Melancholy as Landscape: Benjamin, Pamuk, Sebald, Süreya

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article locates the work of Walter Benjamin, Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Cemal Süreya in a minor tradition of writers preoccupied with melancholy since the Baroque. By pushing the notion of melancholy outside the experience of the individual subject, melancholy can be understood beyond its inherited descriptions, which treat it either as an impetus for artistic creativity or as a medical condition. Instead, drawing on work in global modernist studies and ecocriticism, melancholy can be productively considered relationally and nonanthropocentrically. This article traces how in İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir (Istanbul: Memories and the City), Pamuk, channeling strands of Islamic melancholy (ḥuzn), closely links the Turkish notion of hüzün (Turkish melancholy) to landscape (manzara), which notably troubles the human–nonhuman divide. Then it will be shown how Sebald’s lamentations on destruction and the ruinated landscape in his poetry and the novel Die Ringe des Saturn (Rings of Saturn) both collapse distinctions between nature and culture and articulate a melancholy at the extremes of visual perception. In closing, a reading of Cemal Süreya’s poem “Fotoğraf” (“Photograph”) brings the work of all three authors together under the notion of a promising and critical “melancholy present.”