Istanbul not Constantinople

Orhan Pamuk's Byzantine Empire

By John Brenkman
THE BLACK BOOK By Orhan Pamuk
Translated by Guneli Gun, Farrar Straus Giroux

I harbor grave doubts about three current ideas in discussions of contemporary fiction: that the novel's new international style is magical realism; that postmodernism provides the necessary form for late-20th-century narrative; that the act of writing fractures the self, exposing identity and desire as transitory scriptural effects. But reading Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk's challenging, wonderful novel, The Black Book, almost makes me want to chuck my doubts and become a postmodern true believer. It exemplifies all three ideas and then some.

The Black Book is a fake detective novel, laced with the madcap columns of Jelal, a political journalist turned parodic autobiographer, and under girded by a rich cross-referencing of Western and Islamic culture, charting the mystery and the menace of modernity in contemporary Istanbul, the city that straddles the geographical and symbolic divide between Europe and Asia.

Jelal's half-sister, Rüya, has just left her husband, Galip, without warning or ceremony. Galip and Rüya are first cousins who grew up together; their memories form "an infinite string of stories that were tied together." They did not marry, however, until long after Rüya had run away to become a political activist, married, and divorced. Her father blames Jelal for leading her politically astray and credits Galip with saving her. Married to Galip, she had become a reclusive housewife "sentenced ... to do nothing with her life but read detective novels."

Galip, meanwhile, had always yearned to be like Jelal. When he discovers that Jelal, too, is missing, he sets off in search of his lost objects by trying to inhabit Jelal's life and mind. Eventually he realizes that Rüya and Jelal, for reasons never revealed, are in hiding together. Jelal's columns alternate throughout the novel with the longer narrative chapters; with his disappearance, the paper is recycling old columns. Galip moves into Jelal's apartment and devours his massive collection of notes, rare books, and mystical treatises. Ultimately, he begins writing the columns himself.

Pamuk's protagonist chases after his identity like a cat after its tail. In a marvelous scene in the passageways beneath Istanbul's streets, Galip tours the massive collection of mannequins that Master Bedii made to document the city's history and discovers among the effigies one of Jelal. He tells the likeness, "You are the reason why I could never be myself.... You are the reason I believed in all these fictions which managed to turn me into you." But what does it mean to emulate Jelal, who believes that his own identity is but "the collage of the crowd" of heroes he has desired to be? As Galip becomes Jelal, trying to take over his memory as well as his writing, he effaces him, in turn making his own new identity even more precarious. During one narrative more or less about Galip, Pamuk even inserts an interlude concerning "a writer" who's been having troubles since his wife left him "without giving a substantial excuse." He turns for relief to his pre-wife self:

He conjured up the persona he had aban­doned with such force and intensity that he became the persona he envisioned and was thereby able to fall into a peaceful sleep dreaming that person's dreams. Since he was soon able to adjust to this double life, he no longer had to force himself to dream or to write. Having assumed the identity of his former self, he became someone else when he wrote, filling the ashtray with the same butts, having coffee in the same coffee cup, sleeping peacefully at the same time, in the same bed, as his own ghost.

The playful paradoxes of identity and effigy, of the person as impersonator, are giv­en fuller scope when Pamuk connects them to the clash of East and West and to the layering of past and present in modern Turkey. The mannequin-maker had retreated underground because shopkeepers quit buying his mannequins; according to one of Jelal's columns, they "didn't look like the models from the West who taught us style; instead, they resembled our own people. ... Abandoning their own, our people began to adopt other people's gestures with an unaccountable speed... [A]ll those ac­quired and inappropriate gestures—the nodding, the polite coughing, the shows of anger, the winking, the shadowboxing, raising the eyebrows and rolling the eyes—all learned from the movies."

To such satire on the cultural loss of self Pamuk adds an elaborate, erudite riff on Hurufism, a late medieval Sufi sect that spied Arabic letters in the human face. To read the face was therefore to discover truths. We learn that Jelal has been fascinated with this belief, which becomes an indictment of movies and photography— they obliterate the face's writing—and of the crowding of "throngs of people" into Damascus, Cairo, and Istanbul, where their faces become "vacant" and "meaningless."

Pamuk is not rejecting modernity, but striving to show its Turkish countenance. The promises that modernity made—secularization, democracy, the individual pursuit of happiness—rested on some handy dichotomies that didn't really hold. Take the oppositions between sacred and secular, private and public. The sacred was supposedly relegated to the private domain of conscience and inner experience, while the public sphere was to be securely secular. But secularization has not proved irreversible, in the West or the East.

Private and public remain permeable to one another. Just as medieval interpreters' devotion to holy writ metamorphoses into the textual fanaticism of poststructuralist theorists, so the Hurufi mystic's cultivation of hidden meanings finds echoes in Islamic fundamentalists' yearning for signs of apocalypse. Pamuk is aware that the evocation of mystery, in medieval and modern times, has its esoteric and its exoteric forms. They do not gel. What Jelal and later Galip find in Sufi mysticism is a language of personal decipherment; they can relish their own unmaking of the self as easily as the making. But as Jelal peppers his column with suggestions of hidden meaning, his throng of readers picks up on the apocalyptic tones: "A columnist who was read by hundreds of thousands of people on ferries, buses, dolmuses, in coffee shops all over the country was a good example of someone who had the wherewithal to propagate the Messiah's hidden messages to show us the way." One reader, bitter over Jelal's failure to give the signs of Judgment Day, stalks him, Rüya, and Galip, with deadly consequence. The intellectual's playful appropriation of ancient mystics finds its explosive counterpart in the exoteric mysticism of modern political masses.

Jelal is ultimately a more central—or, at least, more legible—character than the protagonist Galip. A secular intellectual with a mass readership, an idiosyncratic intelligence with canny political instincts, Jelal embodies the precarious task of those who must find the language that can ply messages among so many contradictory, yet inseparable, faces of society.

Pamuk's own task is reflected in Jelal's. He has turned to the techniques and possibilities of postmodern narration to convey a world of rival values and troubled identities. An adept of the Western literary tradition, Pamuk has already in his career virtually recapitulated the history of the modern European novel. His first novel, Cevdet Bey ve Oglulari, published in 1982 and still not translated into English, is a multi-generational bildungsroman. He followed it with the absorbing Sessiz Ev, available in French as La Maison du silence (Gallimard), which uses the modernist device of multiple narrators to pick apart a wealthy, Westernized Istanbul family. The White Castle inaugurated his postmodern turn with an elegant, somewhat contrived fable of confused identities alluded to in The Black Book as "a novel on the subject of a pair of look-alikes who had exchanged lives, a book that was considered by his readers to be 'historical'"

The stylistic choices of The Black Book suggest a larger ambition. Pamuk creates this novel's webbing from Islamic and Western, medieval and modern sources. He takes, for example, the 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi's Mathnawi, and displaces the dervish's moral wisdom with psychological paradoxes, his sacred mysteries with modern conundrums. At the same time, Pamuk builds his narrative as an imitation, or travesty, of detective fiction, the Western literary genre that feeds the craving for mystery only to profane it in the secular revelation of whodunit. In one more twist, Pamuk then refuses to dispel the mystery or solve the crime.

All this literary artifice has a purpose. It enables Pamuk to explore his great themes—identity, mystery, Westernization and Islamicization, modernity—across two faces of agency in the modern world: the self and the masses. As modern society creates masses of migrants, workers, and squatters (Istanbul's population is said to have reached 10 million), the crowd in turn transforms politics. At the same time, modernity remains preoccupied with the self, whether plumbing the depths of the modernist "psyche" or inventorying the shards of the postmodernist "subject." Like Don DeLillo's Mao II, The Black Book yokes the self and the crowd to show their impossible, inescapable coexistence.

A residual doubt keeps me from simply celebrating the postmodern turn. DeLillo's novel forgoes understanding its masses because it knows them only through images televised via satellite. While Pamuk has a surer ear for the noise of the crowd, he does not really try to tell its stories. That task leads to very different stylistic innovations—in, for example, Latife Tekin's Berji Kristin: Tales From the Garbage Hills (Marion Boyars), which assembles stories from the lives of people living in a massive shantytown built on one of Istanbul's dumps. Her writing is a testimonial art, evoking anonymous and collective voices. Pamuk's postmodernism, by contrast, commits him to a linguistic equivalent of CNN. His translator, Guneli Gun, herself a novelist, says The Black Book "translates like a charm precisely for the same reason Isabel Allende's work travels easily into English: English is, in fact, the common language behind the various languages out of which the new world-voice is being created." The writer hears English even as he writes Turkish! It's worth questioning the triumph of the "world-voice," not to criticize Pamuk's choices so much as to warn against the tendency of Western readers to believe that the truth of another culture can drop into our literary lap only if it is written in idioms we already understand.