Books

World Books Review: American Writers in Istanbul

This study of American writers in Istanbul should have been a fascinating example of multicultural literary analysis, but academic jargon and heavy-handed politicizing get in the way.

American Writers in Istanbul: Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Bowles, Algren, and Baldwin by Kim Fortuny. Syracuse University Press, 238 pages. $34.95.

Reviewed by Vincent Czyz

Ostensibly, the purpose of “American Writers in Istanbul,” as stated in the foreword, is to examine “both the ways in which each author reacts to the great city and the placement of their writings about Istanbul … within their total oeuvre.” Which authors you ask? Literary legends such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernst Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and James Baldwin. As an avid reader, a writer, and a former inhabitant of Istanbul (for nearly nine years), I was determined to like, laud, and recommend this book. It is with genuine regret that I have to do just the opposite.

The concept is as alluring as rumors of an ancient city uncovered during excavations for a subway, but what we get is a lot of opaque over-theorizing and sloppy thinking on the part of the author, academic Kim Fortuny, who seems bent on applying every class she ever took in post-colonial theory and Orientalism to every sentence composed by these writers. (Ironically, she treats America as a colonial power as though the Turks didn’t grab every square inch of land and subjugate every people they came across from Central Asia to Eastern Europe.)

Moreover, the writing itself is a poster child for the bad academic writing Orwell scourged in his essay “Politics and the English Language.” That is to say: Don’t use a long word where a short one will do; don’t use jargon if you can find everyday English equivalent; and don’t be verbose if you can be succinct.

Let’s start with the mess she makes of poor Melville, who visited Istanbul in 1856. The celebrated author of “Moby-Dick” writes: “Cedar & Cypress [are] the only trees about the capital. –The Cypress [is] a green minaret, & blends with the stone ones. Minaret perhaps derived from cypress shape. The intermingling of the dark tree with the bright spire expressive of the intermingling of life & death.” Fortuny interprets the passage in this way: “His familiar play with the symbolic potential of juxtaposed particulars in the world, whichever the world, leads him to apply minarets and cypresses to the questions of existence, a question that transcends, because it does not exclude, disparate avenues of inquiry, of faith.”

Not only does her commentary fail to add anything, it actually muddies Melville’s perfectly clear passage.

When Melville describes the scenery during a boat trip, Fortuny turns this into: “Melville resorts to painterly discourse to represent the interplay of topography and water along the Bosphorous, and his geographical references are repeatedly North American, but again rather than enacting a historical space that privileges an outsider’s point of view, Melville seems to abandon his imagination to the immediacy of the place.”

Should we be surprised that an American writing for an American audience makes comparisons to North American landscapes? I give her credit for admitting Melville wasn’t “enacting a historical space”—whatever that means—in some politically incorrect way, but again, not only does her commentary fail to add anything to Melville’s lucid prose, it makes these pages reek of academia the way a mortuary reeks of formaldehyde.

Mark Twain fares even worse. From a single word Fortuny will deduce a whole, utterly fallacious argument. Here is Twain describing Turkish women swathed in veils:

Seen moving about, far away in the dim, arched aisle of the Great Bazaar, they look as the shrouded dead must have looked when they walked forth from their graves amid storms and thunders and earthquakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the Crucifixion. A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once—not oftener.

Fortuny responds, “While the final ungrammatical ‘oftener’ compromises the credibility of the speaker in the passage on the ‘shrouded dead’ above, it is aimed less at self-mockery than deflating the momentarily grave contemplation of Istanbul women: Twain must dismiss whatever weight the biblical reference has lent them; they must not be allowed to drift away enriched by any metaphorical sophistication …”

All this from the “ungrammatical” nature of one word! But if Fortuny picked up a dictionary, she’d discover that “oftener” isn’t in the least ungrammatical—particularly in the 19th century. In fact, about 17 years earlier, Hawthorne wrote (in “The Scarlett Letter”): “There was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to the sight the oftener they looked upon him.”

So this entire paragraph of wild over-reaching can be deleted along with the bad pun (“grave contemplation”). What’s more, Fortuny has missed the point: it is not a compliment or metaphorical enrichment to compare living women to zombies—even Christian ones.

Again and again Fortuny will stretch Twain on the rack of the anti-Orientalist, the invader from the West, when in fact the writer did not despise Oriental culture—he lavishes praise on both a reform-minded Egyptian leader and Syrian peasants—it is empire he detests, which he demonstrates in vitriolic passages about America’s imperialistic tendencies. When Twain describes a trio of dogs sleeping on a street and a drove of sheep that step over them—simple description without commentary—Fortuny observes “The city that [Twain] attempts to control through traditional Orientalist tropes, like the street dogs, does not notice the American tourist’s passage.”

For starters, “trope” is a literary device, not a cliché. (The book is full of malapropisms, including “sublimated” for “subsumed” and “syntactical” for “verbal”). More to the point, how could Twain possibly hope to “control” Istanbul with a passage about street dogs? As for her assertion that the city doesn’t “notice” Twain’s passage, the city as well as the rest of the world is still noticing his passage—hence, this book.

I only have space enough to showcase what Fortuny does to two writers, but rest assured, she will mangle them all though not always to the same degree (Hemingway gets off lightly). The only writing worth salvaging in this book is the passages by the famous authors themselves, and I suggest you find them elsewhere.

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Vincent Czyz is the author of the novel “Adrift in a Vanishing City“. He is also the recipient of the Faulkner Prize for Fiction and two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts. His work has appeared in “Shenandoah,” “AGNI,” and the “Massachusetts Review.”