| Sumario: | The relative paucity of Armenians in the novels of the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is ironic, given Pamuk's own political and very public stance on the Turkish government's silence concerning the twentieth century history of violence towards its Armenian minorities. I examine a possible relationship between this paucity and the influence of theory (deconstruction, new historicism) on Pamuk as an intellectual—whether a conviction regarding the intangibility of history, nationhood, or the self has any part to play in the way Armenians haunt Pamuk's work. If Armenians in Pamuk's fiction effectively amount to ghosts, examining the meaning of their spectral presence will highlight a strategy for lamenting a past one can now no longer articulate.
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