Two worlds

Turkey's East-West tensions spin out narrative arabesques

by Bill Marx

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country," wrote James Joyce to Grant Richards in 1906, "and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the center of paralysis." Orhan Pamuk's city of choice is Istanbul, and to him it's the heart of contradiction: Islamic terrorists and communist agitators. Eastern spiritualism and Western pop culture. The capital is the site for The Black Book, a portrait of Turkey's centuries-old identity crisis, the schizophrenia of a country caught between a ruinous past and a dangerous present.

Filled with tales within tales as well as speculations on the ambiguity of language, the novel was both a bestseller in Turkey and a target for journalistic attacks on the growing influence of the Christian-dominated West.

Pamuk, educated at a secular college in Istanbul, knows contemporary French, Russian, and American fiction, he was a Visiting Writer Fellow at the University of Iowa in 1985. His manipulation of traditional storytelling techniques suggests the intricate leg-pulling of Calvino and Borges, though his amalgamation of Western and Eastern influences (The Black Book quotes Coleridge and Proust, the 19th-century prose writer Ahmet Rasim and the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi) never descends into the hermetically sealed jollity of John Barth's postmodern Orientalism, which appropriates but never integrates the East.

Pamuk's only other novel to have been translated into English. The White Castle (1991), also takes up Turkey's identity problems and penchant for self-deprecation. Set in the 17th century, that provocative short parable is told from the point of view of a Venetian enslaved to a Turkish look-alike, Hoja. The pair's relationship grows from sadistic incomprehension to frustrated affection. The Turk's desire for Western scientific knowledge is undercut by a society more interested in interpreting dreams than deciphering reality. His captive's dreams of freedom, in turn, are tamed by the Venetian's increasing attraction to the fanciful imaginative rhythms of the East. The two design a monstrous machine to storm a castle in Poland. But the contraption ("freak, insect, satan, turtle archer, walking tower, iron heap, red rooster, kettle on wheels, giant, cyclops, monster, swine, gypsy, blue-eyed weirdie") fails miserably at its imperialistic task, and the Ottoman Empire withdraws into wounded isolation.

Pamuk proffers a teasingly cryptic answer to Hoja's inquiry "Why am I what I am?" The two men gradually absorb one another prejudices and temperaments until, at the end, they swap identities. Pamuk seems to be saving that the self is elastic and that different combinations of the two cultures are possible, perhaps even necessary.

The Black Book explores cultural and individual instability on a grander scale — it's a would-be Joycean epic infected with Borgesian doubt. Beginning as a fractured detective story, the book evolves into a metaphysical thriller about the rewards and risks of seeing the self, language, and society as reflections of human desire. Pamuk's hero. Galip, is a nebbishy lawyer searching for his wife Rüya, a beauty who, bored with her life as a housewife and part-time translator of mystery stories, up and left him one morning. Galip is also obsessed with Rüya's half-brother and his cousin Jelal, who disappeared about the same time as the disaffected wife. A 5Oish columnist for a popular newspaper, Jelal wrote ornate, ruminative, critical prose that won him both fans and enemies. Envious of Jelal's power of expression, Galip absorbs the writer's life — he goes through his papers, impersonates him, and writes his columns. The transformation is so successful that he's hunted by an alternately loving and hostile reader who blames the writer for aiming his back on a revolutionary coup in the mid '60s.

Chapters that chronicle Galip's discovery of his creative voice alternate with examples of Jelal's often brilliant columns, which include sardonic family reminiscences, speculations about poets and gangsters, and traditional yarns. "The Story of Those Who Cannot Tell Stories" investigates the pain-filled faces of

The quiet ones, the ones who cannot do the narrative, who cannot get themselves heard, who don't seem important, the mutes, whose stories don't arouse peoples curiosity, who think of the perfect comeback only at home.

"The Executioner and the Weeping Face" deals with an assassin teased into authorship by the tearful expression on the face of the severed head he's bringing to the Sultan:

What made the world so astonishing as to be frightful was his own seeming attempt to extract a story — as if the world wanted to tell him something, to signify some meaning, but the words were lost in a misty uncertainty, as in a dream.

To Pamuk, the self has an itch for fiction. In his narratives. Turkey is sometimes a mask for a world filled with mysterious significance, sometimes a grotesque imitation of Western chic. The most haunting image in The Black Book is of a painting (in an infamous Istanbul bordello) that faces a mirror:

The representation of Istanbul on the first wall, although its technique was reminiscent of scenes painted on horse carts and on tents at local fairs, fetched up, in the mirror's treatment of its subject matter, unnerving associations with dark and creepy engravings. The mirror opposite showed the large bird floating in the corner of the fresco on the opposite wall as if it were beating its wings languorously like a mythic creature: the unpainted facades of ancient wood frame mansions in the fresco were transformed in the mirror into terrifying faces ... parks, seaside cafes. Municipal Lines ferryboats, inscriptions, trunks were all transformed into signs of a realm that was altogether different.

Pamuk shares with Borges what Harold Bloom in The Western Canon calls "a rueful consistency": "in the labyrinth of his universe we are confronted by our images in the mirror, not just of nature but also of the self." By mirroring Jelal, Galip assimilates him until it is impossible to tell the difference between the lawyer and the writer, the reality and the dream. Galip exchanges his story for another.

Eschewing the didactic, The Black Book argues for art as an instrument of individual and cultural liberation through synthesis. The writer's problem is reconciling fantasy with reality, or at least holding the two perspectives (and selves) in balance. Galip learns how to do it: "For the first time in his life, the gewgaws Galip saw in the windows and the faces he came across seemed as strange as his dreams and at the same time, as familiar and reassuring as a noisy family dinner." The real and the unreal necessarily intertwine. But it is the ritual of art, rather than the dogmas of ideology that keep the contraries in fruitful play.

Pamuk's syncretizing sleight of hand doesn't always take us in. The novel's Borgesian solipsism weakens its celebration of the connections between the imagination and the world, one culture and another. Rüya is more of a device than a character there's no erotic heat propelling Galip's quest, which makes his identify crisis unnecessarily theoretical. Still, The Black Book is prestidigitation of a high order even when Pamuk shows us the tricks up his sleeve — or his novel in the mirrored fresco.

A black book the artist had prankishly stuck into the hand of a blind beggar turned into a two-part book in the mirror, a book with two meanings and two stones: yet, looking at the painting, one realized the book was of uniform consistency and that us mystery was lost in itself.

Unity from language

Now in his early 40s, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is bemused by the fact that he's an avant-garde novelist and a bestselling author in a repressive culture. The Black Book sold over 80,000 copies when it was published in Turkey four years ago.

"Actually, I have always felt that I am not experimental in the sense of unintelligible." Pamuk explains during a phone interview from Istanbul. "I am hard, I need some patience. I want the reader to pay some attention; he has to stay awake. On the other hand, my writing is never obscure."

Pamuk is controversial because he deals quite directly with Turkey's cultural confusion. "Identity has been, and is still, a major cultural and political issue here," Pamuk explains. "Istanbul is a town made of many layers formed by a number of civilizations. The Black Book puts all of these layers together into a forceful collage in which a sense of unity comes from my energy, my language. I am not a purist in that I want us always to be Eastern or always to be Western. The unique quality of the life here doesn't depend on its sources in the East or West. What counts is the unique way these different stories, images, and ideas come together."

The common-sense notion that culture should be an imaginative smorgasbord is a minority opinion among Turkey's literati. "I am the most outspoken of contemporary Turkish writers because I have the courage to be influenced by what's happening in the West," Pamuk says. “I am unembarrassed to be influenced by Borges. The other writers around here stay away from touchy matters, particularly fundamentalism. The only time I really got myself into trouble is when I wrote something to defend Salman Rushdie. My mother called me, asking why I was saying such things. Luckily, I had hidden myself away in an obscure corner in Istanbul at the time to work on The Black Book"

- BM