From City to Text

Abstract

Michael De Certeau (1984) introduces the rhetoric of walking by observing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre by approaching the city as a human text. He claims that totalizing this text in the eye without analyzing closely and without experiencing it is isolation and distancing from life. Certeau (1984) rejects this Panopticon look by urging the necessity of walking on the narrow streets of the city to have unique analyses like free voyage of the reader on the lines of the text. The voyeurs must come down and just jump onto the streets freely to become walkers and readers must be born on the text after the death of author as Roland Barthess (1967) suggests. Only then, the variety of voices created by innumerable walkers in the city and multiple footsteps on the text can compose a chorus by creating a harmony of differences. The chorus of free pedestrians’ footsteps involves unique voices depending on their perspectives. Inspired by Certeau (1984) and Barthes (1967), this paper analyzes four different voices of walkers in one of the most magnificent cities in the world, Istanbul or Constantinople in the past. The descriptions of the city are different due to the writers’ different point of views, their ideologies and their aims. Their angles, the time they live and their sex have also big effects on their writings. Four texts by four different writers describing Constantinople/Istanbul are discussed in this research: The Turkish Embassy Letters (1970) by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Lands of the Saracen (1863) by Bayard Taylor, The Innocents Abroad (1869) by Mark Twain and Istanbul, Memories and the City (2006) by Orhan Pamuk.