Pirates, Pashas and the Imperial Astrologer

THE WHITE CASTLE

By Orhan Pamuk
Translated by Victoria Holbrook
161 pp. New York: George Braziller.

By Jay Parini

A new star has risen in the east — Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer. And if "The White Castle" is representative of his fiction, he has earned the right to comparisons with Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, both of whom preside over this novel like beneficent angels.

Born in 1952, Mr. Pamuk apparently established himself overnight in 1982 with a massive realistic novel along the lines of "Buddenbrooks" that tracks the fortunes of a wealthy Istanbul family over three gener­ations in this century. His second novel was a slim modernist tale told from several viewpoints that prompted comparisons with the work of William Faulk­ner and Virginia Woolf. A fourth novel has recently appeared in Turkish. But "The White Castle" — Mr. Pamuk's third novel — is the first to be translated into English (and the luminous translation, by Victoria Holbrook, is such that one could easily believe the novel was written in English).

"The White Castle" is a fable of identity, a post­modern tale that explores the murky and recessive byways of Cartesian self-consciousness. At this point, many readers of this review will yawn: not another second-rate philosopher pretending to be a novelist. You can relax. Mr. Pamuk is a storyteller with as much gumption and narrative zip as Scheherazade.

The story begins as a straightforward first-person narrative about the misfortunes of a young Italian scholar who, en route from his native Venice to Naples sometime in the 17th century, is captured by Turkish pirates. Brought to Istanbul, he is imprisoned. Having convinced his captors that he was trained in Italy as a doctor, he finds himself called upon to heal everyone from fellow prisoners to a pasha. A man of high intelli­gence and common sense, he manages in most cases to effect a cure. Slowly, he wins the admiration of the pasha, who presents him as a slave to his friend, an eccentric scientist called only Hoja, a word, he tells us, meaning "master."

The young Italian is amazed by his first sight of Hoja. "The resemblance between myself and the man who entered the room was incredible!" says the narra­tor. "It was me there ... for that first instant this was what I thought." Hoja, it turns out, is a determined character, full of quaint enthusiasms, who wants to learn everything about the West, especially its science; he commands his identical "twin" to teach him all he knows. When he finally has learned everything, the slave will be freed.

After more than a decade, Hoja insists that his counterpart sit opposite him at a bare table, both with paper and pen in hand to write the stories of their lives for each other in a protracted and narcissistic ritual of self-exposure that probes the inner workings of that great conundrum: truth versus reality. "Thus in the space of two months," our narrator tells us, "I learned more about his life than I'd been able to learn in eleven years." More enticingly, he notes: "I encouraged him, perhaps because I already sensed then that I would later adopt his manner and his life-story as my own."

One day the bubonic plague overwhelms Istanbul. Coffins are piling up in the mosques, and there is panic in the air. By this time Hoja has won the favor of the young sultan of the Ottoman Empire, mostly by filling his head with pseudoscientific tales and fantastic sto­ries. Eager to gain further power at court, Hoja con­spires with his double to think of ways of reducing the risk of plague through the exercise of Western hygiene. Cats, for instance, are brought in to get rid of the rats that infest the city, although the sultan is told that these rats are really Satan in disguise. The scheme works, and the plague is banished. Hoja is elevated to Imperial Astrologer.

One of Hoja's enduring obsessions has been the construction of an ultimate weapon — a "war engine" to rout the sultan's enemies. The sultan now grants Hoja the necessary funds to pursue his hobbyhorse. Some years later, when a war between the Turks and the Poles erupts, Hoja's expensive and ridiculous cannon is called into action to help in the assault on a glittering fortress in the Carpathian Mountains, the "white cas­tle" of the book's title. Alas, it can only fail. Hoja knows this, and he escapes from the battle into the fog rather than risk beheading by an irate sultan. In fact, Hoja leaves the sultan's realm altogether and goes to Venice, to resume there the life of his Italian double, and his slave takes over Hoja's life as a Turkish sage.

Or does he? In a final chapter that was purportedly written many years after the main events of the tale, Mr. Pamuk offers twist after twist as the identity of the narrator is called into question. Has a role reversal really taken place after all? Who, indeed, is writing this book — Hoja or his slave? Were they, perhaps, always one person — the bicameral mind reified as two sepa­rate people for the sake of the story? The more one tries to figure this out, the less certain one becomes.

Adamantly, Mr. Pamuk's tale spirals in on the most basic human problem, the one Hoja puts at the top of his pad every time he sits down to write: "Why I Am What I Am." And what makes up any human being, at least according to the narrator of this story, is a shimmering web of fancy, a sequence of events that may or may not

Hoja Is the Rest of Me

I could tell from the clever questions he asked, from his shrewdness, that ever since he'd received the books we presented to him the sultan had been speculating how much of Hoja was me, and how much of me was Hoja….He disentan­gled us with his observations about our speech and behaviour. These observations, which I found sometimes childish and sometimes clever, start­ed to worry me: I began to believe that my person­ality had split itself off from me and united with Hoja's, and vice versa….The sovereign would stop suddenly and, turning to one of us, say, "No, this is his thought, not yours….Now you are glancing around just as he does. Be yourself!" When I laughed in surprise he'd continue, "That's better, bravo. Have you two never looked at your­selves in the mirror together?" He'd ask which of us could stand to be himself when we did look in the mirror.

From "The White Castle."

be true. "At times," the narrator says, "while entertain­ing the sovereign, or now while writing this book, these stories have seemed to me mere reflections of my fantasies, not the truth, but I believed them." What he comes to believe in, finally, are the small details: his sister's stutter, the buttons on his clothes, the olive tree in the garden. The power of fiction, then, becomes the power to shape the myriad facts that make up the world, to create order where nothing but randomness existed. We are what we are because of the way the imagination plays with, indeed shapes, "reality."

Accordingly, the Turkey of this novel is not a realistic place; one does not read a novel like "The White Castle" to find out what Turkish life in the 17th century was like. Mr. Pamuk, I suspect, places his narrative in a slightly disorienting, dreamlike zone simply to point up the fictional aspect of the narrative. The Kafkaesque white castle, for instance, is unlike anything one might encounter in reality: "It was at the top of a high hill, its towers streaming with flags were caught by the faint red glow of the setting sun, and it was white; purest white and beautiful." One might well ask what this castle represents, since Mr. Pamuk calls so much attention to it by naming the book "The White Castle" and by making the failure to conquer this fortress the climax of the plot. I am not sure. Is it truth itself that, like the castle, remains unassailable?

Again, one should not be led astray by all of this metaphysical probing. Mr. Pamuk, like his characters, is obsessed with narrative. "Wasn't inventing and lis­tening to diverting stories the pleasantest part of life?" his narrator (whoever he is) asks near the end of the novel. He understands the ideal shape of a good story. In fact, Hoja and his slave at one point discuss "how the ideal story should begin innocently like a fairy-tale, be frightening like a nightmare in the middle, and con­clude sadly like a love story ending in separation." "The White Castle" begins exactly like a fairy tale, fantastically, with pirates and kidnapping, slaves and pashas; it proceeds into a dark, almost hallucinatory maze of self-exploration in which the narrator nearly lapses into solipsism; it ends, wistfully, with Hoja and his slave — who have become like brothers — perpetu­ally severed.

There is one oddity here: the novel includes a preface about the origin of the manuscript that was supposedly written by a fictional character from Mr. Pamuk's second novel. While this preface has a certain Borgesian charm, it will puzzle most readers. It proba­bly should have been dropped altogether for the Ameri­can edition.

Over all, Mr. Pamuk's seductively canny novel reaffirms what is essential about human nature and points up the fictive aspects of personal boundaries. As the sultan remarks to Hoja: "Was it not the best proof that men everywhere were identical with one another that they could take each other's place?" Though re­markably brief, "The White Castle" is one of those rare novels that call into being a complete and self-sustain­ing world shot through with a peculiar brilliance.