Putting a tangible shape on time
Savkar Altinel
ORHAN PAMUK
The While Castle
Translated by Victoria Holbrook
161pp. Manchester: Carcanet.
0856358827
Kara Kitap
428pp. Istanbul: Can.
975 510 142 X
The White Castle offers Anglophone readers their first chance to become acquainted with the writing of Orhan Pamuk, who over the past decade has established himself as Turkey's foremost novelist and one of the most interesting literary figures anywhere. (There exists a pirated Arabic translation of his first novel, Cevdet Bey, published in Syria, and a French translation of his second, Sessiz Ev, which was short-listed for the Prix Medici for the best foreign novel of 1988.) The White Castle is his most accessible work for a non-Turkish audience, but it can perhaps be appreciated fully only if one is familiar with the rest of his output.
In his teens and early twenties, Pamuk steeped himself in French and Russian nineteenth-century fiction, and became a devotee of Georg Lukács. The result was the massive Cevdet Bey ve Ogullari (Cevdet Bey and Sons), a sort of Turkish Buddenbrooks dealing with the lives of three generations of a patrician Istanbul family, which was completed when Pamuk (like Mann when he completed his family chronicle) was a mere twenty-six, and appeared to immediate acclaim four years later in 1982. Cevdet Bey would have won Lukács's approval. A depiction, in the grand nineteenth-century style, of Turkish "life and manners", from (the coup of 1908, when the Young Turks finally toppled Abdulhamid II, to the eve of the military takeover of 1971, it offers all the pleasures of great realist fiction: a strong plot, memorable characters and a detailed social background; but at the same time traces with remorseless clarity the rise of the modern Turkish ruling class and the evolution of Turkish capitalism. A central joke is that the "enlightened" life-style and values adopted by the westernized businessman Cevdet Bey and his descendants are only an ideological concomitant of their pursuit of wealth, which leads to their involvement with more mundane forms of enlightenment - the importing of oil-lamps from Western Europe and, eventually, the manufacturing of light-bulbs under license. Yet Pamuk's concerns go beyond such essentially Marxist matters. All the characters in the novel have an intense self-awareness, a deep sense of being in the world and being conscious of their existence. This phenomenon, seen in Pamuk's later works as part of the universal human condition, is here attributed to the acquisition of an entire range of Western habits of mind, along with the Western commercial ethos, by Cevdet Bey and his circle. At one point a German engineer working for the Turkish State Railways quotes a passage from Hölderlin's novel Hyperion about "the East, that magnificent tyrant who throws one down on the ground, that place where one truly learns to crawl before one can walk". None of Pamuk's characters, though, is an "Easterner" in this sense: they are all conscious of their individuality and power, and know that they can "make something" of themselves and the world in which they live. This kind of making, which is presented as the imposition of a tangible shape on time itself (the ceaseless passing of which is marked by a giant grandfather clock in Cevdet Bey's house that goes on ticking relentlessly through the decades), was accomplished in the first instance by Cevdet Bey himself with his amassing of a fortune and founding of a dynasty. The long central section of the novel, however, deals with the generation of weak, restless dreamers that followed him and contributed to the failure of Turkey to achieve either economic or cultural stature, before his grandson Ahmet emerges as a major painter. Thus, after years of failure, high bourgeois life is at last crowned with high bourgeois art.
Superficially, Pamuk's second novel, Sessiz Ev (The Silent House), which deals with a week spent by three frustrated and unhappy siblings in the home of their dying nonagenarian grandmother in a small town near Istanbul in the summer of 1980, when Turkey was in the midst of a virtual civil war between armed left and right-wing street-gangs, could hardly be more different. This beautiful, elegiac book employs live narrators, each viewing the action from a different perspective, and clearly owes more to the modernist experiments of Faulkner and Virginia Woolf than to the nineteenth century and Thomas Mann. Underneath this, however, Pamuk's preoccupation - the rise and fall of a great family, the westernization of Turkey, and the overwhelming, Cartesian awareness of existing as a conscious, thinking being- remain essentially the same. This last, in particular, is reflected not just in the structuring of the book round five separate centers of consciousness, but in its style, which involves constant reiteration of the pronoun "I", a commonplace in Western languages but virtually redundant in Turkish where declension as a rule makes it unnecessary. This redundant "I", not at one with itself or the world, is the real subject of the book, which manages to be rigorously philosophical without being in any way abstract or schematic.
Once again, the characters in Sessiz Ev apprehend the primary function of consciousness as the structuring of time. The question "What time is it?" is casually repeated throughout the book until it turns into the grandmother's reflection that "what time is, no one knows..." -a sentiment echoed by one of her grandsons, a fat, alcoholic historian who sits in the local archive day after day, poring over centuries-old title deeds and court records, thinking that historians are frauds who impose an artificial pattern on an infinitely detailed and essentially meaningless sequence of events. Meanwhile, the deadlier frauds in the background go on maiming and killing each other in the name of their versions of "history". Yet such misgivings concerning the imposition of form on inherently formless material do not prevent the novel from ending, like Cevdet Bey, with a celebration, of art, as the grandmother remembers in her final moments how during a childhood visit to some friends she was read to from a wonderfully archaic Ottoman translation of Robinson Crusoe and was so fascinated by the story that when her mother arrived to fetch her, she burst into tears and remained unconsolable until her hosts said she could take the book with her:
You cannot embark on life, that one-off couch ride, once again when it is over, but if you have a book in your hand, no matter how complex or difficult to understand that book may be, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life as well.
At first glance, Pamuk's third work of fiction, The White Castle, might once again seem an entirely different kind of book. A role-reversal tale, it has affinities with Borges's "Story of the Warrior and the Captive" and Flaubert's unwritten Eastern story, "Harel Hey", which would have shown the transformation of a "civilized" man into a "barbarian" and vice versa; and with the splendid scene in Vanity Fair which Rawdon Crawley appears dressed as a Turk during a game of charades at one of his wife's soirees, where a westernized Turkish ambassador is among the guests. At some point in the seventeenth century, an Italian is captured by pirates, brought to Istanbul, and sold as a slave to a Turkish scientist and scholar who happens to be his virtual double. Soon a plague breaks out in the city and the two men find themselves cooped up in a house where in between producing scientific tracts for the benefit of the young Sultan on the Ottoman throne and trying to design a "war engine", they tell each other about their personal histories and the radically different cultures they come from. This eventually seems to lead to their changing places, but the book ends with a startling twist which casts doubt on this interpretation of events.
What lies behind all this is the idea that one can become Italian or Turkish or anything else, because in the innermost core of one's being one is neither Italian nor Turkish nor anything else. Whatever one is in the world, one is also outside the world, merely looking on. Just as at a crucial point in the story the war engine fails, preventing the Turkish Army from taking a gleaming white fortress, pointedly named Doppio, this duality remains unresolved and the redundant "I" lives on. It is indeed clearly this "I" that turns its owner and the world into what they are apprehended as being, with the result that what appears to be merely given is always in fact deliberately constructed. There is no "reality", only fiction. Accordingly, the book advertises its own artificial and fictional nature with a dreamlike setting that makes no claim to being an accurate recreation of the "real" Istanbul of (he seventeenth century. There is a series of sly allusions to Cervantes and his famous hero who also found that illusion and reality were indistinguishable; and it is ultimately suggested that the redundant "I" can be reconciled to its condition only by accepting its true identity as a creator of fictions and becoming, "like that one-armed Spanish slave", a writer.
Because Pamuk, unlike some practitioners of this kind of fiction, is not a second-rate philosopher in disguise but a first-rate storyteller, this is a highly entertaining, and indeed moving, book with plenty to beguile even the reader not particularly interested in the matter of the redundant "I". Victoria Holbrook's translation is very readable and conveys the suppleness and beauty of the author's prose remarkably well (though The White Fortress would have been the correct title). She has, however, unwisely retained the preface by "Faruk Darvinoglu" and the dedication to the latter's "sister" without bothering to point out that both are in fact characters from Sessiz Ev (and thus serve further to confirm the fictional status of the book).
Pamuk's fourth and most recent work, Kara Kitap (The Dark Book), which appeared earlier this year, is by far his most complex to date. The story concerns Galip, a young lawyer who spends his days roaming the streets of Istanbul, looking for his cousin and wife, Rüya, who has left him without any explanation. His only hope is that there might be a due to her whereabouts in the writings of her half-brother, Celâl, a famous journalist who, it gradually becomes clear, is also missing, although his daily column in a major national newspaper mysteriously continues to appear. The chapters describing Galip's search alternate with Celâl's increasingly bizarre pieces, but both of these always come with an epigraph. Together, these quotations link Kara Kitap with a vast range of Eastern and Western literary works, some of them - The Arabian Nights, the Divine Comedy, Albertine disparue and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge - real, others, such as A Guide for the Young Journalist (from which comes the epigraph "Never use an epigraph: it will destroy the mystery of what you write") and Obscuri Libri, with its alleged Arabic translation Kitap-al Zulmet (which share their titles with Kara Kitap), clearly imaginary.
Yet these epigraphs cast, at best, an indirect light on the chapters they introduce, and the same air of connections almost made characterizes the whole book. In the same way that, in the sprawling maze of Istanbul, one street leads to other streets, the stories told by Celâl and heard by Galip in the course of his search lead to other stories in a complex pattern which never becomes fully clear. Meanwhile, the clock in Galip's home ("Our family friend Cevdet Bey had one just like that", his aunt tells him) ticks away and Rüya, who seems to symbolize reality, (although her perfectly ordinary Turkish name, alas, means "dream") remains elusive. In the end Galip assumes Celâl's identity and decides to continue with his writing; the book thus arrives at the Proustian conclusion that reality, which exists in and as time, cannot be captured but only re-captured: remembered, reimagined and preserved as literature. Memory and imagination, however, are seen as somewhat inadequate in Kara Kitap, where doubts remain as to the ability of literature to comprehend all the countless fictions "reality" consists of. The characteristic endorsement of literaturewith which the novel ends has, this time, a wistful rather than triumphant ring: [You and I, reader, ] are remembering Rüya and looking out at the darkness of Istanbul, and we are experiencing the same sense of sorrow and excitement I had when at times, caught between sleep and waking in the early hours of the morning, I thought I had detected some trace of Rüya on the blue-checked quilt. For nothing can be so surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for that only consolation, writing.
An interesting feature of Kara Kitap is the way in which it deals with the themes of cruelty and love. The Istanbul that Galip combs for Rüya and that Celâl writes about is a place of murder, thuggery and human-rights violations, but also of love affairs, trysts and sexual encounters. The terms "cruelty" and "love", however, are not to be taken at face value, for Pamuk pushes both back towards their Turkish etymological origins in two words meaning, respectively, "darkness" and "light", and weaves them into his tale about the light of consciousness and the darkness of the world confronting it. Darkness and Light was the title Pamuk originally had in mind for Cevdet Bey, with its ironic account of the injection of "enlightened" Western self-awareness into the "dark" East. The author's career, it would appear, has come full circle.
In the process, however, important changes have taken place. The transformation of Easterners into Westerners, which was initially seen as a tangible economic and social process, has been reinterpreted on the ideological level as the playing and switching of roles, with this phenomenon itself then being placed in the context of the general interplay between consciousness and the world; in keeping with the downgrading of reality to "reality" there has been a shift from realism to more fantastic styles of story-telling. Pamuk has switched paradigms, abandoning Robinson Crusoe, with the link it establishes between Western-style fiction and Western-style capitalism, indicating that books grow out of and depict life, for Don Quixote, with its seductive thesis that life grows out of books which themselves grow out of other books. Literature itself has become his subject, although at the same time literature, like reality, has paradoxically come to seem a lot less important and powerful, dwindling to a mere "consolation".
Pamuk's development, though, mirrors the development of the novel as a form in its native West; around a set of interrelated themes he has produced not just four striking books but, in a way, the Turkish novel in its entirety. If Cevdet Bey is the great "nineteenth-century" Turkish novel, and Sessiz Ev, concerned with consciousness and time, the great modern Turkish novel, then The White Castle, with its emphasis on the artificial character of national and personal identity, and Kara Kitap with its examination of the complex and problematic relationship between fiction and reality, are major postmodern Turkish works. For a writer not yet forty, Pamuk's is an astounding achievement.
