The Walking of The Anti-Flâneur: The Practice of Experiencing The City in Ayhan Geçgı̇n’s Novel Named Uzun Yürüyüş

The modern city is a complex structure that transforms an individual’s daily experience spatially, intellectually, and sensorially. The accelerated urbanization that followed the Industrial Revolution intensified conditions such as crowding, speed, anonymity, and diversity, exerting profound effects on individuals. Consequently, the city emerged as a critical site of both observation and representation. Emerging in 19th-century Paris, the figure of the flâneur crystallized as an urban subject who regarded the city as an aesthetic object and sought to comprehend modernity by reading the streets of a city as though they were a text. However, in the 21st century, the advent of the surveillance society, digitalization, the culture of speed, and spatial disorientation has paralyzed the flâneur’s capacity to generate meaning, giving rise to the figure of the anti-flâneur, a negation of its 19th-century counterpart. The anti-flâneur is a passive subject overwhelmed by the city rather than observing it, incapable of forging aesthetic or intellectual connections, and lacks a coherent sense of direction. This study examines Ayhan Geçgin’s novel Uzun Yürüyüş [The Long March] as an example of the anti-flâneur typology in contemporary literature. The novel’s nameless protagonist drifts from the city center towards its peripheries, devoid of the flâneur’s observational power and aesthetic awareness. His relationship with the city is marked by dissolution, fading, and silence rather than by processes of meaning-making. Although he is initially a potential observer, the character gradually devolves into a passive subject, confined to his own body. In this regard, Uzun Yürüyüş provides a literary illustration of the individual’s anonymization and transformation into an anti-flâneur within the modern urban landscape.