Alienation and the City, or, How to Find and Lose Yourself in Berlin and Kars

Abstract

In Konvolut M of the <em>Arcades Project, </em>Walter Benjamin comments instructively on the duality of the city as experienced by the <em>flâneur.</em> He writes: ‘the city splits for him into dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room’ (Benjamin, trans. Eiland and McLaughlin, 1999, 417). The implications of this are several. The dialectical poles are on the one hand spatial - indicators of the flexibility of self-location in the city. However, they are also metaphysical and meta-poetic. The city offers the possibility for a blending of personal and collective memories; for an opening of the mind to a ‘landscape’ of social interaction or a retreat of the soul into its own isolated ‘room’; for the injection of a creative impulse or the projection of psychological and experiential stagnation. This study examines the impact of these dialectical poles on ideas of selfhood, loss and memory in Cees Nooteboom’s <em>All Souls’ Day</em> and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow