Or so we hope. At any rate, the conditions for this all-important second essay have been out of the ordinary. I had some ideas sketched out, they will have to wait: I've been traveling lately, to Montréal last week and to Morocco for a few weeks to come. I don’t want this to become a simple travelogue, but most of my writing will reflect what I’m up to at the moment.
I often associate travel with reading: in a general sense, time in transit feels ready-made for reading, which leads me to bring overly-ambitious and unnecessarily-heavy piles of books with me on the road; more specifically, I sometimes recall trips and books together, either because of what I read while traveling or because the a book deals with a place I've been (or the other way around).
Orhan Pamuk's memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City[1] and the city of Istanbul itself form one such pair. The link between them is clear enough from the title alone, but they also share a second bond for me personally because I read the book while in Istanbul with a group from my college. We stayed in the city for nearly three weeks and I left feeling that one could easily spend a year there and still not have plumbed its extreme historical depths. Bits of the past are almost literally stacked, folded, and layered on top of one another in Istanbul. Walking the city’s streets, I was impressed by the different ways that the material stuff of the past, apparently obstinate and stubborn, remained quite malleable: it could be ignored, buried, or destroyed, reworked, uncovered, or rewritten. This highly-visible hyper-historicity put into relief what is really an everyday process of navigating the past that is an essential part of living in the present for people around the world.
Pamuk's memoir shows this constant negotiation of present and past at an intimate scale. In the book, Istanbul’s epic, longue durée historical complexities play out in individual lives in a sort of familial time. Pamuk recalls the sitting rooms created by upper-class and aspiring-bourgeois Turkish families in the twentieth century, which he looks back on as spatial expressions of westernization. The sitting room required a particular decor and strict etiquette to match: “Sitting rooms were not meant to be places where you could hope to sit comfortably; they were little museums designed to demonstrate to a hypothetical visitor that the householders were Westernized” (13). The contents of these little museums of self-identity reflect the perceived interests of western European elites: pianos (that no one played, as Pamuk recalls it), Chinese porcelain and Japanese screens (an interesting displacement of Europe’s orientalist image of Turkey by making east Asia the oriental object of both Europeans and Turks-as-Europeans), silver, crystal, and so forth. The display of these objects, which was their primary function, was a marker of status to the family itself as much as its potential or theoretical guests. Pamuk speculates that a “person who was not fasting during Ramazan[2] would perhaps suffer fewer pangs of conscience amongst these glass cupboards and dead pianos than he might if he were sitting cross-legged in a room full of cushions and divans” (13).
Pamuk’s comment here links the primary spatial purpose of the sitting room-as-museum to the temporal moment defined by the Islamic calendar and its month of fasting. Its function as a mark of westernization is most pertinent during a period when ostensible non-western-ness would otherwise be highly visible. The room distracts its inhabitants from any anxiety they might feel about being in the room itself.
It would take a different kind of western distraction to effect a further change in the social structure of Turkish bourgeois sitting rooms: the television. As Pamuk puts it, “Once people had discovered how pleasurable it was to sit together to watch the evening news, their sitting rooms changed from little museums into little cinemas” (13). But the television did not work the same way as the sitting room-museum; it crossed class and religious lines differently. As a result, the sitting room’s connection to Ramadan and Islam in general would change. Today, for example, gathering at night to watch special TV programs has become an important part of many families’ celebration of Ramadan itself.
If the sitting room-museum was an architectural response to a certain kind of religious time, the introduction of the television turned it into a space that organized time on its own. The key, as Pamuk sees it, is sound. Before television, the sitting room was a place of quiet contemplation of objects on display, epitomized by the unplayed piano. At times, this quiet allowed for unexpected and unpredictable moments of familial calm in the Pamuk household. The young Orhan wanted to become a painter and was inspired in these moments to do family portraits:
“It was when tensions between my parents had softened somewhat—when no one was needling anyone else, and everyone was relaxed, and the radio or maybe a tape was playing in the background, when the maid was bustling in the kitchen as she cooked our supper, or just before we all set out together on an outing or a trip—that I would do these paintings, always in a single of inspiration . . . . It was an arrangement devoid of arresting detail, provoking no discussion, but this was why it attracted my attention. When this tableau made one of its rare appearances, I would whisper, ‘I’m going to do a painting’” (354-5).
In the stillness of this prolonged instant, a fleeting sense of happiness emerges, specifically linked to the quiet: “perhaps my mother and father looked happy because they weren’t speaking. . . . A magical silence would descend over the room as my mother and father stretched out, perfectly still, not saying a word but expressing what seemed a shared anguish” (355-6).If this calm was rare at home in Pamuk’s childhood, it was also historically contingent and its time came quickly: “later, in the seventies, when like everyone else in the country we bought a television set and they [my parents] somewhat sheepishly surrendered to its entertainments, there were no magical silences, and I never again had the desire to paint them” (356).
When I first read Pamuk’s memoir five or six years ago, this seemed like a great loss, an emblem of the aesthetic impoverishment of everyday life at the hands of modern technology. No doubt this had something to do with my own experience of television. Unlike Pamuk growing up in Turkey in the sixties and seventies, there never was a moment when television entered my life. It seems to have always been there, and yet I never really used to watch it. I would have much rather read than anything else (often including having dinner or going to bed). It always seemed more of a distraction than anything else.
It wasn't until I graduated that television had any appeal to me, when a combination of free time and a Netflix subscription opened up a (very digital, very virtual) world of possibilities. What surprised me most was how good much of it was. Television, it turned out, could be a vibrant, compelling means of storytelling (though not all of it is, of course). This discovery was pleasant, but also a little sad: sometimes, watching television at night feels like one of those pessimistically adult gestures that stand for the supposedly-inevitable loss of childhood's wonderment, as if I had given up the imaginative world of reading as Pamuk had stopped painting family portraits.
I think, however, that this is too easy a conclusion, based on nostalgia for time past, whose supposed disappearance is marked by the arrival of at television set. Looking more closely at the Pamuks’ “magical silences”, we see that they weren’t actually particularly silent. The radio was on, or music on the tapedeck, and the maid was busy moving about the kitchen. Stillness, strictly speaking, wasn’t maintained either; Pamuk writes that sometimes his father would put on Brahms and stand up at the most energetic moments to conduct an imaginary orchestra. What television did, in fact, was to channel the activity in the room through its screen. But it can also simply be in the background, present but not commanding, like the radio or the noise from the kitchen.
I don't believe that loss and nostalgia are really the core of the issue. Instead, it is about the structure of time. After a day’s work in French literature, theory, and criticism, reading for pleasure isn’t always that appealing, but that should not mask the fact that I have, in fact, spent my day reading, which is (usually) a rather pleasant thing in and of itself. If I watch TV in the evening, reading hasn’t gone out of my life.I began reading comics relatively recently and am always ready to open a comic book (or a graphic novel, if you like) in the evening. Although turning to an ostensibly-childish medium (although such a conception is quite mistaken) may seem particularly fitting as a response to the threatened disappearance of reading time at the heads of grown-up responsibilities, comics are not actually not a means for me to overcome being a grumpy, jaded, TV-watching adult by returning to a childhood delight in reading. What has made reading comics so exciting is not a return to a past way of life, a familiar kind of time, but the discovery of a new kind of reading, a new possibility of aesthetic experience. It is the discovery that one kind of reading need not override another.
I had wanted to do my second reciter essay about comics. It is precisely because comics don't fit squarely with my main academic work that I find them really intellectually rewarding. In a way, comics are all the more stimulating to my research because of this. As with travel and reading, connections arise on their own just as often as when I seek them out.
To that end, I'm currently working on a piece about Joe Sacco's excellent works of comics journalism, Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza. Being away from home has made it difficult to finish, however, not only because I am already carrying around other books that I haven't yet read, but because I also took advantage of my time in francophone Canada to pick up Guy Delisle's Chroniques de Jérusalem, which I may want to consider alongside Sacco's books. I’ll leave it for another time, then.
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