transformation" that can be regarded as "the true urban revolution, for it meant not only the rise of a few scattered towns and cities but the appearance of a genuine urbanization, in the sense that a substantial portion of the population now lived in towns and cities." (ibid.) Davis identifies urbanisation as "a product of basic economic and technological developments" (ibid. 429) and the nineteenth century as the epoch of "urban revolution" (ibid. 433). The condition of urbanity thus becomes synonymous with the politico-social and cultural climate of the nineteenth century and the same is often presumed to be the age of metropolitan urbanity, i.e., the age of cities.
In his Introduction to the The Flaneur, a seminal anthology which interrogates this  Baudelaire's further ponderings on the flaneur (a substantial evaluation of it is beyond the scope of the present paper) locate him as a hyphen subject who is the embodiment of transition. In his home in the crowd, in his perennial pursuit of the significance that is contained in the insignificances of the everyday (one can refer to Michel de Certeau's Practice in Everyday Life) and above all, in his preoccupation with an excess that exceeds the nominal enterprises of the material-familial, the flaneur earns for himself the status of liminality. In the words of Walter Benjamin, the sense of being "out of place" (Benjamin 188) is fundamental to flanerie. What is paradoxical is the suggestion that the flaneur is at home in this essential state of out of place. His "composure" (ibid) rests in the state of being unhomed where he is exposed to the precarious state of placelessness. Referring to Allen Poe's short story which is also referred by Baudelaire, Benjamin sets up an essential distinction between the man of the crowd and the flaneur in his revisionist ponderings on the flaneur and flanerie. Modernity and its impersonation (the flaneur) are hence both characteristic of a precarity that is marked by nuance, paradox and ambiguity. What is characteristically modern is not appropriable through easy decipherments. Instead, they are marked by a characteristic spin on the head, a self-contrast that is never in adherence with the quintessential narrative of progress. The grand narrative of progress and the material manifestation of the technocratic that is often mistaken as not a predicament but as modernity, i.e. the essence of modernity, is suggestive of a critical myopia. An understanding of modernity demands an epistemic or critical endeavour to look beyond the matter/ form of modernity into the essence. Only then the liminal finesse of modernity is unveiled which reveals the modern condition as the state of perpetual statelessness.
The march of material modernity into the politico-social-cultural climate of the third world, which has recently been re-categorised as the Global South, is marked by a characteristic glitch. The advent of modernity in non-Europe is intimately tied to the more pertinent and historic socio-political considerations like imperialism, colonialism, secular Nationalism, political sovereignty, among others. Hence, the precarious hyphenation which marks the essence of modernity is only intensified when one takes into consideration the history of modernity in the non-European Orient. Partho Chatterjee, in his discussion on the nature of modernity in the context of a non-European culture, observes "that there cannot be This infusion is often marked by a tension and the co-existence of the global and the local is not often a happy co-habitation. This is specifically foreseen in the conflict between scientific rationalism and faith, progress and tradition and secularism and religion, industrial technocratization and the agrarian modes of production. Turkey, geo-politically located in the hyphen between West and the East, is not unfamiliar to this perpetual tension that outside the limits of "comport" (Heidegger 33) and conduct. For Heidegger, being is associated/ affiliated to more pre-existential questions which are "pre-ontological" (ibid. 32).
The dasein is not merely the performance; it is also the essence which precedes performance. subject who has lost his tread to fortune due to the impediment of modernity. In a dialogue with one of those families that would often make him feel "poor and out of place" (ibid.) and that asks if he is rich, Mevlut remarks: ""I cannot say that I am…All the relatives that came with me from the village are rich now, but I guess it just wasn't meant to be for me."" (Ibid. 24) SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH e-ISSN: 2582-3574 p-ISSN: 2582-4406 VOL. 8, ISSUE 8, AUGUST 2020 www.ijellh.com 127 Hence, to locate Mevlut as the flaneur demands a deeper consideration of his engagement with modernity. To assume that his status of being out of place in the milieu of modernity substantiates him as the flaneur is suggestive of a critical myopia that refuses to take into consideration Mevlut's material reality of impoverishment.
Hence, to comprehend the traits of flanerie in Mevlut, it is indispensible to take into consideration his engagement with modernity. It is significant that the plot progression in the novel never happens in distinction from the progress of modernity. The novel charts the growth of Mevlut and, in doing so, takes into consideration the trajectory of modernity in Turkey. Mevlut grows in the climate of material modernity and like the representative modern subject, Mevlut depicts an unkempt desire for sovereignty. He is rather critical and subversive of the rigours and regulations of tradition and the institutional regimes of social governance. Here is an excerpt from the novel which that describes the fantasy turned desire quotient of an adolescent Mevlut.
"...he was twenty-one years old and he had never slept with a woman. A pretty girl with a headscarf and good morals, the kind he would like for a wife, would never sleep with him before they got married...His priority wasn't marriage anyway, but finding a kind woman he could hold and kiss, a woman he could have sex with. In his mind, he saw all these things as being separate from marriage, but apart from marriage, he found himself unable to obtain sexual contact." (Ibid. 152) Mevlut's 'priority' is not marriage, the institution that guides desire within a traditional patriarchal structure. Instead, he is driven towards the urge to indulge that which constitutes the primordial. Such an indulgence foregrounds an agency which is deeply sovereign and is simultaneously transgressive towards tradition. It is in this desire to transgress the regulative that Mevlut becomes an embodiment of the essence of modernity.
He is striving for modernity in spirit. To live in this shadow between the promised and the materialised is the precarious fate of the non-Western man inhabiting the milieu of modernity. For him, the arrival of modernity is a promise of novelty. In it lies the promise of change which can essentially open the doors of the stagnated politico-cultural to a radical appeal of progress. However, once arrived, the modern bears an unfamiliar disposition, often bearing a stark contrast with the intimate everyday and the familiar. The response to modernity thus appears binary patterned.
One can either reject the unfamiliar and live in tradition or else recognise the unfamiliar as a unanimous truth and engage in mechanised revelry of the alien as the lived.
Mevlut in the novel chooses neither but curiously inhabits the ecstasy of the estranged. While at the realm of the personal he refabricates his desire and rekindles his love with Rayiha, at the more manifested realm of the modern, he chooses to be the liminal subject who has internalised the discontinuum of modernity. The estrangement of modernity does not necessarily lead him to an absolute rejection of modernity and an unconditional obsession with the non-modern inertia of tradition. Simultaneously, Mevlut is not completely obsessed with the materiality of novelty that modernisation seems to advocate. In his walks through the cityscape, Mevlut realises that "old things" (ibid. 391) made him "feel good". (ibid.) Mevlut thus occupies a curiously singular and sovereign position in his engagement with modernity.
He is in pace with the flux of the modern. Yet, he is not completely absorbed by it. Hence, like the Baudelairean flaneur, Mevlut is able to look beyond the nominal and the materiality of the apparent for a deeper truth. The city for him emerges as a system of signs that hold a secretive index to an alternative truth, that which is revealed only in a state of hyphenation and estrangement. Mevlut has internalised modernity, but not as a grand ideologue of progress. Instead, it is an internalisation that is able to decipher the essence of flux and respond to the discontinuous and the evolving. This internalisation does not necessarily suggest that Mevlut is an empty subject without a residual sense of agency. Instead, he is profoundly appealed by memory that sustains as the underlayered essence that is eternal and sovereign from the flux of change. Simultaneously, however, he is not contained within the familiar solace of past, memory and tradition. Instead, he curiously infuses the new and the old, the discontinuous and the underlying continuous and it is thus that he claims for himself the status of the flaneur who is the subject in transition without determination.