Tarantino in the Ottoman Empire: Glorious Viziers, Pulp Fiction, and Scrambled Narratives

Abstract

I wanted to break up the narration, not to be a wise guy, a show guy, but to make the film dramatically better that way. . . . A novelist would think nothing about starting in the middle. And if characters in a novel go back and tell past things, it's not a flashback, it's just telling a story. I think movies should benefit from the novel's freedoms.— Quentin Tarantino1I wrote a prosopography twenty years ago. I published a biography two years ago. In the first case, I offered the collective biography of 282 servants of the late Ottoman period (1839–1909).2 In the second case, I presented the monograph of a grand vizier from the second half of the 18th century, Halil Hamid Pasha (1736–85).3 In the former, I delivered an academic work (stemming from a PhD dissertation) focused on the study of the careers of central and territorial administrators. In the latter, I recounted the rise and fall of the head of the Sublime Porte. A priori, these two books had nothing in common, except that they dealt with pashas. If I mention them together here, it is not to describe the personal evolution of my research. It is to shed some light on an observation that is regularly made, that is, of the inadequacies of the biographical genre in Ottoman history.4 It is to reflect on how to remedy this situation.