Istanbul Expressed
THE BLACK BOOK. By Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Güneli Gün. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 400 pp.
One image stays with me from a visit to Istanbul some years ago: the floor of a mosque, covered with layer after layer, perhaps century after century, of intricately patterned rugs. This clever cushion for the knees of the faithful seemed to symbolize the difference between East and West, between the preservation of a multi-layered past and a tear-down, throwaway culture; between a textured life, full of meaning and mystery, and one that's all surface and instant gratification.
Re-examining these impressions after reading The Black Book, an extraordinary, tantalizing novel by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, I'm embarrassed by my unconscious stereotyping, even my easy assumptions that life must have meaning and a rug can be something other than itself. For Pamuk delights in shredding preconceived dichotomies—East/West, sameness/difference, community/individual, fiction/reality, meaning/ nothingness, certainty/ambiguity—considering them part of our universal quest for identity.
In the process—and process becomes a major player in this book—Pamuk also challenges the ability of literature to describe the Big Questions. Sometimes playful, sometimes angry, he wrestles with the demon of writing, not to give logical shape and meaning to his story but to resist that natural impulse, because those qualities don't exist in life.
This game of mirrors in which the survival of literature is at stake is familiar from other modern fantasists like Italo Calvino. Jeanette Winterson, William Gass and especially Jorge Luis Borges. But Pamuk seems more dangerous. He's like a charming, turn-of-the-century huckster, luring literary prospectors through a desert of mental contortion, only to leave them suddenly, without map or sustenance, to complete the search for meaning by themselves.
That Pamuk pushes readers close to the edge of what they are likely to accept has already been proved in his native Turkey. In this most Westernized country of the East. The Black Book has been both a best seller and the object of condemnation, not only for its overwrought sentences and postmodern style but also for its ambiguous politics and lightly mocking tone, which have angered leftists and fundamentalists alike. (Undaunted by those who feel threatened by his books, Pamuk has written another, just out in Turkey, called The New Life. Apparently indebted to Dante and to German Romanticism, it boasts a 22-year-old hero who reads a book that changes his life.) Though Turkish politics is always at least part of the fabric of Pamuk's work, literature rather than contemporary affairs is paramount in his latest fiction.
If one looks at Pamuk's career, this latest terrain is a logical spot in which to find him. At 42 and with five substantial novels to his name, he is making yet another stop on his express train ride through different literary styles. In his first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982, not translated into English), Pamuk sets out with fairly simple observations about superficial Western influences on Turkish life. It's a work of realism executed in nineteenth-century style, a three-generation saga about a typical middle-class Istanbul family—rather like Pamuk's own—weakened temperamentally by wealth and Westernization. (Pamuk's own Western influences are strong. Educated at an American secular school in Istanbul, he was also a visiting fellow at the University of Iowa, and is clearly steeped in European and American classics.)
Pamuk's second, more intimate novel. The Silent House (1983), is about three siblings hanging out at their dying grandmother's house in the chaotic summer of 1980, when rival left- and right-wing gangs were fighting in the streets of Istanbul. It's told in five different voices, vaguely reminiscent of Faulkner and Woolf.
In his third novel. The White Castle, published in English in 1991 to wide acclaim. Pamuk focuses even more intently on the question of identity and how it can be described. Told as a fairy tale or dream, it is the story of two men who look alike, an irascible seventeenth-century Turkish scholar known as Hoja (meaning "master") and his gentle, literature-loving, nameless Italian slave, captured aboard ship as the novel opens.
Hoja, having learned Western engineering from his slave, becomes obsessed with making a huge weapon for the Turkish Sultan's military campaign in Europe. But once constructed, it gets stuck in a swamp at the base of a gleaming white fortress in Poland, which the Turks fail to take. Surely a statement against the abuse or knowledge and the forceful taking of other cultures, this defeat also reflects the real failure of the Ottoman Turks to conquer the West in the sixteenth century, when their armies were stopped at Vienna.
In The White Castle, the Turks blame the Italian. Yet master and slave exchange clothes and identities, and Hoja (as the Italian) takes off into the fog. Thus the Turk goes "back" to Venice as if he were Italian and the Italian stays "home" in Turkey as if he were Hoja, each living in the place that suits him best.
Despite much fun and double talk about East and West—and Pamuk revels in paradoxes, opposites, doubles and ambiguities of every sort—the unspoken reality of The White Castle is that its protagonists possess personality traits that have little to do with ethnic stereotypes. Hoja is outgoing, adventurous, impulsive, awed by science and reason. The Italian is a dreamer, storyteller and instinctive survivor. Yet they belong together. Apart, each misses the other, as if to say, the melding of their complementary qualities adds up to a whole person or, on a larger scale, a healthy nation.
There is some typical Pamuk obfuscation at the end of The White Castle, suggesting that such completeness is not easily attained. Nevertheless we all yearn for it, he claims, through others or within ourselves. And it is the mystery of that yearning that looms large in Pamuk's most recent novel to be translated into English.
The Black Book is so different in style from The White Castle that it's almost a shock to readers of the earlier novel. The White Castle, beautifully translated by Victoria Holbrook, is by no means a traditional work of realism; but there is something familiar about its urgent, almost hypnotic narrative. In the story of the Italian's servitude and his efforts at survival, in Hoja's plans and schemes, and in the complex emotional connection between the two men. The White Castle has a shape we can feel at home in, a thread of story we can follow, a warmth to which we can relate.
In The Black Book, only the starting point feels familiar. Superficially, it's a whodunit featuring a world-weary lawyer, Galip, who plods around Istanbul for a week in search of his missing wife, Rüya, who's also his cousin. Galip suspects Rüya has absconded with Jelal, her half-brother, a famous newspaper columnist whom Galip idolized as a boy, and to whom he's sure Rüya is attracted. But we're soon far removed from the typical detective story, as Galip decides that the key to finding Rüya is figuring out the nature of Jelal, and then becoming Jelal. When, through Galip's carelessness (or intention?) Jelal is killed and Rüya along with him, Galip promises to keep the newspaper well supplied with Jelal's old, unpublished columns, though they're really all his own writing. Thus Galip becomes the hero of his boyhood dreams, a writer, an accomplishment darkened by his grief over Rüya's death. And that's about as close as Pamuk gets to linear narrative.
For this is the mystery novel of your nightmares, all dressed up in clues with nowhere to go. We are entering a Borgesian labyrinth: Written in deliberately befogging, serpentine sentences as if the book were composing itself right before our eyes—cheekily, Pamuk even suggests he's not quite sure where the story's going—this novel meanders, circles, weaves, goes backward, reiterates, stops to think for a moment, remembers that it's all been said before by other writers, real and invented, and even quotes them. This snow machine of a book presents us with an utterly confounding blizzard of information, complete with sinister drifts, like Galip's work phone, which keeps dialing wrong numbers, perhaps to underscore the evasiveness of truth.
Chapters on Galip's search alternate with Jelal's newspaper columns, which read more like short stories, prose poems or meditations, and reflect, as in a distorting mirror, the ideas and actions in the other chapters. Like the detective in Borges's "Death and the Compass." who uses rabbinical texts to track down a murderer. Galip's quest for his missing cousins takes him along obscure literary and historical byways. Operating again on the snow-making principle, these include infuriatingly dense discussions about Hurufism— an obscure, fourteenth-century sect that believed we could find the origin of being in letters written on our faces. There's also a whole crew of verbose, dogmatic, usually anti-Western characters who provide some of the funniest moments in the book, like three old columnists who talk all over each other giving Jelal advice on writing. (Borges's presence may loom large in this book, but the teasing, impish spirit is Pamuk's own.) There are meditations on memory, Western influences, movie stars, leftist politics, journalism, Sufi poets and the Sufi path of enlightenment, religion, Oedipal rage, love, and on and on, so that the book's suspense lies largely in the questions: When will the author get to the point, and what will it be when he does?
Pamuk has said in interviews that he wanted to invent a language that reflects the texture of life in Istanbul, its maze of ancient streets, its 3,000-year history, a city divided by the Bosphorus, half in Europe, half in Asia. Straggling over seven hills on its European side, it is connected to Asia by a twentieth-century bridge. Certainly, as Galip wanders, we get a colorful, all-encompassing, sometimes surreal picture of the city, right down to its movie-star role-playing prostitutes and its pigeons. The city also reflects life's dailiness, its careful balance of imposed form and chaos, a necessary framing element for this story, but not the whole story.
In truth, when you crawl out from under the weight of the dizzying circumlocutions and digressive detail—if you have the patience to push through The Black Book's verbal haze—what you find is a persistent strand of investigation into what it means to be a person, and secondly, a writer.
It is human, Pamuk seems to suggest, to struggle with mysteries such as "foreign" influences (versus Turkish character, for example), to look inside yourself, to wonder what you are, to long to be truly yourself. But that can also be fatally limiting. One of the most remarkable stories in the book is told by Galip (pretending to be Jelal) to a BBC film crew, for a program about Turkish politics— only Galip's story is about a nineteenth-century prince who tries to become more fully himself by getting rid of people, books, furniture, anything that might make him want to be someone else. Boredom sets in, but he never stops trying to clear his head of alien matter. He envies the "stones in the desert for just being themselves," until he dies, alone except for his scribe, in a virtually empty room painted white.
In other words, the capacity to imitate is an essential part of our beings. We're naturally open to influence, change and new experience. Indeed, we need these things just as plants need water. To resist newness is to reject the stuff of life.
Pamuk describes our yearning for this newness, for life, for something other, as a void inside us, symbolized by an air shaft in the old building where Galip and Jelal grew up. This void need not necessarily be filled with sadness, an emotion we usually associate with inner emptiness; it may also be a space where something heroic blossoms, amid the ordinariness of life, like Galip's finally fulfilled wish to be a writer. In fact, when Galip tells the story of the prince, he feels triumphant. In creating, he thinks, he has finally become himself. He is complete— a testament, as Pamuk's books usually are, to the power of art.
Pamuk's relationship with literature is ambivalem here, however. Early on, Galip admires Jelal's ability to give meaning to life through stones. Later, one of Galip's columns is allegorical, using a painting reflected in a mirror as a parable for our failure to find ourselves through art. It's a vision also embodied in the recurring image of Rüya ("dream" in Turkish) that torments Galip with a sense of her unattainability and his own shortcomings.
Finally, literature pales against life's dramas and even falls short in describing them, or so Galip intimates. His triumph as a storyteller is cut short by news of Jelal's and Rüya's deaths. But there is a trick here: Galip, suddenly more vivid in the first person, urges us to avoid the passages concerned with Rüya's murder and his grief because, he says, he doesn't have the power to convey them. In fact, these "pitch-black pages"—in contrast to the prince's deathly white room—buzz with life. Their simple descriptions of ordinary tenderness, grief, loss and love are among the most moving in the book.
So is this the true aim of literature, the seemingly artless portrayal of events and emotion? No, not here. For Pamuk, this final section is just one more wrestling round with words, one more try for a miraculous melding of reality and illusion. And for a moment, he almost succeeds. For the "I" that is Galip merges with "I," the author, as they mouth together, "We remember Rüya": Galip recalling the Rüya that is his dead wife and Pamuk catching a glimpse of his "rüya," the truth about art and life. But the reader can't help thinking it's just another trick, and may be left wondering, What's the mystery here?
The answer, in fact, lies on every page of the book. Toward the end, Galip says that being Jelal is no longer a big deal, since his style is considered old-fashioned and all he does is retell old stories anyway. But like one of Borges's metaphysical musings—"that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect"— Galip's attempts to find Jelal, whether through politics, religion, literature, mysticism, in signs on shopping bags, in the symbolism of the air shaft, all represent parts subordinated to Pamuk's whole, his very attempt to describe the search.
Like a score of other postmodern writers, Pamuk is suggesting that there are as many ways of seeing and describing life as there are, say, rugs in a mosque. Beneath one truth lies another. And like the rugs, these truths, these stories, may look different—old or new, dark or brightly colored—but they are all made of the same stuff. And some of them, to steal a word from both Borges and Pamuk, are astounding.