La Maison Du Silence

Berman, Paul

The New Republic, September 9, 1991, v205, n11, pp.36-39

Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle begins wi th a preface signed by one Faruk, explaining that the story to come was dug up from a seventeenth-century archive in a village outside Istanbul, has been rendered into modern idiom, and should not be weighed down with too many speculations about contemporary politics and East-West relations-which is, of course, a backhanded invitation to try out precisely those speculations, and indeed speculations of every sort. It is an amusing preface. It is a sort of theater curtain, dangling to arouse anticipation. And if it mystifies the American reader on small points-who is this Faruk, and who is the grandfather he invokes, or the dead sister whom he dedicates the book? -it also gets out of the way quickly, and we are soon enough in a Venetian galley in the seventeenth century, where we are about to be captured by the Ottoman navy and flung into slavery, and all is well, at least for the reader eager for narrative.

Still, there is more to say about these opening pages. Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 and has already published four novels in Turkey, making him a celebrated figure, his country's leading post-modern writer. The White Castle is the only one of these novels so far to be translated into English. But one of his other books, a larger and in some respects a more ambitious work, has been translated into French as La maison du silence, or The House of Silence. And from this book we can glean a few additional insights into that little dangling preface. The same Faruk who dug up the archive in The White Castle turns out to be a main character in The House of Silence: a sad sack historian in his mid-30s, an abandoned husband who heads out from Istanbul with his younger brother and sister to spend the summer with their ancient grandmother at her beach-town home. Sometimes Faruk does put in a hard day's research in the Ottoman archives, where eventually he will turn up the story of The White Castle. Mostly, though, he sits in his grandmother's dining room and hides a bottle under the table. The younger people hang out at the beach, carry on flirtations, keep misplacing a beloved Best of Elvis album. They live the kind of modernized life that is marked by drunken car rides, American-style. While American young people, however, might do their driving in a stupor of the eternal present, Faruk and his siblings are shadowed, drenched really, by the Turkish past.

What is this past-for the Turkish intelligentsia, or at least for the characters that Pamuk has chosen to show? It is not, as might be supposed, the dead hand of ancient tradition. The past is a tradition, instead, of anti-tradition: a past that was meant to overcome the past. The grandfather who is invoked in Faruk's preface to The White Castle presides like a ghost over The House of Silence-long dead, still creaking around the house, especially in the unforgiving reveries of his bitter widow, the grandmother. We are meant to see in him a somewhat representative figure of historic Turkish progressivism, a character evocative of Kemal Ataturk, the modernizing dictator from early in the century. (Turkish readers will notice, I am told, that several details of grandfather's life mirror Ataturk's.)

But the modernizing zeal, back in the days when grandfather was alive, didn't necessarily lead to glorious triumphs. Grandfather's thinking tilted to the simple side. He tortured himself with a question: Why has the Islamic East lagged behind the West? And all his life he came up with the answers of a village atheist. It was because the West knew that God is dead. It was because Westerners reject the idea of an afterlife and know that death means nothingness. It was because the West knows particular facts and theories that could easily be provided to the East, too, if only someone would apply himself to the task. After which would come, in the East as in the West, the radiant future.

So grandfather devoted his life to compiling precisely the necessary information to enlighten the East, and he set out to write it down in what he projected to be a forty-eight-volume encyclopedia. He was going to be the rationalist messiah: half Quixote, half Casaubon. Even his wife couldn't stand his foreign fanatical Jacobin obsessions. His political agitations got him exiled from Istanbul, which is how the family ended up in the beach town. But life in the provinces only doomed him more. He was a physician by profession, yet building a practice among the peasants of the beach region was nearly impossible, and he ended up with a reputation for being in league with the devil. Like his grandson to come, he took to drink.

In the 1980s world of The House of Silence, on the other hand, grandfather's creaky old-fashioned ideals have willy-nilly been realized, haven't they? His own grandchildren do seem to be the rationalist marvels that he envisioned. Enlightenment is theirs by natural inheritance. They don't have to torture themselves to think secular thoughts. The lonely beach town is nowadays filled with prosperous concrete houses. German tourists throng the hotel wearing fezes and watching belly dancers. Yet what good is this triumphant modernity? Everyone is steeped in problems. The ferocious battles between tradition and change go on as before, except in the useless violent form of rival gangs and killings, Communists versus fascists. Faruk's cousin, a nasty kid from the poor side of town, Joins a gang of fascist extortionists; his sister takes up communism.

Such is the radiant future! The conundrums of East and West are not looking good. From the preface to The White Castle we discover that poor old Faruk, the boozy historian, who had quite enough troubles in The House of Silence, seems to have more, and has been expelled from the university. We are reminded that his young sister has died, not from natural causes either, as we know from the other novel, and we bite our fingernails over the fate of modernity and the East-even while we are supposed to be settling down for the story to come. And only four pages have gone by ! And so The White Castle begins, and the modern age disappears, and the naval battles of the seventeenth century are upon us. An Italian university student, seized at sea by a Turkish attack, finds himself enslaved in Istanbul by his own Turkish look-alike, a master called Hoja, whose greatest desire is to learn the wisdom of the West. The Turkish obsession with Western knowledge turns out to antedate the present by hundreds of years. Hoja wants to learn everything the Italian has ever studied, to gorge himself on the several mysterious branches of Western knowledge-on science and engineering, on the information that might lead to military advantages for the Ottoman empire, and even on the deeper psychology of the West.

But how to get at these unOttoman things? Master grills slave. They discuss chemistry, the stars, the relative merits of Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. They set out to build various contraptions in a spirit of scientific curiosity: a fireworks display, a model of the universe, a clock, a giant weapon. Only who can predict how knowledge will spread? Hoja is eager to share his new scientific learning with the Turkish masses, but when he sets up school, the students get suspicious, a calf's head turns up on the doorstep, and the teaching must be abandoned. Hoja wants to instruct the boy sultan, but the sultan's curiosity is less than dependable. The Ottoman court court craves prognostications, not science.

Gradually Hoja caves in to his own culture, as most people would. He does try out a few prophecies, just for fun, and the prophecies happen to come true. He rises to the office of Imperial Astrologer, which was not exactly his original intention. The prescientific world turns out to be a sponge. The elements of Western knowledge that Hoja wrings out of his slave get sopped up like drops, and knowledge itself disappears.

Even in the sphere of the strictly practical, in the military engineering that Hoja and slave undertake, nothing useful comes from their years of faithful labor. Master and slave build a superengine of war, a sort of manpowered tank, or anyway a contraption that people call a "freak, insect, satan, turtle archer, walking tower, iron heap, red rooster, kettle on wheels, giant, cyclops, monster, swine, gypsy, blue-eyed weirdie." And with this monstrosity in tow, the Ottoman empire proceeds to the invasion of eastern Europe. The Turkish army besieges a White Castle in the Carpathians, and the contraption is finally brought into play. But it gets caught in the mud.

A single weird product of Western engineering is of no use to the advancing army of the East. Worse: it arouses the superstitions of the soldiers. And like the school and the private tutoring and the effort to go beyond astrology, the invasion collapses in miserable failure. Is this fiasco meant to represent the crucial turning point in the history of Islam and the West, the moment when Islam fell into the stagnation that so much preoccupies Faruk's grandfather, centuries later?

Pamuk's novel brings to mind the view of Bernard Lewis, the historian of Islam, who has argued that the military failures of Ottoman Turkey in its invasion of Europe in the seventeenth century did indeed constitute the decisive catastrophic moment. For up to that fateful invasion, Islam had risen more or less steadily for a thousand years, and Christianity had generally receded, until at last the Ottoman army, having conquered large parts of southeastern Europe, stood at the heart of Europe and laid siege to the gates of Vienna. And the failure was inexplicable. The Westerners had somehow acquired an ability-what was it? science? military organization?-to repel all attacks, and to push the invaders out, and to initiate their own never-ending expansion.

The shock of this unimaginable disaster after a thousand years of success has never entirely disappeared, according to Lewis. It is a primary source of resentment and rage even now, the background to relations between Islam and the West that Westerners themselves never pause to remember. Of course Pamuk says nothing about any of this in his novel. On the contrary, speculations about Turkish history and the rise of the West are precisely what he warns us against in his preface. Yet what can be done? Pamuk brings Hoja, the slave, the sultan, and the army to the gates of an impregnable White Castle in Christian Europe, and the ignominious defeat occurs; and since readers are thinking creatures, interpretations of every sort leap to mind. The sly author has only himself to blame.

Perhaps not everything in Hoja's exploitation of his slave fails so utterly. There is the psychological exploration of the West. Hoja conceives the notion that Western difference from the East consists of something deeper than technical or scientific knowledge-possibly a different sense of identity, a species of selfknowledge that is unknown in the East, possibly a consciousness of sin and shame. So he obliges his slave to reveal his every dream and memory, and while the slave dutifully recalls his childhood and youth in Italy, Hoja responds by recalling his own dreams and memories. The two men sit at a table "like two bachelors telling each other's fortunes to pass the time on endless winter nights," writing memoirs called Why I Am What I Am" and sharing them with one another. But identity is memory, in Pamuk's notion. The sharing of memories entails a certain blurring of identities, too. Their conversations, their scientific enterprises, their lives together become a sort of mutual demolition, tearing down what makes each one distinct. This yields very little about the secret inner strength of the West. Yet neither is it another fiasco like the march into the Carpathians.

It generates somehow a quiet ecstasy. For the exchange of identities, the mutual introduction to a new life, a ne way of thinking, a new language-this is, at least it can be, a kind of love. Faruk, in introducing the book, offers what he calls a mistranslation of Proust, to this effect: "To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person-what else is this but the birth of great passion?" The love that is generated by hours of writing and talking at the table teeters for a moment on the homoerotic; the men stand in front of a mirror and touch each other, though with some revulsion and fear. Their love is not really sexual, however. But it is passionate. The novel rises to a sort of love aria of open confession-peculiar, narcissistic, confused between self-loathing and love of the other. "I loved Him," the slave says of Hoja (or is it Hoja of the slave, since separate identities have long been lost?):

I loved Him the way I loved that helpless, wretched ghost of my own self I saw in my dreams, as if choking on the shame, rage, sinfulness, and melancholy of that ghost, as if overcome with shame at the sight of a wild animal dying in pain, or enraged by the selfishness of a spoilt son of my own. And perhaps most of all I loved Him with the stupid revulsion and stupid joy of knowing myself...

Does this aspect of The Mite Castle, the story of intimate confused passion, suggest still more complexities of East and West? Can whole cultures, like individuals, fall confusedly in love, believing that the other "has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery"? Cultures can certainly fall into hatred. Undying animosities have kept Europe and the Islamic Middle East at each other's throats for no less than 1,300 years. But where there is hatred, might not there be also love, mixed in a little here and a little there, like sugar? The mutual fascination between the Christian-dominated West and the Islamic-dominated East is no small or simple thing. It is so powerful that people sometimes do want to abandon their own identity in a fit of self-loathing or desire for the other. Is that kind of fascination different from passionate love, and aren't Hoja, the slave, and Faruk's grandfather all instances of such a love, each displaying the foolishness of a lover, grandly incapable of taking the measure of the object of his inflamed affections?

One of the appeals of Pamuk as a novelist is that he invites this sort of daffy speculation, not explicitly, but by the substance of what he writes. Possible interpretations bubble up spontaneously from his pages. There are novelists who entertain us with their inventiveness and novelists who entertain us with our own inventiveness. Pamuk, with his easy Cartesian cerebralness, manages to do both. Possibly the ratiocination in The White Castle carries on a little too much. The book's characteristic image is not the castle, as suggested by the title, but the table, which is a disappointment, given that hard logical tables are less amusing than impregnable white castles. Still, it must be acknowledged that, when the memoir-writing at the table finally engenders its special passions and the narrator finds himself thinking thoughts of love, the cerebral complexities of memory and identity acquire a surprising warmth and ardor. As a philosophical meditation, The White Castle is curious and engrossing. As a novel of love, however, The White Castle turns suddenly vivid and unpredictable.

The impression that Orhan Pamuk is more than a philosophical novelist is confirmed by The House of Silence. Characters and philosophical themes recur in one book and the other, yet far from being extensions of one another, the two novels seem almost to be manufactured of different materials, as if The White Castle were a statue and The House of Silence a carpet. The latter emphasizes everything that is downplayed in the former. It is a novel of character, not so much of ideas; an interweaving of several stories, not the telling of a single grand tale. The White Castle tends to be coolly recited, except for the declaration of passion at the end, whereas large portions of The House of Silence are written with a Faulknerian warmth and intensity. (Faulkner is an obvious influence on this Turkish writer.) What possibly can Pamuk's other two novels be like-the latest of which, by the way, is currently a best-seller in Turkey and the object of polemics in the newspapers? So in addition to the intrinsic interest in these novels, their entertaining quality, the fascination of their topical themes, and their tendency to excite a certain madly enjoyable spirit of theoretical spritz in the reader, something else attracts attention. That is the author. The man is extravagantly talented. He is prolific. And he's only 38.

PAUL BERMAN is editing a reader on "political correctness" to be published by Dell Laurel in February.