Tales of the city

Robert Irwin
07 July 1995

Orhan Pamuk THE BLACK BOOK Translated by Gueneli Gun 400pp. Faber. - 0 571 16892 2

According to Turkish folklore, the Simurgh is a bird with a name but no body. In the thirteenth-century Conference of the Birds by the Persian poet Farid al-Din al-Attar, the Simurgh, which nests on the equally legendary Mount Kaf, becomes the object of a mystical quest a quest which ends in self-discovery for its participants.

The Black Book, the second of Orhan Pamuk's books to be translated into English (it was originally reviewed in the TLS of October 12, 1990), takes a similar form, as Galip, a rather colourless lawyer, searches for his missing wife Ruya. (Ruya is Turkish for "dream", though it also happens to be the name of a cinema in the insalubrious Beyoglu quarter of Istanbul; Pamuk's book is saturated with references to dreams, of both the physiological and the celluloid kind.) The hunt for Ruya develops into a search for her half-brother Jelal, a flamboyant and mysterious newspaper columnist, for Galip is possessed by the notion that his wife has gone into hiding with him. As he follows the tracks of Jelal, Galip comes to identify with his quarry, to the point of secretly taking over the writing of his column for him. Unlike the mystical seekers after the truth who travel the world in al-Attar's medieval romance, Galip's quest for the sweet cheat gone never takes him out of Istanbul. The Black Book is, before all, a tale of the city. When Galip visits a subterranean storehouse of dolls, he looks on models representing Istanbul types the sort of people tourists rarely get to know:

He saw bingo men with their draw sacks. He saw snotty, stressed-out university students. He saw apprentice nut roasters, bird fanciers, and treasure seekers. He saw those who have read Dante in order to prove that all Western art and thought have been appropriated from the East, and those who have drawn maps in order to prove that the objects called minarets are in fact signal posts erected by extraterrestrials, and he saw the mannequins of theological-school students who, having been struck by a high tension cable, were jolted into a collective blue funk which enabled them to recite daily events which had happened some two hundred years back. In the muddy chambers, he saw mannequins who had been teamed into groups of mountebanks, impersonators, sinners and impostors. He saw couples who were unhappily married, ghosts who were restless, and war dead who had bolted their sepulchres . . . .

Istanbul is an apocalyptic city, whose inhabitants wait for a Messiah who will bear His cabalistic (that is literary) credentials written on His face. Galip's quest is a search for signs and meanings in a shabby city, as he looks for omens in the activities of the pimps and the vendors of sesame rings, in the posters advertising Bruce Lee films, in the dusty clutter of shop windows and in the pattern of the narrow, twisting streets. He comes to believe that the city is a book which can be read only if one also knows that each person has their destiny written on their face.

The Black Book is not one story but many. In this it resembles The Thousand and One Nights, another collection of what are overwhelmingly urban stories, and Pamuk repeatedly draws attention to the medieval Arab story collection as a source for many of the themes and motifs that he is working with. At several points, the reader encounters pastiches or reheatings of old tales from the Nights, most notably in a story, "A Lengthy Chess Game", produced by Jelal for his newspaper column. This story is closely modelled on the tale of "The Mock Caliph", in which Harun al-Rashid encounters his double on a boat floating down the Tigris. The medieval Nights story (which, after its marvellously mysterious opening, turns into a fairly conventional Arab love story) has been reworked by several modern writers. Naguib Mahfouz in Arabian Nights and Days (1995) turned it into a parable about protest against political oppression. Gueneli Gun (who by an odd twist of fate and destiny has become the translator into English of The Black Book) gave it a transvestite and feminist slant in her fine novel On the Road to Baghdad (1991). But Pamuk characteristically turns the story into a metaphysical parable about the doubtful frontiers of individual identity.

Another of The Black Book's oriental sources is the Mathnawi Discourses, a rambling compilation of fables, stories and mystical meditations cast in verse form by the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Jalal al-Din al-Rumi. The Mathnawi Discourses provides Pamuk with licence to meander, digress and be cryptic. Rumi is traditionally credited with the formation of the Mevlevi order of Whirling Dervishes. A later Mevlevi poet, Seyh Galip (175799), namesake of The Black Book's protagonist, is frequently quoted. Pamuk draws on the numerous Arab and Persian romances of star-crossed lovers and to a greater extent on the word-playing parlour games of the Ottoman court and literary elite.

There are other tales of the city which have furnished models for Pamuk. Thomas de Quincey's opium-driven pursuit of the prostitute Anne through the streets of London becomes, retrospectively, a prefiguration of Galip's rather odd way of trying to track down his wife. Dante Alighieri's transposition both of Florentine factional politics and of his love for an unattainable woman into the after-life provides more material for Pamuk's postmodernist game. The Hollywood B movie has affinities with oriental tales of star-crossed lovers, while crossword puzzles are the Western answer to the Ottoman parlour games. It is easy to list the influences, for the author signals them insistently. Pamuk deprecates originality, and there are several highly original passages in the book on the unimportance of originality. Confusingly, not only does he signal his actual borrowings, he also cites imaginary ones. I am sure that Bottfolio and Ibn Zerhani are made up. I am not sure about Dr Ferit Kemal, who had a Dostoevskyan treatise on the coming of the Messiah printed in Paris and who was acquainted with Baudelaire's Les Paradis artificiels. He ought to have existed.

The Black Book is a fiction which tackles, again and again, the question of Turkey's shaky cultural identity, as that identity comes under attack from European literature, hamburgers and Hollywood. As Galip learns, even Turkish body language has been changed by Western films. The identity of the individual is even more central to the book. Pamuk's characters find it very difficult to be themselves. They are always tempted to imitate, or to fake, or to be influenced. As Jelal puts it: "I must be myself, I repeated without paying any attention to them, their voices, smells, desires, their love, their hate. If I can't be myself, then I become who they want me to be, and I cannot bear the person they want me to be; and rather than be that intolerable person they want me to be, I thought it would be better that I be nothing at all, or not to be."

Pamuk's first (and untranslated) novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982), an account of the lives of three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family, was a realist novel in the manner of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks or Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. The Silent House (1983) was more modernist in its use of multiple voices and investigated the nature of identity. Pamuk's third novel, The White Castle, his only novel to be translated into English, was a historical fiction, set in the seventeenth century, which was again more preoccupied with exploring problems of cultural and individual identity than it was with history. The Black Book has been both a bestseller and a succes d'estime in Turkey. It success has provoked the appearance, in 1992, of Kara Kitap: uezerine Yazilar (The Black Book: Writings about it), a volume which includes essays by critics, maps and photographs of the background to Pamuk's masterpiece.

"Every man resembles his times more than he does his father." Setting Rumi, Sayh Galip, Dante and De Quincey aside, what Pamuk's novel most closely resembles is Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. Pamuk shares Auster's intelligence, metaphysical preoccupations and astringent literary style. He also partakes of Auster's problems. His densely written book is highly cerebral. It has some affinities with the traditional detective novel, but reading it is more like watching someone sitting down to solve a crossword than a murder. Galip and Jelal seem to love literature more than women. Ruya is woman with a name, but hardly any body. She is a mystery to Galip and, surely, to most readers. Galip's perceptions of her and everyone else are consistently vanilla-flavoured.

But while Galip plods, Jelal flies. Jelal's eccentric and discursive newspaper essays are amazing. Addressing the reader directly, he writes about feral children living on the pontoons of the Galata Bridge, about Levantine pederasty, about letter mysticism, about Turkish gangsters, about the possible homosexuality of Rumi, about the desertion of Istanbul by parrots. Jelal is a Turkish Autolycus, "a snapper up of unconsidered trifles". His fantasia on the drying-up of the Bosphorus alone is worth the price of the book. Would that we could get rid of our current newspaper columnists and instead have Jelal write his loonily erudite articles for some British newspaper. Jelal's (or Pamuk's) sentences are stately and dense, as befits a latter-day Turkish De Quincey. Considered as a novel, The Black Book is a little disappointing, for it fails to deliver the conventional satisfactions. It should really be read as an encyclopaedia of esoterica and as a compendium of medieval and modern literary tricks. As such, it is quite wonderful.