Affective Semiotics of Landscape. The Istanbul Encyclopedia from Reșat Ekrem Koçu to Orhan Pamuk

Abstract

Enriched with photographs, some of which taken by Ara Güler, and with reproductions of the Bosphorus panoramas by A. I. Melling, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul is a “self-portrait in the form of a city”. Inspired by Hugo’s oriental poetics or Baudelaire’s curiosity about Paris, Pamuk investigates Istanbul as a city of personal memory but also as an encyclopedic microcosm. One of the central chapters is devoted to the Istanbul Encyclopedia by Reçat Ekrem Koçu (1905-1975), a pseudo-encyclopedia of almost 11 volumes, where Koçu describes the Turkish city in many aspects since the Ottoman era. Pamuk, who holds Koçu in great esteem, puts forward the hypothesis that one of the reasons for the failure of this work is because of its melancholic and, therefore, incomplete encyclopedia. Istanbul is also seen by Pamuk as a melancholic landscape and a visual urban encyclopedia. Pamuk seems to continue Ekrem Koçu’s incomplete work and expands the perspective of the city into an encyclopedic microcosm, reconstructing it through the readings of renowned nineteenth-century travelers such as Nerval, Gautier and Flaubert, dazzled by the mirages of exoticism. Taking up the work of Ekrem Koçu, Pamuk describes Istanbul with a classifying passion. For him, the nostalgia that dominates Istanbul, the hüzün, is an interior landscape that marks a universe lost forever (the Ottoman Empire), from which the inhabitants bear the wounds. From Ekrem Koçu to Pamuk, the Istanbul encyclopedia enables an affective semiotics of the landscape, where space is configured as a complex and unlimited system of signs that the artist produces to interrogate and represent his memories and his present.