Orhan Pamuk and the Poetics of Fiction 1527535177, 9781527535176

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Orhan Pamuk and the Poetics of Fiction

Orhan Pamuk and the Poetics of Fiction By

UmerO. Thasneem

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Orhan Pamuk and the Poetics of Fiction By Umer O. Thasneem This book first published 2019

Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2019 by U mer O. Thasneem

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10) : 1-5275-3517-7

ISBN (13) : 978-1-5275-3517-6

To my Dad who is as maverick ajournalist as Pamuk's Cellil, and my Mom who is as unlike Pamuk's Ruya as two people can ever be.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Chapter One The Fictional Chemistry The Well-wrought Stories. Symbols, Images and Motifs. A Blender of Traditions and the Occupant of the Middlescape. Creator of "Mystories" and Spectral Landscapes A Magician of spectacles

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Chapter Two The World of Doubles, Shadows, Ghosts, and Mysteries Metafictional Elements The Architectonics of Black

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 The Red-Soaked World of Desire The architectonics Chapter Four The Poet of Love Female Superiority and the Male Gullibility Love' s Labour Recovered Love: The Emotional Ballast

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Chapter Five To Be or Not to Be: The Question of Turkish Identity (How) To Be or not to Be: That is the Question A Battle of Discourses Turkey' s Mut(il)ation The Infantile and the Indolent Zaim Versus Kadife or West Versus Veil Conclusion

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

Chapter Six 107 Towards an Islamic Aesthetics? A Survey of Religious Motifs and Images The New Life of Epiphanies The Red Zone of Djinns, Demons and Greedy Priests Snow and the Abyss of Atheism Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter Seven Inconclusion: The Metropolis and the Strange Voice of the Subaltern The City as Symbol Alienation Lure and allure Flux and Transitoriness Life and Death The Unconscious Social Criticism Militarization Cracks in Craft?

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Chapter Eight Epilogue : The Inexhaustible Well of Stories Cern's Encounters with Depths The Blinding Red, the Inexhaustible Well and the Infinite Stars

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Bibliography

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book owes a lot to the encouragement, flattery, praises, and naggings of people belonging to my immediate circle : First and foremost are : my Dad, Mr 0 Abdulla, a veteran media and political commentator who has made a name for himself in Kerala as a maverick and unpredictable journalist AND my Mom who epitomizes an untiring spirit of motherliness belonging to a bygone age; Second: my wife Binu and kids Naseef, Fathima, Jinan and Rina who leaven my life with sparks of wit, humour and bother. Third: Paul Gilroy, under whom I was fortunate to work for a Master' s dissertation at LSE; the chapter "To Be or Not to Be" owes much to his stimulating insights AND Milind S. Malshe my PhD supervisor at lIT Bombay to whom l owe a gratitude insufficiently expressed in words. Fourth: Asif, the Research Scholar working under me. But for his assistance with e-resources, I would have floundered in deep waters AND Hairdas, Shihab, Anita, Aparna, Nasma, Unaisa, Veena and Anseera, all doing doctoral proj ects under my supervision. Fifth: My current students at the University of Calicut AND previous ones at Hail, and King Saud Universities (KSA) and WMO College, Wynad, Kerala.

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Acknowledgements

Sixth: Dr M. Abdul Salam, former Vice Chancellor, University of Calicut for reposing faith in me and giving me the much needed 'rest' to pursue my passion for Pamuk and world literature AND my colleagues in the English Department at Calicut University; especially Dr K. M. Sherriff, for his wisdom and guidance, and Dr Abdul Azees, the University librarian for his help with type-setting. Finally, my handful of friends, especially those belonging to the ' Close Mates Group,' who have flattered me into a feeling of self-importance AND Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their promptness and professionalism.

CHAPTER ONE THE FICTIONAL CHEMISTRY

Orhan Pamuk has been a sensational figure in world literature for more than a decade. Gabriel Garcia Marquez being no more, he is one of the strongest contenders to the title of the writer with the greatest cult­ following across the globe. Like Marquez himself, he has been responsible for bringing an element of freshness and exotica into the Euro-saturated novelistic world. Coming as they did when the novel was facing a crisis of sorts in the West-exemplified in such pronouncements as John Barth's "literature of exhaustion" and "replenishment"-these writers infused a fresh energy into the geure. (Barth, 13 8-47) Marquez and Pamuk are indeed two widely differing authors, despite the similarities that novels like Love in the Time of Cholera and Museum of Innocence, with their preoccupation with the theme of love display. However, the appeal they have for the contemporary imagination has been remarkably similar. The element of exotica as well as the unique style of narration-which imbues the mundane and everyday with a sense of mystery, magic and history-distinguishes them from many contemporary Western novelists. In other words, their thickly-layered novels abound in events and incidents that give us the feeling of something happening out there in the real world. This contrasts with the absurdist and orgiastic plots in novels like Easton Ellis' s peopled with "zombified dudes sleepwalk[ing] through endless parties." (Bilton, 199) The volatility of the geographical and historical loci that form the background of their creative expressions contributes to this in no small measure. The turbulence of their nations seeps into their imaginative landscape and animates their prose with a rare energy. Time itself has a different dimension in the Third World experience marked by frequent social upheavals and political turmoil. Fredric Jameson famously explained how " the waning of affect" has had an eviscerating and "flattening out" effect on advanced capitalistic cultures, where even temporality has

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Chapter One

, "shrunken" into "a mere present. ,1 This is well reflected in all Westeru artistic products, but most notably in its fiction. Due to this, as Bilton remarks, "A permanent heat-haze hangs over the novel, destroying any sense of perspective and denying any chance of movement." In this sense, fictions produced in the West perfectly exemplify the mood of a 2 Baudrillardian "post-orgy" world. (Bilton, 1 99-200) On the other hand, there is still something traditional about the societies that created Marquez and Pamuk. According to Walter Benjamin, the birth of the novel in the West almost coincided with the death of the story teller. According to him, the story teller belonged to a time when the "stones in the womb of the earth and the planets at the celestial heights" hadn't grown so indifferent to the fate of humans (Benjamin, 95). The novel, on the other hand, marked the birth of the solitary individual cut off from his metaphysical moorings and social fabric. In the occident and South America, the situation is still different despite the sweeping impact of globalization. Mary Montagu' s statement that drives home the difference between Oriental and Occidental settings and temperament made centuries back seems more relevant in contemporary context: The garden is suitable to the house, where arbours, fountains, and walks are thrown together in agreeable confusion . .. 'Tis true their magnificence is of a very different taste from ours, and perhaps of a better. I am almost of the opinion that they have a right notion of life. They consume it in music, gardens, wine and delicate eating while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politics . . .we die or grow old and decrepit before we can reap the fruit of our labours. (McNamara and Gray, 253)

While it is an encroachment, and at times a virtual conquest of the ersatz on the real that we witness in western postrnodern novels (the works of Don DeLillo, for example), fiction in the worlds that produced Marquez and Pamuk still retains an epical and mythical aura. These two writers, like a host of other writers belonging to Asia, Africa and South America, combine the best elements of their native story telling traditions with the most recent trends available in western avant-garde fiction to chart out novel traj ectories for contemporary fiction.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_eM-ySEDjA There are indeed many notable exceptions, especially among, though not only, from those belonging to the marginal communities. The obvious names that spring to mind being: Toni Morrison, Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer. 2

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This introduction is not meant to be a comparison of Marquez and Pamuk, although Marquez's name popped up incidentally and might do so again. What I seek to do in this chapter is to explore the chemistry of Pamuk' s art by focusing on his craft, themes and symbols. In chapter two, I carry forth the exploration by focussing on The Black Book, and in chapter three, I repeat the exercise by turning the attention to My Name is Red, two of the books in Pamuk' s oeuvre that represent the apogee of his creative achievement.

Well-wrought Stories Pamuk' s thematic and artistic concerns are largely the same across his vast and expanding spectrnm. Questions of identity, both at the individual and the collective/national level, East-West dualism, the dialectics of love, the polarities of life and death, the role of art, the dynamics of memory and history, the intricacies of the human mind, the mechanics of evil, the inexorability of time, the tense entanglement of past and present, nostalgia and melancholy, and the elusive nature of reality are his constant themes. His major symbols and motifs revolve around these oppositional themes to form a tapestry of sharply contrasting colors and sensations. Despite strong postmodern inclinations, his works display an artistic and strnctural unity; a unity that owes much to his notion of an anchoring centre from out of which all the flux and flow emanate. While discovering the centre in a thorough-going postmodernist work like Donald Barthelme 's The Dead Father or William H Gass' s The Tunnel will be an assiduous task, Pamuk's novels are so constructed that their centre draws the reader into its vortex from the beginning itself. In Naive and Sentimental, he observes : In well-constructed novels, everything is connected to everything else, and this entire web of relations both forms the atmosphere of the book and point toward its secret center...what sets novels apart from other literary narratives is that they have a secret center. Or, more precisely, they rely on our conviction that there is a center we should search for as we read. (24-5)

Most of Pamuk' s stories, like many postrnodern works, contain many narrative threads and digressions, with several smaller stories and anecdotes crowding the larger canvas. But all such stories and anecdotes serve to draw us into the magnetic centre whose gravitational pull is felt in all the words and images, including those which at first sight seem to be thrown around at random, like the china dog on top of the television

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Chapter One

described no less than ten times in Museum and a couple of times in Black where it is stationed on top of a radio. The "dog" acts as a Bahktinian chronotope, throwing vital hints about the temporality of the mise en scene, in both instances and in the former assumes a greater role as a fetishistic obj ect cherished by the lovelorn Kemal. In other instances this might be a reference to the color or the floral pattern of the dress worn by a character, the peculiar lilt in his/her voice, or the color of the ink in the pen, or some seemingly unremarkable feature of the sky, or the growl of a stray dog or the tint of the clouds, or even a seemingly desultory description of an item in the showcase. But all of them serve as many quilting points in his works, and lead to the heart of the story, like the labyrinthine routes of an immense strnctnre leading to its epicentre. This is because, despite all the intricacies, Pamuk's works possess a symmetry and balance, two notions to which he is fully committed. What we see in them is the discerning eye of a fastidious architect particular about every single tile he places in his giant designs. Probably Pamuk owes this attentiveness to detail to his training as an architect. Like Arnndhati Roy-who too has been trained as an architect but doesn't practice the profession-he uses certain words and phrases recurrently in his works to create a sense of all-round unity and intra­ textuality. And when the same themes, motifs, and in some instances characters find their way from one book into another, they contribute to make an intricate narrative arc. The case with Celal, the fictional journalist whom Galip presents in The Black Book is an example. Pamuk refers to his mnrder in both The New Life and Museum of Innocence and uses his imaginary lines as an epigraph to the first section in Strangeness in My Mind. This strategy gives the larger than life character presnted in Black a real-life dimension, 3 besides lending Pamuk with vital quilting points to hold together his narrative universe.

Symbols, Images and Motifs These principles of balance and symmetry are something Pamuk scrnpulously observes in his choice of symbols and motifs. There is a clever juxtaposition of light and darkness, black and white, greyness and radiance, and red and green in his works. Together with these sharply 3

The expression 'quilting point' is here used more in its conventional sense, as used in upholstery, than in the more nuanced Lacanian sense.

The Fictional Chemistry

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contrasting motifs, he makes use of symbols and images like wells (often dark and bottomless), shadows, stars, sun, moon, gardens, books, pens, ink, stray aimless dogs, snow, and graveyards. Drawing upon both oriental and occidental traditions, from the Quran to Rumi and from Tolstoy to Proust, he invests these images with rich symbolisms and textual allusions. However, the most significant of all his symbols is the city of Istanbul. For him, Istanbul with its beguiling history, bewitching variety, and nostalgic memories stands for everything that life embodies. It is its eternal flux and flow; its mesmerizing possibilities and glorious uncertainties; its push towards the future and pull towards the past that animate his plot. As Pamuk describes it in Black, there is nothing "stranger than life" except for writing, and for him Istanbul symbolizes both life and writing in all their strangeness and variety (78). But for the ghosts of history that this mega-polis incarnates, the chaotic past it plays host to, and the massive human drama it plays out daily, there would not have been any writing for Pamuk. Almost all his novels have Istanbul as their locale. Even in novels like Snow where the action shifts to the border city of Kars, his protagonists like Ka and the author-narrator himself, playing the role of the chorns character, are people who carry within them memories of Istanbul. The city and its geography are invested with multiple and contradictory significances in Pamuk' s works. In modem terminology, oxymoronic as it sounds, we can describe 4 Pamuk as a pastoralist of the city. Like Baudelaire who wove a symphony out of his Parisian experiences, Pamuk crafts a harmonious melody out of the immense cacophony of Istanbul. Hardly at all does he seem to be at home in a rnral milieu. In Strangeness, where the scene alternates between Istanbul and Cennetpinar, the protagonist Mevlut's native village, the author seems too eager to get back to Istanbul from the village-in geographical terms, an arduous and time-consuming voyage-and the voluminous novel of nearly six hundred pages devotes less than thirty pages to village scenes. Aleksander Hernon's statement about how the scenes, smells and odours of Sarajevo seeped into his own psyche and became part of his very soul is equally trne of Pamuk vis-a-vis Istanbul: "I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo's architecture and its physiognomies. I gradually became aware This is an expression used by several contributors to the volume The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, edited by Kevin R. McNamara.

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Chapter One that its interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of the city was the geography of my soul." (Nesci, 82)

This correlation between the inner psychic-scape and the outer city­ scape is what Pamuk's fiction exudes. The sombreness and melancholia with which he invests Istanbul seep into every nerve and sinew of his characters. Though melancholy is the overwhelming feeling that Istanbul betrays, for them, it is also a city which at times radiates a rare energy and optimism; it is one that helps people make or mar their fortunes and careers. At times it devours them like a giant boa constrictor leaving no trace behind, the way it happened with Mevlut's father Mustafa Karatas in Strangeness. At other times it helps people climb up the ladder of financial and professional success the way Hadji Hamit and Mevlut's cousins could. However, its tantalizing charm is something fatally dangerous and spiritually eviscerating, as many of his characters discover to their own peril. The ambiguous and conflicting identities that Istanbul incarnates are also symptomatic of the identity crisis that his characters are prone to. Many of his characters, including Hoja, Osman, and Galip, have a problem being themselves. They feel their ontology to be constantly under threat. This is something symptomatic of the city they inhabit. Having been variously named as Byzantine, Constantinople, Istanbul, etc. through the course of history, there is something inherent in the city's DNA that makes its denizens subject to multiple and polyphonic identity pulls. Consequently, they find themselves caught in several labyrinthine narratives unable to locate the exit points or the destination marks. Compounding the problem of multiple historical traj ectories is the specific geographical location of the city. Situated as it is at the intersection of Europe and Asia, Istanbul for Pamuk, symbolizes the point of confluence and conflict between East and West and their cultural heterogeneities. Pamuk' s art and his characters best exemplify this. Just as Istanbul straddles Asia and Africa, Pamuk' s art straddles two worlds. In many a sense, he is a writer who belongs to an in-between traj ectory. It is in recognition of this that Tom Holland described him as a "bridge between our culture" and a "heritage quite as rich" (opening unnumbered page of Snow). However, I think, this in-between status extends beyond his role as a bridge between cultures, to the nature of his craft and his thematic preoccupations. It is the middle ground that seems to be his default

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address, vis-a-vis not only his technical choices but the issues he engages with.

A Blender of Traditions and the Occupant of the Middlescape Though rooted in the Turkish past and its traditions, his indebtedness to European masters is something Pamuk makes no bones about. In Naive and the Sentimental, which is a detailed exploration of the novelists ' craft, he repeatedly quotes the western writers that influenced him. Among those influences, we have the great figures of European fiction all the way from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner. Naive attests to his wide scholarship in the European fictional tradition. For Pamuk, the novel is a "foreign [European] toy," as he calls it in The New Life (243). But his uniqueness lies in the peculiar ability to make this alien art form accommodative to his native requirements. His compatriot, the great novelist Yashar Kemal, had succeeded in this to an extent. But Kemal, as evinced by Memed, My Hawk his magnum opus, is scrnpulous in steering himself clear of Western influences. His fiction has greater kinship with the old tradition of oriental romances than with the novel form familiar to us today. His protagonist Memed, the epical hero who fights against exploitative feudalism is, by all counts, a larger than life figure; the superhuman dimensions he is endowed with make him immune to bullets and fire, fatigue and weariness. It is only such a mythical status that would explain his exploits on the Taurns Mountains and the daredevilry against armed policemen on the streets. His capacity to stick it out in a solitary cave on a precipitous mountain in the company of a pregnant wife and surrogate mother is equally awe-inspiring. His vanishing into thin air at the end of the novel also suggests the stuff of romance rather than the novel. Unlike Kemal, Pamuk' s art shows greater affinity with the European tradition, from the early realistic epistolary forms to the most recent postmodernist ones: while traces of the realist epistolary style are detectable in novels like My Name is Red and Silent House, with their multiple viewpoints, novels like The Black Book and White Castle exhibit features of modernist and postrnodernist fiction. This does not mean that Red and Silent are traditional realist texts; on the contrary, they exhibit strong strains of modernism and postmodernism albeit making use of traditional realist strategies. Pamuk' s dexterity lies in his ability to blend multiple European traditions with oriental narrative techniques.

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Chapter One

This ability to be receptive to multiple traditions makes him a writer who occupies the middle ground between many binaries. In Naive, based on Schiller's formulations, he classifies novelists into two kinds, the naive and the sentimental: Some novelists are unaware of the techniques they are using; they write spontaneously, as if they were carrying out a perfectly natural act, oblivious to the operations and calculations they are performing in their head and the fact that they are using the gears, brakes and knobs that the art of the novel equips them with. Let us use the word "naive" to describe this type of sensibility. And let us use the term "reflective" to describe precisely the opposite sensibility; in other words, the reader and writers who are fascinated by the artificiality of the text and its failure to attain reality. (N&S 1 3)

For Schiller, writers like Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Goethe belong to the first category to whom expression came spontaneously. The reflective writer, on the other hand, (described as "sentimental," derived from the German word Sentimentalisch) feels "uneasy" because "he is unsure whether his words will encompass reality, whether they will attain it, whether his utterances will convey the meaning he intends." Schiller considers himself part of the less envied second category. Pamuk describes how, as a youth, he had "oscillated" between the two while contemplating the art of the novel. (N&V 15-7) This oscillation has done a world of good to the craftsman he later became. As an artist, he is naive and sentimental. There is a kind of spontaneity detectable in his works as exemplified by his poetic descriptions of the streets and people of Istanbul. In those descriptions, he strikes us as a poet who, besides knowing the "chemistry of streets," is endowed with the ability to create "enchanted texts" (phrases used by Pamuk in Strangeness on pages 85 and 41) effortlessly, a la the naive writers described by Schiller. For Pamuk this spontaneity has a divine quality about it, as Ka, the protagonist of Snow, thinks about moments of poetic inspiration. In those moments of radiance and illumination, Ka feels God himself sending him the words he composes. It is the kind of moment that inspires Coleridge to write "Kubla Khan," which is sadly interrupted by the arrival of an unwelcome guest. After the interruption, Coleridge is unable to recall the lines he had in mind. The divine voice which was whispering those lines had vanished, and the poet had to leave his work incomplete. (Snow 146) Talking about his decision not to write poems, Pamuk states how a poet is one through whom "God [himself] is speaking." Since he felt that "God was not speaking to me," Pamuk gave up trying his hand at poetry and

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instead wrote prose all the while trying to figure out how it would have been if "God were speaking through me." In the process, he says he ended up working "like a clerk." (Oe 359) Indeed no clerk works thinking how it would be if God were speaking through him. So, this apparently self-deprecatory remark needs to be considered as a pseudo-statement; nevertheless, it tells us something crucial about Pamuk' s craft. He is a writer whose fiction exists as a cross between poetry and prose or in other words "naIve" and "sentimental." This is because his notion of "naive," equated with spontaneity, naturally allies itself with poetry, whereas "sentimental," equated with reflectiveness, inclines more toward the axis of prose. In this sense, Pamuk can be considered a poet writing prose, i.e. not as God himself pouring out through poetry but as if He were attempting prose, a language (un)fortunately not his mother tongue. Again this suggests the middle of the middle ground between divine and human or poetry and prose. As he states it in Naive: While reading "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" thirty years ago, I too­ just like Schiller, raging at Goethe---complained of the naive childlike nature of Turkish novelists of the previous generation. . .Now, after an adventure of thirty five years as a novelist, I would like to continue with my own examples, even as I try to convince myself that I have found an equilibrium between the naive novelist and the sentimental novelist inside me. ( 1 8)

This equilibrium that blends the best features of naivete and sentimentality is visible in the all-round construction of his novels as well as the many individual passages. I shall try to illustrate this using three passages that have a common theme. In these passages drawn from three different novels, the characters grapple with the problem of guilt, having actually or presumably committed the felony of murder: (Passage 1 ) That's how I stood in front of a store window i n the city of Amasya stuck between two mountains, Angel, and I wept, breaking into big sobs. You ask a child why he is crying; he weeps because of a deep wound inside him but he tells you he is crying because he has lost his blue pencil sharpener; that was the kind of grief that overcame me looking at all the stuff in the window. What was the sense in turning into a murderer for naught? To live with that pain in my soul for the rest of my life? I might buy some roasted seeds in the dry-fruit- and-nuts store, or look into the mirror of some grocer to see myself, or believing the life of bliss replete with refrigerators and

Chapter One

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stoves, but still the accursed sinister voice inside me, the black wolf, would snarl and accuse me of my guilt. (NL 1 98) (Passage 2) If I do have a style and character, it is not only hidden in my artwork, but in my crime and in my words as well! Yes, try to discover who I am from the colour of my words ! . . . There was a time when I was terrified not only of the devil, but of the slightest trace of evil within me. Now, however, I have the sense that evil can be endured, and moreover, it is indispensable to an artist. After I killed that miserable excuse of a man, discounting the trembling in my hands which lasted only a few days, I drew better, I made use of brighter and bolder colours, and realized that I could conjure up wonders in my imagination ...A city' s intellect ought to be measured not by its scholars, libraries, miniaturists, calligraphers and schools, but by the number of crimes insidiously committed on its dark streets over thousands of years. By this logic, doubtless, Istanbul is the world's most intelligent city...! stood in the middle of the snowy street as evening fell and gazed down the dark road which had been abandoned along with meto jinns, fairies, brigands, thieves, to the grief of fathers and children returning home and to the sorrow of snow-covered trees. (MNR 1 20-1 23) (Passage 3) But was it possible to pretend nothing had happened? Inside my head there was a well where, pickaxe in hand, Master Mahmud was still hacking away at the earth. That must mean he was still alive, or the police had yet to investigate his murder.. . . . . My mother had noticed that the apprenticeship with the well-digger had left some sort of mark on me. I wondered in passing whether she realized somehow that the newfound "maturity" she observed was in fact a black stain on my soul.. . . . . Once, I thought, I'd pick up a new translation of The Brothers Karamazov as a birthday gift for my fiancee, but when I saw that the introduction was by Freud, a text on Dostoyevsky and patricide, and touching upon Oedipus the King and Hamlet, I decided after reading the unsettling essay on the spot, to buy her a copy of The Idiot instead-at least its protagonist is naive and iunocent. Some nights I saw Master Mahmud in my dreams. He was still digging away, somewhere up in space on a colossal bluish sphere spinning slowly among the stars. That must mean he wasn't dead and that I need not feel so

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guilty. But it still hurt if I looked too closely at the planet he stood on. (RHW 1 1 8-26)

These passages, that capture almost identical situations in three different novels, exude the spontaneity of the naive poets and the studied grace of the "self-aware artist" guided and "aided" by intellect. In them we detect a happy harmony of the poetic and prose suggestive of the middle­ ground. The same principle holds true vis-a-vis techniques, like the stream of consciousness. Pamuk owes his elaborate use of the technique to western masters like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce whom he considers his idols (N&S 82-3). However, unlike these writers whose preoccupation is predominantly with the inner world, Pamuk finely balances the inner with the outer. In books like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Mrs Dalloway, we have the external world, the timorous Ireland and the teeming London as proj ections of the inner world of Stephen Daedalus and Mrs Dalloway. But Pamuk's fiction strikes an equilibrium between the two in such a way that neither is sacrificed for the sake of either. Thus we have in them vivid representations of the inner psychic-scape of the characters and the outer physical landscape that surround them. Another area where Pamuk occupies the middle ground is the modernist-postmodernist divide. For Brian McHale, the divide between these can be located in the differing thematic dominants of the two groups (McHale, 6-25). Modernists tilted more towards questions of epistemology, while postmodernists grappled more with ontological issues. Admitting the distinction to be hazy, McHale concedes that all epistemological questions pursued too far are bound to tip into ontology (1 1). The dispute concerning postmodernism as an extreme form of modernism or as something opposed to modernism assumes relevance in this context. McHale illustrates the difference by quoting Dick Higgins : The Cognitive Questions (asked by most artists of the twentieth century, Platonic or Aristotelian, till around 1 958): "How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?" The Postcognitive Questions (asked by most artists since then): "Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?" (McHale, 1 )

The questions posed b y Pamuk' s characters, on the other hand, are situated on the fine line separating/connecting epistemology and ontology.

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The best example for this is Osman who is equally concerned about interpreting the "world which" he is a part of while at the same time doubting the reality of that world. This hero of The New Life has read a book titled The New Life itself. He suddenly feels himself to be transported into a new world, the radiance of which mesmerizes and mystifies him. From then on, he finds himself caught in a swirl of epistemological and ontological questions. In fact, this is a situation many other Pamuk' s characters like Hoja, Osman, Galip, and Fazil face to a greater or lesser degree. They all have a problem retaining their own selves and end up taking up the roles of their alter-egos. For Pamuk, this situation of being engulfed by multiple selves, which his characters encounter, is emblematic of his country that finds itself caught between many competing narratives. (OC 368) Pamuk' s recourse to infinite regress and multi-diegetic technique also attests to postmodern influences: McHale cites the example of Burroughs' s story Exterminator! to illustrate the postmodern use o f infinite regress. In the story, a man in a waiting room reads a magazine story about a man reading a magazine story about a man reading a magazine story, and ends wondering whether he too would "wind up in the story"(1 l4). In Black, the cousins read a love story about a boy and a girl who fall in love after reading the same love story about a boy and girl who fall in love after reading a third love story about a boy and a girl who fall in love after reading a fourth love story and thus ad infinitum (BB 369-70). The multi­ diegetic narrative strategy employed in The White Castle similarly shows the influence of postmodernist authors like Umberto Eco who uses the same technique in The Name ofthe Rose. The Chinese box model of embedding several smaller stories within the larger narrative frame also suggests postmodern influence. Both Black and Red contain several such stories within them. For Pamuk, it was Italo Calvino and Borges who acted as liberating influences for him from the staid realist traditions, and inspired him to create a canvas like a "Dadaist collage" for Black (OC 367). However, not unlike these writers, it should be said that he is equally influenced by oriental examples like Arabian Nights. Arabian Nights is the classic example of the Chinese box strncture of story-telling in which the Sheherzade and King Shahryar story acts as the frame for other stories. Calvino, in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, attempts a postmodernist inversion of this traditional story through the figure of the "petroliferous" Sultana whose marital contract includes a provision that she be furnished with an endless supply of stories ( 1 25). For Pamuk' s characters, unlike the Sultana, the need to tell stories is an

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13

indispensable element o f their ontological need to "be," as I further elaborate in the next chapter on Black. Another influence here could be Rumi, repeatedly invoked by Pamuk in Black. Rumi' s Mathnawi, has an uncanny similarity with the books authored by the fictional author Silas Flannery in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Pamuk describes how Rumi begins narrating a story only to slip into a second one and then into a third one and so on ad infinitum without finishing any of the stories (BB 258). This is exactly what Calvino' s Flannery does. Pamuk also slips from one story into another in Black, but unlike Rumi and Flannery, he doesn't leave them incomplete. In this respect, Pamuk is Sheherzade' s brother more than Rumi' s cousin. The extensive use of intertextuality and metafictional techniques too are features that show postmodernist characteristics; and as McHale remarks, postmodernism is inherently intertextual in orientation (McHale, 65-72). Black epitomizes a complex tapestry that includes in its fabric many threads from oriental and occidental narratives and philosophical strains. It is rich with references all the way down from Rumi to Gazzali, and Proust to Lewis Carroll. On the other hand, Red, based as it is in the 1 6th century, confines itself to references to medieval literature and religious scriptures. However, its use of themes and images suggests Pamuk' s deep learning in modem western literature and psychological theory. This is detectable in the subtler and deeper layers of the novel which are rich in intertextual possibilities that range from the Hamletian dislike that the siblings Orhan and Shevket harbour against their stepfather to the repeated references to the Oedipal longings towards their mother. While the features we examined so far place Pamuk more on the axis of postmodernism, there are others that locate him on modernist terrain. His treatment of geography and temporality is an example. He does not tamper with geography and temporality the way postmodernist writers like Calvino, Pynchon or Walter Abish do (Mc Hale, 43-58). His Istanbul, in this sense, has a greater affinity with Joyce ' s modernist Dublin or Woolfs London than postmodern heterotopias like Pynchon' s post-war Germany in Gravity's Rainbow or the artificial world created by Davenport in "The Haile Selassie Funeral Train," or Calvino' s Invisible Cities. These are works that wreak havoc on cartographic realities. While Pynchon' s novel presents the intrusion of the world of hallucinations and comic books upon the instability and anarchy of post-war Germany following the fall of the Third Reich, Davenport's artificial map links together such non­ contiguous regions separated by oceans like Barcelona in Spain and

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Atlanta in the United States into a geographical continuum. Calvino's Invisible Cities presents a whole array of cities nowhere visible on the globe. In Pamuk, we do not have geographical experiments of this magnitude, and the roads and streets he describes are places locatable on the map of Istanbul. But unlike the descriptions in thoroughgoing realist writers, he invests his landscape with a dreamy surreal quality. A thick blanket of melancholy hangs over his Istanbul. This mood of gloom is in keeping with the mental state of his characters who, despite being natives of the city they live in, feel themselves alienated and cut off. This alienation has a clear modernist ring to it as evinced by A Strangeness in My Mind. Not unlike geography, Pamuk doesn't fiddle with temporality either, another domain of postmodemist experimentation. All his novels can be traced to definite historical phases. Barring White Castle (that locates itself in seventeenth-century Turkey) and My Name is Red (whose scene is the 16th century) they describe events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In some thoroughgoing postrnodemist writers, time has been rendered wholly fluid and malleable. So we see in Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra, Columbus discovering America in the late 16th century and Philip II of Spain marrying Elizabeth of England (McHale, 17, 67). Pamuk doesn't engage in this kind of tampering, nor does he present characters like Marquez's gypsy who defies age and death like the Biblical Noah. In diction and phraseology too, Pamuk is conservative and does not share the postrnodemist craze for verbal exuberance. As McHale stated, the obj ective of the postmodemist text was not to allow a smooth reconstmction of the world; nor did it try to entirely block such a reconstmction. Its attempt was to throw up obstacles to the "reconstmction process" as part of its anti-mimetic strategy (220-22). For this, it relied on strategies from "lexical exhibitionism," to the use of unconventional constructions like the invertebrate syntax. This experiment reaches its apogee in Guy Davenport's story entitled "Sentence," where a single snaking sentence mns from page to page consuming a total of nine whole pages before finally hitting a full-stop. Pamuk nowhere goes to such extremes; his sentences are remarkable for their balance and symmetry. Compared with postrnodem writers like Rushdie and John Barth, Pamuk's diction (at least as he is available to us in English) strikes us as conventional. Though his sentences appear spontaneous and effortless, we can detect the presence of a discerning and calculating mind behind them. In this respect, he is like Mevlut, the hero of Strangeness. Mevlut was not a deft hand at writing love letters to the girl he fell in love with, but he

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knew that each word should b e chosen with care to create an "enchanted text." (SIM 4 1 ) On the same note, Pamuk' s treatment of sex differs from thoroughbred postmodernists like Burroughs, Barth and Marquez. Burroughs, for instance, attempts a thorough revision of the traditional physiological hierarchy that privileges the upper-part of the body over the lower. Thus in Naked Lunch, we have the picture of a talking anus that goes on to take control of the owner' s body. Joe Orton in his Head to Toe in the same vein presents a mountainous penis (McHale, 173). In Pamuk' s world we don't come across these kinds of postrnodern hyper-monstrosity (His novels are not inhabited by characters like Rushdie' s Moors-with horrendously overgrown physique-or Saleem Seenais with perpetually running gargantuan noses). In other words, he does not share the postmodern penchant for grotesque reality. The sexual scenes similarly exhibit temperance and moderation. This is well-exemplified in the conduct of characters like Black, Mevlut, and Osman all of whom exhibit great patience and perseverance in their wait before the eventual consummation. It is difficult in this world to encounter characters like Elif Shafak' s Mustapha who forcibly impregnates his own sister and has a child with her in an orgy of rage. This temperance contrasts with the characters we come across in Mailer, Roth or Marquez. It perhaps has to do with the Islamic milieu, steeped in sexual taboos that his characters occupy despite their secular western upbringings. Probably, it equally owes much to Pamuk' s love of order and decorum, a characteristic feature of his art: . . .if there is a sense of elegance and measure in the book, it is because my characters long for the unity, beauty and purity of an earlier age. (Oe 269)

This desire for the features that we associate with an earlier age goes beyond the urge for beauty and purity. Like traditional romances and gothic stories, Pamuk relishes creating an aura of mystery and enigma in his stories. While commenting on the extravagance of blood and violence in Cormac McCarthy, Alan Bilton quotes McCarthy' s own line, "the mystery is that there is no mystery," to be emblematic of his plots (Bilton, 103). Pamuk presents an opposite example. Mystery constitutes the fibre and sinew of his plots.

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Chapter One

Creator of "Mystories" and Spectral Landscapes Since most of Pamuk' s novels enact a kind of mystery, he may be better described as a creator of "mystories" rather than of mere stories. His dexterity at creating plots is most visible in the way he builds up this mystery to its climactic point. In Red the mystery surrounds the identity of the murderer, which is revealed only towards the end. In The New Life, the same enigmatic aura is sustained through Osman's quest for the mysterious angel, which at a particular juncture turns out to be a trail in search of his enigmatic sweetheart, Janan. His other heroes, like Kemal, Galip and Ka too undergo agonizing periods of prolonged waiting during the search for their missing beloveds. All this waiting is fraught with mystery and anxiety. In certain instances, Pamuk uses familiar novelistic techniques like withholding information regarding "who done it," and "what happened next" to sustain this aura of mystery. In Strangeness where the element of mystery is minimal, the readers are made to anxiously plough through several pages before learning the identity of the man with whom Samiha elopes (SIM 252). In Museum, the mild dose of mystery is built around a pair of earrings, which carry in them memories of an earlier thwarted love. The predominance of the mystery element in Red and Black is greater as required by the detective cast of this work. Black, as it does in other aspects, outstrips others vis-a-vis the mystery element. It conjures up a whole cosmos of mysteries, complete with labyrinthine underground tunnels, underworld dons, submarine secrets, nocturnal streets, shady characters, seedy places, riddling signs and nightmarish scenes peopled by Cyclopes, Deccal and other enigmatic beings, as it sketches Galip ' s search for Ruya: a trail that takes him through the dark entrails of Istanbul, and finally to the scene of the inscrntable murder. This murder fulfils the condition that Galip lays out for the kind of detective story that would interest him, i.e. one in which even the author himself "doesn't know the murderer." Celal's murder appears to be of this sort and Pamuk himself seems clueless about the assassin. One factor that augments the aura of mystery in Pamuk' s works is the perpetual veil of melancholy that shrouds them. He considers this melancholy-huzn-to be very much a national character. The snowy, misty landscape of Istanbul and Kars that his novels sketch, perfectly fits in with the aura of mystery he evokes. This is also in keeping with the spectrality of being, which is a constant theme in his fiction. All his characters are marked by this spectrality which, according to Punter, is one of the

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abiding features o f many great literary works including Hamlet, a play wherein the ghost is an overarching presence (Punter, 259-78). In Ibsen's Ghosts, we have a quintessential modem example of this. The main theme of Ibsen's play is our vulnerability to genetically inherited flaws which in effect makes the world nothing but a huge theatre of ghosts and spirits. Genetic determinism is one of the main themes of Pamuk in novels like Museum and Silent House. Kemal in Museum is nothing but a ghost of his father with the same frailties and foibles, his love affair being merely a re­ enactment of his father's, and his death due to heart failure a replication of the latter's earlier death. In Silent House, Faruk Darvinoglu incarnates the same disillusionments, ambitions, desires and frustrations as his dead father SeHihattin. In fact, the title Silent House is both suggestive and deceptive. Suggestive, in the sense that it implies the silence of the house haunted by the spectral presence of SeHihattin; deceptive because this silence conceals beneath its apparent tranquillity the hushed and threatening voices of several ghostly presences and absences. While the dead SeHihattin and Dogan mark such an absence, the aged Fatma with her storehouse of memories epitomises an eerie presence: in other words, her presence is more that of a living ghost than that of a full-blooded human being. The interest that Pamuk shows in graveyards, museums and archives is an instance of his preoccupation with the theme of spectrality. In all of Pamuk' s novels, we come across characters who feel the weight of history on their back. Faruk is an ambitious writer and hunts the archives in search of stories. Kemal is an eager collector of souvenirs that have anything to do with the memory of Fusun. Osman is an avid reader and collector of old railway magazines; Galip sifts through old writings by Celal, and Black combs the archives of the miniaturists. As Boulter explains, there are occasions when a subject him/herself becomes an archive, which in Derridean terms simultaneously symbolizes both absence and presence (Boulter, 1 -5). In other words, an archive is the institutionalisation of a loss, an attempt to preserve something that belonged to the past against permanent/future loss. Kemal, Osman, Faruk, Ka, Black, and Galip undergo agonising periods marked by loss and separation. These losses and the melancholic world they inhabit qualify them to the status of archival subjects described by Boulter. As stated earlier, for Pamuk this sense of loss and melancholy is symptomatic of Istanbul. As a city that incarnates the memories of earlier cities like Byzantium and Constantinople, Istanbul is an archive and spectral presence: a locus that is constantly haunted by history. A place so

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Chapter One

redolent of history always feels the weight of the past on its shoulders. Pamuk' s obsessive concern with time (another feature he shares with Marquez as evinced in stories like the "Sea of Lost Time" and Hundred Years ofSolitude probably owes much to these historical and geographical concatenations. Just as the city of Istanbul grapples with its multiple selves, his characters too feel themselves prone to multiple pulls. Almost all his characters have problems in being themselves. They feel themselves to be the doubles of their alter-egos, and at times ghosts of the dead ones that take possession of their souls. This ghostly aura lends his novels a kind of gothic aura. But despite this spectrality and disembodiedness, Pamuk is keen on providing minute photographic descriptions of his scenes in a realist vein. He is, in this sense, like the ancient miniaturists described in Red. These miniaturists were attentive to all miniscule details including the curve of the nostrils of the horses they drew, to the gentle shade of the moon that caressed the still ponds on a star-spangled night. It is this quality that makes Pamuk' s works such sumptuous visual treats.

A Magician of spectacles In Black, Celal describes himself as a "picturesque writer." (BB 40) This is equally trne of Celal's creator. For Pamuk, "Novels are essentially visual literary fictions." (N&S 92) He pays particular attention in creating a visual landscape a la realist writers and fills it with all the necessary details and colors. The fact that at least four of his titles have to do with color attests to his overwhelming interest in visual images: A novel exerts its influence on us mostly by addressing our visual intelligence-our ability to see things in our mind's eye and to turn words into mental pictures . . . Writing a novel means visualizing images through someone else' s words. By "painting with words," I mean evoking a very clear and distinct image in the mind of the reader through the use of words. When I am writing a novel, sentence by sentence, word by word,. . .the first step is always the formation of a picture, an image in my mind. . .When I write a chapter, a scene, or a small tableau (you see that the vocabulary of painting comes naturally to me!), I first see it in detail in my mind's eye. (N&S 92-3)

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Pamuk had initially aspired to b e a painter, and his book Other Colours contains some of his stray drawings. It was at the age of twenty-two that he gave up on this ambition and turned to writing. (OC 36 1) But for Pamuk, writing has always been "seeing the world with words." All his works testify to his interest in visuality. Entering them is like entering a new landscape, not unlike the experience Osman had upon reading the book "The New Life" in the novel of the same title. Osman felt light suddenly pouring in from the pages of the book and filling his whole being with supernatural radiance. It was a baffling, dazzling experience as he felt himself transported into a new realm. The whole book is saturated with images of light and the surfeit of light triggers a blinding effect on the reader. In Red too, light and colors are overriding motifs but they have been ingeniously counterpoised against the melancholic tale that the novel narrates and creates no jarring effect on the reader, unlike Life. The novel whose focus is painters and painting marks the apogee of Pamuk' s firm belief in the novel's visual orientation. The story, based in 16th century Turkey, uses the legend of Husrev and Shirin as its narrative frame. In the legend, Shirin falls in love with Husrev after watching his portrait painted by the legendary artist Shapour. The first meeting of the lovers takes place beside a pond in which Shirin is bathing naked against the background of a sparkling red moon. Countless painters have depicted this scenery, the novel informs us, endowing it with unique personal touches; in all of them light and joy form the most abiding motifs. Red, which uses this legendary story to narrate Black' s affair with Shekure, is suffused with verbal radiance. The following lines, describing Shekure gazing at Black after his long absence, provides a brilliant example: [Shekure' s lines] Having exposed my face to him, I remained for a while there at the window, showered in the crimson hue of the evening sun, and gazed in awe at the garden bathed in reddish-orange light, until I felt the chill of the evening air. (49) [Black's lines] The snow began to fall at a late hour and continued till dawn. I spent the night reading Shekure's letter again and again. I paced in the empty room of the empty house, occasionally leaning toward the candlestick; in the flickering light of the dim candle, I watched the tense quivering of my beloved' s angry letters, the somersaults they turned trying to deceive me

20

Chapter One and their hip-swinging right-to-left progression. Abruptly, those shutters would open before my eyes, and my beloved's face and her sorrowful smile would appear. And when I saw her real face, I forgot all those other faces whose sour-cherry mouths had increasingly matured and ripened in my imagination. (61 -2)

These passages attest to Pamuk's ability to conjure up visual scenes. The first passage spoken by Shekure evokes a canvas full of colors suggestive of light and radiance. In Black' s speech, the depiction of Shekur's handwriting, in which letters indulge in gentle hip-j erking and handsprings against dim candlelight, captures a scene of romantic realism. It is a minutely attentive mind that is simultaneously "naive" and "sentimental," at work in passages like this. This is also evident in the details Pamuk furnishes on everything including the color and patterns of the clothes he dresses his characters in and the pitch of the dog-barks that form the background chorns of the meticulously choreographed scenes. I have used the phrase "dresses in" deliberately because Pamuk is not a writer who allows his characters to appear on stage wearing whatever costumes they choose. On the choice of the dress in which we meet a stubborn Fusun taking her driving lessons, he observes: Once when browsing in a second-hand shop, I found a dress in a bright fabric with orange roses and green leaves on it, and I decided it was just right for Ftisun, the heroine of my novel. With the dress laid out before me, I proceeded to write the details of a scene in which Ftisun is learning to drive while wearing that very dress. (N&S 1 2 1 -22)

A novelist doing shopping for his characters' clothing is something unheard of; but that is vintage Pamuk. The same applies to the coat that Ka wears in Snow. The author repeatedly draws our attention to its grey, faded features, accentuating the spectrality of his character. Similarly Black describes how Ruya used to wear size seven shoes. These sartorial details are also in keeping with the mood and temper of the scenes. In the last suicidal scene in which Fusun meets with her death, she is no longer dressed in the bright fabric with orange roses. Instead, she is now in a red dress. This red gels well with the red in My Name is Red, wherein it is suggestive of death, desire and passion. (Since a detailed discussion of the use of the "red" symbolism appears in the third chapter on Red, I shall not elaborate upon it here). While a harsh rnddiness pervades Red, it is white that serves as the anchoring motif in Snow. The white in Snow suggests death, spectrality, the ennui and inertia that characterize life in the ghostly town Kars, with

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its brooding memories o f the Armenian massacre and a suicide epidemic. It is a blinding, all-pervasive radiance that does the same anchoring job in The New Life. In Black, on the other hand, the color black is "fore­ grounded" as the background (a more elaborate discussion follows in the next chapter). This strategy of filling up his fictional universe with various colors attests to the importance of visuality for Pamuk. The title he gives to his essay collection, Other Colours, is also remarkable; it points to his decision to tum attention to a new kind of color, or colors, different from the ones that inhabit the fictional universe. In a sense, this stress on visuality is something that entirely gels with the aesthetic dominant of our times. The over-emphasis on visuality in postrnodern times is a much­ regurgitated theme, at least since Guy Debord's description of the contemporary world as the "Society of Spectacle." For Mario Vargas Llosa, it is the organ mouth that symbolizes modem man's eternal craving to consume, but it would have been equally, if not more, appropriate if he had chosen the eye as the symbol, because consumption in our times relies more on visual appeal than at any time during history. Pamuk' s appeal to visuality in this sense is fully in keeping with the ethos of the times. However, it should be said that it is not only to visuality that Pamuk appeals. His novels are a veritable feast for all the senses including the auditory, olfactory, and gastronomic. This appeal to multiple senses makes him a trne poet of the senses and of sensual delights. In Innocence, he chronicles the experiences of Kemal travelling around the world to collect souvenirs for setting up the museum in memory of his beloved. In order to re-create Fusun' s exact scent Kemal spends an "entire day in the Musee International da la Parfumerie . . .the world capital of perfume." (499) The character' s sensitivity to smells here is something he shares with his creator. Kemal' s engagement party too is an extravaganza of smells: As the smells of aftershave and brilliantine (applied with particular liberty on the thinning hair of men over forty) the lady's heavy perfumes, the clouds of cigarette smoke to which everyone contributed, more out of habit than for pleasure, the odour of cooking oil from the kitchens -as the confluence of odours swirled into the spring breeze, I was reminded of being a child at my parents' parties. Even the elevator music that the orchestra (the Silver Leaves) was playing, half ironically, to set the mood for the evening, whispered to me that I was happy. (Museum 109)

This receptivity to all sensations, including the auditory, is detectable in his novels. The following passage, where he describes Kemal' s love-

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Chapter One

making with Fusun, agam attests to his deftness at evoking auditory Images: The boys whose joyful shouts and curses and screeches would accompany our love-making in the days that followed were there too that fIrst day, playing football in the old garden of Hayrettin Pasha's derelict mansion, cursing and screeching while in the house we made love. When they stopped their chatter for a while, a marvellous silence fell over the room, broken only by shy gasps from FUSUll, and one or two happy moans that escaped me. In the distance we could hear the policeman's whistle in Nisantasi square, and car horns, and a hammer hitting a nail: a child kicked a can, a seagull mewed, a cup broke, the leaves of the plane trees rustled in the breeze. (30)

These are only some among the numerous examples scattered in Pamuk' s oeuvre and not necessarily the best. In Istanbul, he talks about how early in childhood, ever since learning to read he felt his head to "be adorned with constellations of letters" that did not "convey" any "meaning" but "just made sounds." ( 1 1 7) It is this ability that he translates into art in his mature works. The same deftness can be seen in the evocation of gastronomic images. In Strangeness, while narrating Mevlut's career as a hawker, selling rice and chick-peas, he describes his menu in minute detail, not forgetting to mention the amount of thyme and pepper as well as the garlic cloves that went into its preparation. Similarly, the taste and tang of the boza and yoghurt waft from its pages in realistic details. Not unlike other postmodernist writers, a conscious or unconscious awareness of the dynamics of the fictional market must surely be a contributory factor to this inclination toward sensual images. Graham Huggan's criticism of authors like Rushdie and Arnndhati Roy, as writers who try to "manipulate the expectations and commercial literacy codes of the "alterity industry," is to a great extent applicable to many postmodern writers. (Tickell, 76) It is this market-logic that comes in for mighty lampooning in the scenes involving the fictitious writer in Calvino' s If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Calvino' s writer has recourse to devices that measure the intensity of the concentration of his experimental reader and alters the plot to suit/shock the expectations of the potential readers. ( 1 28) This surely represents a kind of market savviness, familiar in the fashion and automobile industries. Though Calvino's example suggests an extreme model, postmodern writers as a whole, have often evinced a keen sensitivity to market logic. It is the heat and haze generated by the 9/1 1 events that Khaled Hosseini successfully harvests to ensconce himself in the imaginary of tum of the century fiction readers. The logic of the

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alterity industry that Huggan mentions is one for which the old spice routes traversing the orient still hold a mythical charm. Fiction writers as cultural merchants are keenly aware of this. Viewed from this angle, the US-based Turkish novelist Elif Shafak' s choice of the title The Bastard of Istanbul makes greater sense than what the demands of aesthetic consideration might dictate. In other words, the novel is a bargain between business and aesthetics, and any writer aiming for a global audience has to make accommodations for the hegemonic aesthetic structures and their firmly entrenched values. This is an issue on which socially committed writers and critics might have a bone or two to pick with writers who fail/refuse to engage with burning social issues. Pamuk is no exception. He has been largely dismissive of tendentious art. After writing Snow, he described it as his s first and last political novel. In most of his fiction, there seems to be a conscious effort to tum away from pressing issues like poverty and destitution. At the risk of sounding crude, it might be said that his attitude in them resembles Aliiadin' s, the comer shopkeeper he describes in Black. Aliiadin is a businessman alert to market trends. He stocks things that people want that include books interpreting dreams, to women' s lip glosses, to celluloid ducks. As a businessman he flaunts an amoral and apolitical attitude : I f a customer bought brown shoe polish, only to open the box and find it was black shoe polish, Aliiadin wasn't the one responsible. Aliiadin wasn't responsible if a domestically manufactured battery shook itself empty before the honey-voiced Emel Sayin had finished her first song, oozing black pitch and causing the transistor radio irreparable damage. Aliiadin wasn't responsible if a compass that was supposed to point north, wherever you happened to be standing, always pointed instead to Tesvikiye police station. And neither was he responsible for the love letter that a romantic factory girl had slipped into a pack of Bafras, even though the painter's apprentice who opened the pack came running back into the shop in a cloud with bells on his toes, to kiss Aliiadin's hand and ask him to be best man and enquire after the girl's name and address. (BB 43)

Alaadin is, at least in a limited sense, a caricaturistic representation of the author himself. Just as the wise shopkeeper combs all the nooks and crannies of Istanbul in search of goods that his customers need, Pamuk scours the massive metropolis in search of characters, images https:llemu.edulnow/global-conflicts-global-novels/20 1 6/05/0 5/the-politics-of­ other-peoples-pain-orhan-pamuks-snowl

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Chapter One

and sensations. Like Alaadin himself, who doesn't want customers to discuss politics in his shop, Pamuk is loath to let politics infiltrate his fiction, and perhaps the same attitude of "not being responsible," for whatever might be taking place around him informs his best fiction. For Pamuk, as I discuss in my next chapter, storytelling is itself part of an ontological need, the need to be. What he tries to fulfil is this need for stories. As he states it, he writes "to be happy." (Oe 4 1 5) Socially and politically committed writers and critics will have a lot to quarrel with Pamuk for this refusal to engage with live social issues that affect society, especially those at the lower rungs of it. A la Terry Eagleton, it might even be argued that politically neutral writings like this implicitly serve to reinforce the exploitative systems and help buttress a lopsided status quo. (Eagleton, 1 983 : 1 94-97) However, it should be said that Pamuk largely rectifies this in Strangeness where he uncharacteristically turus his attention to the proletariat of Istanbul. This novel actually belies Pamuk' s earlier statement that Snow was to be his first and last political novel. In chapter seven I discuss the political and aesthetic import of this novel and how it marks a departure from his major works like Black and Red. In the coming two chapters, I shall try to explore the chemistry and architectonics of Pamuk' s craft focusing on his two magnum opuses.

CHAPTER Two THE WORLD OF DOUBLES , SHADOWS , GHOSTS , AND MYSTERIES

The Black Book is Pamuk's quintessential work that integrates all of his major themes and exemplifies the chemistry and architectonics of his craft more than any other work. It is with its dark, benighted world that he identifies himself more than with the melancholic but rainbow-streaked world ofMy Name is Red: If there is a sense of elegance and measure in the book, it is because my characters long for the unity, beauty and purity of an earlier age. (My own world is not the measured, elegant and godly world of My Name is Red; the world of the Black Book is dark, chaotic and of course modern). (Oe 269)

As Pamuk states, the world depicted in Black is dark and chaotic, but the representation of it is well ordered and disciplined. Black doesn't flaunt serpentine sentences or unwieldy chapters. Everything has been tailored to finesse, and what the novel offers is the ordered picture of an unpleasant and disordered world, unlike the chaotic portraits of chaotic worlds that writers like Pynchon and Barthelme present. This order is visible in the way the novel juxtaposes the journalistic articles, purportedly written by Celal (a central character in the novel), with the narrative tracing the plot. Every chapter dealing with the development of the plot is followed by a journalistic article having a thematic affinity with the story-line. The plot traces the search of the lawyer protagonist named Galip for his missing wife, RUya. Ruya is his cousin and their love affair dates back to early childhood days. They are both good-looking, have attended the same school, climbed up the same staircases and rnmmaged through the same trnnks. In a manner recalling the theme of infinite regress in postmodern fiction, they also read the same stories in which they come across cousins falling in love after reading the same love stories. So falling in love is something natural and inevitable for them.

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Chapter Two

Ruya is Galip ' s uncle Melih's daughter from his second marriage. Melih marries Ruya's mother during his sojourn abroad. Celal (pronounced Jalal in Turkish), another central character in the story, is Galip' s alter-ego and Ruya' s half-brother. Black devotes some of its most poetic passages to describe the love affair between the cousins. Viewed in Freudian terms, or to be precise the terms that Freud borrowed from Jung, Ruya can be seen as Galip ' s imago, the idealized concept of a mate that the unconscious develops during childhood. According to Freud, the hold of the imago on the unconscious is so strong that an individual fails to develop a meaningful relationship with a partner who fails to live up to the idealized imago. (Freud, 1 922: 2) Adding depth to the affair is the mythical aura surrounding Ruya. Ruya' s mother Suzanne is a Turkish woman of Arab descent who traces her lineage to Prophet Muhammad. The novel's intertwining of myth, history and fable comes into relief as the plot evolves. However, their sail into marriage is no smooth affair. Before marrying Galip, Ruya falls into "bad company," supposedly under the influence of Celal, and marries a man with strong leftist leanings. It is only after the collapse of this marriage that Galip is able to fulfil his childhood dream of marrying his cousin. According to Galip, his marriage with Ruya takes place exactly 1 9 years, 1 9 months, and 1 9 days after he first met her, after her father's return to Istanbul in the company of his new wife and daughter. This reminds us of Florentino Ariza's even more passionate and agonizing wait for Fermina Daza in Love in the Time of Cholera that lasted 5 1years, 9 months and 4 days. After marriage, Ruya spends her time devouring detective stories. Hers is the life of an easy going, luxurious, lazy upper-class woman. Just as her name in Turkish signifies "dream," her life too has a dreamy quality. In fact, this quality pervades the whole novel which devotes large sections to the description of protagonist Galip' s nocturnal odysseys through the city. There is very little by way of real happenings in the novel compared with Snow or Red. The sequence unfolds with Ruya' s vamoosing. She has left behind no other clue than a 1 9-word note which throws no hint as to her destination. (BB 48) Galip sets out on a desperate search to track her down. Eventually, after days of search that takes him through mysterious places and meetings with strange characters, he encounters the bullet-ridden body of Celal near Alaadin's shop. The famous journalist's body has been covered in old newspaper sheets by the police and his murder remains a mystery. The

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next morning, the body of Ruya is found inside the shuttered shop. Though the plot looks deceptively simple, it conceals a deep and intricate strncture as the novel engages with themes such as identity, memory, history, the dynamics governing the conscious and the unconscious, East­ West dualism, esotericism, the dialectics between tradition and modernity, etc. There is also a subtle but clear instance of an incest motif. Galip 's subsequent inquiries reveal that Ruya and Celal were living in a decrepit apartment in a rnndown part of the city before their murder. When Galip visits the apartment in the company of Uncle Melih (Celal's and Ruya' s father) after the murders, h e sees piles o f peanut shells on the table, a clear sign that Ruya was sitting there. It appears from the way the tables and chairs are arranged that Celal had been busy working on a book, probably dictating it to Ruya. It further emerges from the way the beds are arranged that Celal and Ruya were not sharing the same room. The incest motif is thus hinted at and the same time compounded by a suggestive denial. However, the same motif is propped up through repeated references to the miniature aquarium that Vasif, the brother of Celal, possesses. Vasif is deaf and dumb besides being mentally retarded. He is taken by Uncle Melih on his European trip for treatment but is unceremoniously returned on a train to Istanbul. He arrives clutching the aquarium and spends his time constantly gazing at the Japanese fish in it, and even after five decades refuses to be separated from his possession. The novel makes repeated references to this aquarium and the degeneration the fish suffer due to years of inbreeding. (9; 56) Vasifs retarded condition, the genetic vulnerabilities of his fish, and the marriages/liaisons involving cousins and half-brothers dovetail into each other, giving the subtle theme of incest an accentuated relief. The novel follows the pattern of a detective story. To trace down his missing wife, Galip makes an inventory of the people and places Ruya is familiar with. He assiduously goes through some of her favourite detective novels thinking they might offer him clues. The last book she had been reading is a black detective novel in which he finds the photo of a naked man with a limp penis (which probably implies Ruya' s disillusionment with Galip who lacks Celal's imagination and creativity). This search for Ruya stretches into days. When Galip learns that Celal too has gone missing, he resumes his panicky search with renewed vigour. The mysterious nature of Ruya' s vanishing, its coincidence with Celal's disappearance, and the strange nature of her 1 9-word message

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Chapter Two

augment the mystery. As elaborated in the chapter on Islamic aesthetics, number " 1 9" is a figure claimed to be of mystical significance in Islamic tradition. Galip ' s nocturnal wanderings through Istanbul bring him face to face with further mysteries. Unlike traditional detective plots that lead to a gradual dissipation of mystery, the novel does not take us to an easy closure. Instead, with each passing chapter, the mystery surrounding the half-siblings' flight thickens. In other words, the blackness only grows thicker as the plot develops. At an allegorical level, Galip ' s search for RUya becomes a search into his own deeper self. In fact, the meaning of the term Ruya as "dream" is significant in this context. Dreams in Freudian conception are the "royal roads" to the understanding of the unconscious. Galip' s search for Ruya is, in this sense, a search for the core of his identity which is hidden from him. During his marriage with Ruya, he constantly feels the presence of a secret core inside her, a dark mysterious spot into which she resolutely bars him entry: Ruya was lying face down on the bed, lost to the sweet warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue- checked quilt...Languid with sleep, Galip gazed at his wife's head; Ruya's chin was nestling in the down pillow. The wondrous sights playing in her mind gave her an unearthly glow that pulled him toward her even as it suffused him with fear. Memory, Celiil had once written in a column, is a garden. Ruya's gardens, Ruya' s gardens . . .Galip thought. Don't think, don't think, it will make you jealous ! But as he gazed at his wife's forehead, he still let himself think. He longed to stroll among the willows, acacias, and sun-drenched climbing roses of the walled garden where Ruya had taken refuge, shutting the doors behind her. But he was indecently afraid of the faces he might fmd there: Well, hello! So you 're a regular here too, are you? It was not the already identified apparitions he most dreaded but the insinuating male shadows he could have never anticipated. (3) [emphases in the original]

Galip has been shut off from the dreamy world: the world where, he dreads, his wife has other male partners. Further analysis reveals how this opening passage contains crncial clues about the central theme of the novel. The passage is preceded by an epigraph by Adli, which states: Never use epigraphs-they kill the mystery in the work! However, what Black does through a tour de force is just the opposite, that of assiduously building up a mystery that does not yield to any epigraphic simplicity. The enclosure to which Ruya bars her husband' s entry is a mysterious garden. It exists in dreams and memory. Both dreams and memory, as

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Celal makes clear in one of his columns, are gardens that open themselves into an infinite number of other gardens. (370) In that labyrinth one is apt to get lost and wander aimlessly as Galip does through the labyrinthine streets of Istanbul. The garden in this instance is a symbol of the self. Its association with memory and, by extension, with dreams, or RUya, underlines the crucial role that memory as well as the unconscious plays in the creation of self. This early passage gives a clear hint as to the significance of the unconscious in the novel. As the novel progresses the role of the unconscious becomes more pronounced and it supplants consciousness as the main theatre of action. In one of his articles, Celal uses the Bosphorus as an objective correlative representing Turkey's unCOnSCIOUS : As I plunge into this silent darkness and make my way through the stench of rotting corpses, I shall listen to the horns of the cars passing above me on what we once knew as the Shore Road, though it now looks more like a lane snaking through a mountain pass. I'll stumble across the palace intriguers of yesteryear, still doubled over in the sacks in which they drowned, and the long lost skeletons of Orthodox priests, still clutching their staffs and their crosses . . .As I descend into the lower depths, watching my step, viewing my way through mud and rock, I shall see galley slaves still chained to their oars as they gaze up at the stars with a patience that seems infinite. I may not notice the necklaces, eye glasses, and umbrellas hanging from the trees of moss, but I shall certainly pause in fearful respect before the armoured crusaders, mounted on horses whose magnificent skeletons are still stubboruly standing. (BB 1 9-20)

The Bosphorus is the unconscious into which Turkey has shoved its repressed memories. It is remarkable that for Jung water is an archetypal symbol representing the unconscious. (Jung 1 986, 378) More pertinent, however, is the Freudian notion of the unconscious which acts as a storehouse of all our memories, both accessible and inaccessible. According to him, the unconscious is the realm where nothing can be permanently deleted. The Bosphorus for Celal is such a realm. Once, Celal had lent his green pen to Galip when he was a child; but during one of his rowboat rides through the Bosphorus in the company of Ruya, she drops it into the water. When Galip apologetically informs Celal of the lost pen he responds enigmatically: "Well, if we know which part of the Bosphorus it fell into, it's not really lost!" (2 1)

These lines have an echo of Freud' s comment on the unconscious: "In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or

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Chapter Two

forgotten." (Boulter, 1 08) In one of his columns, Celal names "the dark menacing spot lurking in the minds" as the source of all miseries. Then in a rather off-handed way, he refers to the police station as a "dark spot in our subconscious." Viewed psychoanalytically, this apparently "casual" remark has deep significance: the police represent the repressive mechanisms that in psychoanalytical terms help prop up the individual' s­ in this instance the State' s-ego/identity. The subconscious-which here is used in the same sense as the Freudian unconscious-is where repressed feelings find refuge. For Celal this unconscious, where all the repressed emotions reside, is the well-spring of a person' s-and by extension a society' s-distress. Galip ' s search for Ruya/Dream through Istanbul' s dark streets is thus a search into his own-and by extension, Istanbul' s-unconscious in order to find the secret "dark spot." The fact that most of the events in the novel unfold at night is significant. It is at night, during the darkest hour, that the secret dark spot throbs to life and manifests itself through dreams and nightmares. But searching for the dark spot at night is like searching for a black kitten in a dark chamber. For Galip, it presents an added difficulty: his own self is in an internally riven and deeply diffused shape. He is unable to bear Ruya' s absence because she is a part of his very self. But inside that "self' is the secret "walled off' spot from which he is shut out. His search for his wife after a series of travails ends at Alaadin's shop, the shop that sells knick-knacks, including booklets interpreting people 's dreams. (45) But even in death Ruya remains sealed off from Galip. Upon reaching the spot of the murder, like other witnesses, he fails to see Ruya, whose body is lying beside the huge dolls inside the shuttered shop. The murders of Ruya and Celal remain a mystery that the police fail to solve. For Galip, the twin murders represent the shattering of his dream-the dream of a long happy life with Ruya/Dream which he used to fantasize. But at the same time, the murder presents him with an opportunity. By the time of his death, Celal has made his name as the most celebrated columnist in Istanbul. His columns are remarkable not only for their readability and topicality but for the ingenious word-play which he indulges in. In some, the last word in each paragraph, when put together, form a new sentence, often stating things unpalatable to the authorities. According to Celal, this is a ploy he invented to bypass the censors and the press prosecutor. ( 1 02) Celal is thus a mysterious figure and the mystery surrounding his death only augments his reputation as a maverick and

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unpredictable genius. It i s even rumoured that Celal must have himself hired the gunmen who shot him. During Celal's funeral, Galip stands next to the editor of Milliyet, the newspaper for which his slain cousin used to write. He tells the editor how he came across many unpublished pieces written by Celal in the apartment where he secluded himself during the last days he spent incommunicado. The editor says he would be only too glad to run all those pieces in Celal's usual space. Galip uses the opportunity to launch himself on a jourualistic career. For years he goes on writing under the name "Celal." For Galip, then, the death of his wife and cousin prove to be both a huge personal blow as well as an ego-booster. For years he had cherished the enviable standing that Celal enjoyed. He even suspected that RUya admired her half-brother more than him, and in moments of desperation longed to "leave" his world behind and live in Celal's. (95) After Celal's death, Galip is able to fulfil his dream. He not only writes under Celal's name but also takes to wearing his dead cousin's coats. In other respects too there was a great resemblance between him and Celal, and over the phone they sounded so similar that even immediate relatives found it difficult to tell them apart. Viewed in this sense, the murder of Celal, for Galip, represents the death of his own haunting double. The double whom he aspires to be but cannot, and whom he envies because of the mysterious bond he shares with RUya. As stated earlier, the theme of doubles is of abiding interest to Pamuk. It strongly reverberates in many of his works and is one of the focal concerns in The White Castle and The New Life, besides Black. In Life, the protagonist, Osman, ends up killing his double Mehmet; and in Castle, Hoja impersonates his Venetian double to the extent that he migrates to Venice and consummates his marriage with his alter-ego' s fiancee. This theme of the double, or Doppelganger, has long exercised the literary imagination. Dostoyevsky's Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is a classic case. Golyadkin is obsessed with the myriad doubles he encounters on the streets and the problem crescendos when he meets Golyadkin Jr. who is the obverse of everything that he is. The affable, outgoing, dashing and extrovert Golyadkin Jr. triggers such violent emotions in his counterpart that the latter is eventually dragged off into a mental asylum. The same problem leads many of Pamuk's characters into nervousness and insomnia, and leaves them teetering on the brink of insanity. For Galip, Celal represents such a formidable double. Dwelling on his fascination, on the motif of "doubles," Pamuk waxes autobiographical:

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Chapter Two From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double. I can't remember where I got this idea or how it came to me. It must have emerged from a web of rumours, misunderstandings, illusions, and fears. But in one of my earliest memories, it is already clear how I've come to feel about my ghostly other...But the ghost of the other Orhan in another house somewhere in Istanbul never left me. Throughout my childhood and well into adolescence, he haunted my thoughts. On winter evenings, walking through the streets of the city, I would gaze into other people's houses through the pale orange light of home and would dream of happy, peaceful families living comfortable lives. Then I would shudder, thinking that the other Orhan might be living in one of these houses. As I grew older, the ghost became a fantasy, and the fantasy a recurrent nightmare. (Istanbul 3-4)

Probably owing to this condition, identity as something vulnerable, permeable, and exchangeable is a recurring theme in Pamuk' s novels. In Life Osman and Janan during one among a series of bus accidents, come in possession of a fellow couple ' s identification cards; from then onwards they shed their identities to become Ali Kara and Efsun Kara. In Snow, the theme is more marginal but no less intense. The religious school boys Necip and Fazil look so much like each other and dote on, though do not dare to date, the same girl: Kadife. Upon the death of Necip, Fazil ends up marrying Kadife in a semi-replication of the Hoja-Venetian story in Castle. In the Ka-Orhan equation too the same "doppelganger" motif operates, so much so that the people of Kars mistake Orhan for the dead poet himself. The theme is most pronounced in Black, which is crowded with images of doubles. Almost everyone in the novel is a double of somebody else. Everyone feels that s/he is an elusive copy of someone whom they aspire to/detest being. Because of this, they feel their bodies to be peopled by multiple ghosts/shadows. In the case of some, the choice of acting as someone else is thrust upon them by fate, as is the case with the call girls in the brothel near the New Angel Theatre that Galip visits. The brothel's main attraction is the "genuine article [s]" impersonating famous film stars. ( 1 42) When the clients arrive, they make it a point to act out scenes from famous movies in a make-believe fashion. There Galip is placed in the company of a girl impersonating Turkan Soray, a famous Turkish actress. During their meeting, she treats Galip as if he were Izzet Guany the famous actor. Throughout, she sounds and acts as if she were acting scenes from Licensed to Love, a twenty-year-old film. While she is with

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him in bed, for a fleeting moment he feels that she is RUya. Then she begins to philosophize on the question of identity. Galip has gone to the brothel because he himself is vexed by the same perplexity and the conversation only serves to aggravate his anxieties: Later, at a moment when they were bouncing gently on the bed and Galip wasn't looking into the mirror, the woman murmured, "we've both become different people." Then she asked, "who am I, who am I, who am 17" But Galip was too far gone to give her the answer. She wanted to hear. The woman said, "Two times two is four," and murmured, "Listen, listen, listen!" and she whispered into his ear a story about a Sultan and an unlucky crown prince, as if it were a fairy tale, as if it might never have happened. (149)

This problem forms the crux of the novel. The Pasha described in a later chapter brings the theme to greater relief. The Pasha is the dictator who rules over Istanbul after the death of the great dictator who from several cues in the chapter, can be assumed to be Mustafa Kemal. The Pasha is in the habit of wandering around the streets and sailing aboard an ordinary boat on the Bosphorus in the guise of a peasant. Once, while sailing, he notices another Pasha who bears a stunning resemblance to him, travelling on board another luxury boat together with the accompaniment of a regal entourage and all the other royal parapherualia. During the jouruey, the "original" pasha, impersonating the peasant, is detected and detained by the "fake" one and hauled into the back of his bulletproof Chevrolet, which is an exact replica of the Pasha' s official vehicle. Ensconced in the luxury of its back seat, the fake Pasha, reveals to the "original," how they had been classmates and competitors at the military college and why he has ventured on such a risky mission. This story is narrated in an epistolary style by the Pasha himself in a letter to his son residing abroad. By the end of the letter the reader is left wondering whether the Pasha is actually narrating his real experience or a dream. Pamuk' s deftness is evident in the way he refuses to bring the matter to any closure. This technique is replicated throughout, in the many stories within stories that the novel abounds in. Indeed, the whole novel as such unfolds in a somnambulistic and surrealistic world of dreams and shadows that eschews solidity and substance. On this "darkling plain" no one is sure of himlherself. They all want to be somebody else, but find themselves unable to be either themselves or the aspired ones. The words of Belkis, a schoolmate of Galip and RUya best illustrate the dilemma:

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Chapter Two "Even after all these years, I still can't understand why someone would want to live someone else' s life and not their own...! finally accepted that no one in this world can ever hope to be themselves." (203)

Belkis's problem stems from her desire to be RUya. This obsession is so fierce that she fantasizes herself as RUya and imagines herself to be married to Galip. These fantasies bring her great pleasure: On stormy autunm afternoons, I would sit listlessly in my armchair watching the raindrops on the window, for hour after hour; I'd be thinking of you: Ruya and Galip. I would go over whatever clues I had handy and imagine what Ruya and Galip were doing at that moment; and if, after an hour or two I had managed to convince myself that it was Ruya sitting in that armchair in that darkroom. This fearsome thought would bring me exquisite pleasure . . .One dark midnight . . . I had an eerie thought: I had not been myself during the first half of my life because I wanted to be someone else, and now I am going to spend the second half of my life being someone else who regretted all those years she had spent not being herself...by now I knew beyond the shadow of doubt that none of us can ever hope to be ourselves . . . (203-4)

Belkis's initial pleasure gives way to disappointment when she realizes the impossibility of being Ruya. The only character, who partially succeeds in being someone else, is Galip who after Celal's death takes to wearing the maverick journalist' s coat and writing his columns. However, it is doubtful whether Galip ever fully succeeds in deluding himself that he has become his much-desired alter-ego. Even if he had done so, it would not have meant a landfall for him: because, the novel presents even Celal to be an internally split and fissiparous entity. Just as Galip attempts to model himself on Celal, Celal attempts to mould himself on the legendary Jalaluddeen Rumi, the Persian mystic poet and scholar whose namesake he happens to be (remember, "COO is pronounced as "j" in Turkish). Like the ancient poet, Celal is a mysterious figure who purveys occult doctrines. The mystery surrounding his life and career attain such magnificent proportions that some of his readers even mistake him to be the Anti-Christ! Deccal himself (pronounced Dejjal in Turkish). Like Rumi, Celal is obsessed with dreams and offers interpretations of his readers ' dreams. While critics accused Rumi of plagiarizing from all available books, including Attar' s Conference of Birds, the Quran, and Prophetic traditions, Celal's rivals in journalism dismiss him as an author with little originality. They trash his widely popular journalistic writings as rehashes of Rumi. As for Celal, everyone incorporates within him/her

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several other selves, several corpses of dead ones. Hence, the question of originality itself is of little consequence. In an article he puts it thus : As for this person I saw at the centre of my thoughts- or, if you prefer, at the center of this illusory universe that existed only in my mind's eye I knew at once he was not my double; we were one and the same, he and I. . . For the first time in years, He saw fit to divulge His secrets to me just as I was able to divulge mine to Him. Yes, it's true, I was speaking to myself, but don't we all? We all have a second person buried inside us, a dear friend to whom we whisper to our heart' s content; and some of us even have a third. (1 1 6- 17) -

The conundrum of "doubles" the novel presents doesn't cease with the Galip-Celal-Rumi question either. Rumi too has a double, the celebrated Shams of Tabriz. Shams was murdered in mysterious circumstances and his body was found in a well. Among those accused of his murder was Rumi's own son. Rumi for his part refused to accept the murder of his friend and went around Damascus searching for his alter- ego and mentor. The novel hints at the dubious role that Rumi must have played in the murder. Despite knowing that his friend's body was dumped in the well, Rumi refused to look into it. What must have prompted Rumi to do so? Wasn't it Rumi who benefitted from the mysterious death of Shams, "for it turned him from a theology teacher of no great distinction to the greatest Sufi poet of all time." (261) Looked at thus, this chain extends beyond the characters that people the novel and has a trans-historical sweep straddling both time and space; encompassing even inanimate obj ects. In this sense, the dark blue Chevrolets in which the original and the fake Pashas travel are the doubles of the white Cadillac in which the Prophet Muhammad is portrayed travelling through Istanbul in the company of his grandchildren. The novel thus orchestrates a deft play of opposites and contradictions, suggested through the metaphor of the chess game in the chapter "A Very Long Chess Game." This play of opposites also manifests itself in the counterbalancing of nocturnal and diurnal cycles, in spite of the tilt towards the former befitting the plot's dark and solemn setting. The most remarkable feat, however, is the dexterous way in which Black proj ects itself as the shadow of another book, probably that of the black detective book which Ruya was reading before she left Galip for good. Though this book is only mentioned in a fleeting reference, the fact of it being black is something that cannot be ignored:

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Chapter Two A small discovery: in the middle of the night, during one of those strange interludes when the refrigerator motor cut off suddenly, as if to unnerve him, when he was searching the back of the wardrobe - and even he could not have said how many times he'd already done so-wedged between a pair of dark green high-heeled shoes she had left behind, he found a detective novel in translation. There were hundreds of these lying all over the house, so normally he would not have paid it much attention, but tonight he was struck by the owl staring so treacherously from the cover, and as he leafed through this black book, it was as if his hands, well trained after a night of reaching into the backs of drawers and wardrobes and leaving nothing unturned, knew exactly where to go: There, hidden between two pages was a picture clipped from a glossy magazine: a handsome naked man. His penis was limp, and as Galip was deciding how it compared with his own, he told himself that Ruya must have cut the picture out of a foreign magazine she must have bought at Aliiadin's. A memory: Ruya knew Galip couldn't bear her detective novels so she was confident he would never look through one. He detested this world where the English were parodies of Englishness and no one was fat unless they were colossally so; the murderers were as artificial as their victims, serving only as clues in a puzzle. (I am just trying to pass the time, Okay? Ruya would say and then she would reach into the bag of nuts she had bought from Aliiaddin before returning to her book). Galip had once told Ruya that the only detective book he'd ever want to read would be the one in which not even the author knew the murderer's identity. Instead of decorating his story with clues and red herrings, the author would be forced to come to grips with his characters and his subject, and his characters would have a chance to become people in a book instead of just figments of their author' s imagination. Ruya who knew more about detective novels than Galip did, asked how the author was to manage all that extra detail. Because every detail in a detective novel served a purpose. Details: Before leaving the apartment, Ruya had used that terrifying insect killer (the one with an enormous black beetle and three cockroaches pictured on the front) and sprayed it all over the bathroom, the corridor and the kitchen. (49-50) [emphases added]

In the above passage where we have the reference to the black book which Ruya reads at the time of her departnre, the color black dominates. The high-heeled shoes that Ruya leaves behind, and the cockroaches on the insecticide are ominously black. The picture of the owl on the book cover adds to the ominousness. For Galip, who is dismissive of all detective novels, the only detective novel worth reading is the one in which the author himself doesn't know the identity of the murderer. The Black Book is this kind of a detective

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novel, and Pamuk gives ample indications that he himself has no clue about the identity of the assassins of Celal and RUya. In this sense, Black can itself be considered the "double" of the novel Ruya reads. As earlier observed, almost everything in Black is counterweighed by the presence of a double or negative. This is something that lends the book itself a spectral quality. In fact, the dark nocturnal world that it portrays seems to be more the abode of spectres and ogres than men and women of flesh and blood. Here everybody/everything is a shadow or copy of somebody/something else. As Celal mentions during his conversation with Galip : " . . . all murders . . . are copies of other murders, just as all books are copies of other books. That's why I'd never think of publishing a book under my own name." (244) Black in this sense is a worthy cogitation on the nature of existence, its prime focus being the inauthenticity and insubstantiality of existence. It projects a world that grapples with its own reality or lack of it; a Platonic world that duplicates the reality of an ideal world lying somewhere beyond the beyond. Just as it raises suspicions about the reality of the world it depicts by underlining the spectrality of Istanbul, it poses questions on its own ontology as a text. The rich inter-textuality of its fabric, which weaves together a host of Eastern and Western writers including Rumi, Attar, Gazzali, Ibn' Arabi, Proust, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Freud, attests to its own status as a spectral artefact. In other words, the book in itself asserts the truism of Celal's statement that "all books are copies of other books." However, there is one author/work that Black scrnpulously avoids mentioning which is crncial in a discussion of the book's ontological status as a copy of another book. To me, this seems to be Carl Jung' s The Red Book. All riddles are worded in a way that they never contain their answer. For example, you won't have the word "lion" in a riddle whose answer is "lion." Black is such a riddle, posing itself as the double of another book and the strongest candidate for this is The Red Book. The Red Book was part of Jung' s attempt to integrate the unassimilable elements of his unconscious into the self as part of the individuation process. Galip 'slPamuk' s attempt in The Black Book is a similar confrontation with the unconscious. While Jung' s Red is peopled with serpents and other monstrous creatures, Pamuk' s Black is inhabited by Cyclopes, Decals and djinns. In both books, circular shapes like wells and eyes (representing Jung' s Mandala) form important motifs. [I acknowledge that this is a point which requires ampler treatment in the

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form of a more elaborate treatise which is not within the scope of this chapter]. 6 However, it is not only books that Black considers to be replicas of other books. As Celal avers every murder to be a copy of "other murders," so Black projects Celal's murder as well as his vamoosing with Ruya to be copies of other historic murders as well as childhood pranks. (244) The event is playful but pithily meaningful in the backdrop of later plot development: Ruya and Galip are playing hide and seek during their childhood. Galip chooses a spot for hiding where he is sure Ruya will never be able to trace him. He waits there for what seems to be an eternity. Finally, he gets out of his hiding place anticipating that Ruya would be eagerly awaiting him. However, to his disappointment, grandma informs him that Ruya has already left the place with Celal for Alaadin' s shop : It was dark outside and it was snowing, a sad heavy snow that seemed to beckon him, that tugged at his heart. In the distance was Aliiadin's shop: amid the toys, magazines, balls, yo-yos, colored bottles and tanks glimmered a light that was just the same shade as Ruya's complexion and he could see it reflected on the white pavement outside. (53)

This scene bears a striking resemblance to the scene describing the death of Celal and Ruya. The blinking blue lights of the police car blocking the intersection gave a sad neon pallor to the wet asphalt. The lights of the Aliiadin's shop were still burning and in the little square in front, silence reigned, never in his life had Galip seen such stillness, and never again would he see it, except in his dreams . . .There on the pavement two paces from the Singer sewing machine display window, was a white blot. A man: Celiil. They'd covered him with newsprint. (439)

In the childhood game, it is Ruya, who has to find Galip ' s hiding place; but she tricks Galip and gave him the slip. In real life, the roles are reversed but once again Ruya manages to leave Galip clueless. The comicality of the childhood game turns tragic in its real-life re-enactment, which ends in the bloody death of the half-siblings. The novel, in a masterly feat, nevertheless portrays this murder as a replica of an earlier death; not that of his illustrious name-sake Jalaluddin Rumi' s, but that of 6 The following YouTube sites provide basic information on Jung' s The Red Book https://www .youtube.comiwatch?v=SGVkyhX2 uQ https://www.youtube.comiwatch?v=xll op2KwLw&t=3 1 6s https://www.youtube.comiwatch?v=p6gqPonoITI _

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his mentor, Shams of Tabriz's. Celal's death is mysterious, but just as Rumi benefits from the death of his master Shams, Galip benefits from his cousin's murder. It catapults him on a successful journalistic career. Can we consider Galip himself to have been complicit in the murder? The novel' s triumph, as a detective novel that successfully strives to fail in offering rnn of the mill solutions, lies in the novelist' s refusal to offer such closures. The readers are deliberately kept clueless, but not entirely: the author throws in a couple of hints, probably remote, to suggest such a possibility. Ever since Galip moves to Celal's apartment after his cousin' s disappearance, and assumes the latter' s role b y wearing the columnist's clothes and answering calls on his behalf [this is before Celal succumbs to the bullets], he is pestered by a fanatical admirer of the journalist. This crazy reader is in the habit of disguising himself as Mehmet the Conqueror and wandering the streets of Istanbul. On one occasion his wife stealthily calls Galip and, under the impression that she is talking to the famed columnist, warns him of her husband' s plans to eliminate him. Unmindful of the danger of which he has been warned, Galip promises to meet the man near Alaadin' s shop after 9 pm when the latter rings him up the next day. It is at 9.30 pm that Celal's murder takes place at exactly the same location, and one of the eyewitnesses reported how he found someone dressed like Mehmet the Conqueror on the spot. How did Celal happen to be near Alaadin' s at almost the same time that Galip had his appointment with the anonymous reader? Was the caller in the habit of simultaneously speaking to both Celal and Galip, especially given the fact that he had claimed to know all the numbers at which Celal could be contacted? Had Galip by then completely transposed himself into Celal as it happens in the case of Hoja and the Venetian in The White Castle? Why did Galip deliberately delay his decision to go to Alaadin' s shop on the fateful night? Why didn't he alert the police about the murderous intentions of the crazy reader even after receiving the warning? There are a host of questions like this that the novelist raises and leaves unanswered, making the plot complicated and intriguing. The reference to Mehmet the Conqueror' s impersonator appears simplistic. Since we have already been informed of the crazy caller' s strange proclivity to dress himself a s the ancient hero, w e are apt to mis/surmise the murderer' s identity. His wife's warning of her husband's designs to eliminate Celal would support this reading. Pamuk, however, complicates this by saying how Galip too had at a certain stage felt himself

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to be Mehmet the Conqueror. The name "Galip," which means "victor/conqueror" lends credibility to such a reading. Thus the needle of suspicion is once again subtly directed at Galip. The extreme resentment that he felt towards Ruya and Celal for having shut him off from their "secret garden" lends this reading greater validity. (4 1 1) Viewed thus, Celal's murder can be seen as a re-enactment of his illustrious namesake 's supposed involvement in Shams' s murder. With the death of Celal, the novel comes full circle. The last few pages are literally drenched in black. Galip says: It would be best, I think, if ! asked the printer to submerge all the words on the pages that follow with a blanket of printer' s ink. This would allow you to use your own imaginations to create that which my prose can never achieve. This would do justice to the black dream that descends upon us at this point in the story - to the silence in my mind, as I wander like a sleepwalker through its hidden world. For the pages that follow-the black pages that follow-are the memoirs of a sleepwalker, nothing more and nothing less. (443)

Metafictional Elements The Black Book is a rich and multi-layered work that weaves within its fabric a whole assortment of complex themes, not amenable to any reductive treatment. This is why critics described it as a novel comparable with the best of Eco, Calvino, Borges and Marquez. An important topic that the novel preoccupies itself with, and which lends it a strong metafictional aspect, is the contemplation on the nature of fiction. In the chapter "The Three Musketeers," Celal describes his encounter with three older generation writers who offer him tips on writing. The conversation uuravels Pamuk' s own concerns as a novelist. The centrality of spectrality and history is stressed. Celal withholds the names of the three writers, not because he is keen on not disturbing them sleeping "in peace in the cemeteries," but because he wants to distinguish between his readers who can identify them, using the clues he drops, and those who are incapable of doing it. This observation made as prelude to the conversation involving the three polemicists, throws light on the chemistry of Pamuk' s fictional universe. The cemetery element hints at spectrality; the challenge thrown to the readers to guess the names hiding behind pseudonyms (Adli, Behti, and Cemali referred to as A, B and C) attests to the stock in trade of Pamuk' s narrative technique that relies on adroit manipulations of the reader' s hopes and expectations. In Red and Black

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this game o f hide-and-seek i s crafted to perfection. One of Cemali' s tips to the young columnist Celal stresses the role of history, memory and spectrality. According to C, "those who have not cracked the secret locked inside our history and cemeteries cannot presume to speak about us, or indeed about the West." In all his novels, this is what Pamuk executes with finesse. The gloomy graveyard is a looming presence in his fiction. His characters are instinctively drawn to graves. It is his mother' s graveyard that Black first visits on his retum to Istanbul. The Darvinoglu family in Silent House and Dr Fine in Life also make periodic trips to the burial places, and their attachment to the dead has a more than cursory dimension. In Strangeness Mevlut feels a magnetic pull towards cemeteries which intensifies after his wife's tragic death. All these underline the spectral dimension. A few other instmctions given by the senior writers are : A: Love all dwarfs, for the reader does too . . . B: The mysterious home for dwarfs in Uskudar, for example; that's a good subject... B : By all means be polemical, but only if you know how to cause injury. . . c: B y all means b e polemical, but make sure to take your coat... c : Our teacher and master is Sheherzade; take a leaf from her book.

Whenever writing about "real life" you too can intersperse facts with stories ten to fifteen pages long. . . A: The three great themes, o f course, are death, love and music ... A: Never forget that you're a devil and an angel. You're Deccal hiding in the shadows and He who rules the heavens. Because readers quickly tire of people who are all good or all bad... c: Never forget that the secret is love. The key word is love.

A: It's love, it's love, it's love. Love! c: One day, when you're older, when you ask yourself if a man can ever be himself, you'll also ask yourself if you've ever understood this secret. Don't forget (1 haven 't) . (88-9 1 )

In this conversation, Pamuk reveals more than h e does in Naive about the mechanisms of his craft. The centrality of "love" to the dynamics of his fiction, his fascination with the weird and mysterious, and his

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umbilical attachment to Sheherzade are unequivocally stated in these lines. Another important clue the conversation yields is regarding the nature of Pamuk' s use of intertextuality. B's advice to the young writer is to read "sparingly but ardently." He advises this as a means of looking "more knowledgeable" than one actually is. Pamuk is certainly an ardent reader but by no means does he appear to be one who reads sparingly. Black is littered with references to many literary works, both Eastern and Western; classical and modem. The great authors that people its pages include Rumi, Gazzali, Ibn Zerhani, Ahmet Rasim, Galip, Attar, Proust, Dumas, Flaubert, Coleridge, Dostoyevsky, Hawthorn, Carroll, de Quincey, Poe, Bergson, Voltaire, Rousseau and a host of others. While these are authors whose names figure in the novel, there are others whose presence is strongly implied without being named. For instance, the central issue of "being oneself' that the novel grapples with has strong Hamletian echoes. Yes, once upon a time there lived a prince who'd discovered that there was one question in life that mattered more than any other: to be or not to be oneself-but before Galip could conjure up the story, he could feel himself turning into someone else, and then into someone else who fell asleep. (204)

Through the Turkish prince, who is an alter-ego of Hamlet, the novel problematizes the notions of originality and authenticity for both authors and characters. Many characters appear in the novel via narratives offered by other characters. The chapter "Love Stories on a Snowy Evening," for example, presents an ensemble of colorful people who appear as characters in the stories narrated by visitors at a nightclub. One of the stories is about a Turkish journalist who imagines himself to be Proust. The man is such an avid fan of Proust that he deludes himself into believing that he himself has written the great works of the French author; not satisfied by this he goes out of his way to look for his beloved Albertine. Eventually, he determines that it is a young effeminate male journalist working with him and confides the matter to him. When the young journalist writes about the old man's delusions in his column, the senior journalist takes offence and develops suicidal fantasies. He is most offended because his beloved Albertine ' s name has been printed in a cheap newspaper that some Istanbullus are going to wrap their fish in. In the "nightmares that the old journalist suffers during the last unhappy nights of his life, he has visions of Prousts, Albertines, and old journalists endlessly repeating one another, in a bottomless well of stories, inside stories, inside stories." ( 1 77)

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Through this story, Pamuk highlights the question he poses throughout, viz. whether it is possible for anyone to truly be himlherself in the world. For Pamuk, there is no permanent solution to this constant existential riddle. Even the existential questions themselves have no originality: who first started them and who copied them from who are mysteries that yield no easy answers. Everything is a bottomless well, within other bottomless wells. As one of the three senior writers who speaks to Celal puts it, "the westeru existentialists who came onto the scene a full seven hundred years later were mere imitations who had plundered his [Ibn 'Arabi's] very idea." In Pamuk' s problematization, however, even Ibn 'Arabi cannot claim originality: just as Rumi is the copy of Shams of Tabriz, Ibn 'Arabi can be nothing but somebody else' s copy. Fittingly enough, Black presents itself as an echo-chamber where the ghosts of innumerable dead and living authors are engaged in storytelling; everyone plagiarizing each other. In other words, The Black Book can be considered an original meditation on the unoriginality of all claims of absolute originality. Nevertheless, despite voicing doubts about the notion of the originality and authenticity of writers, the novel fully recognizes the power of storytelling as a ritual. Accordingly, the stories need not be original, but the very process of telling them is a means of "being," a means of achieving the Jungian "individuation" for the characters. In Jung's complex theorization, individuation could be achieved only through the integration of the dark elements of the unconscious with consciousness, and by working out a symbiotic chemistry. Storytelling is for Pamuk the means of achieving such a symbiosis: When he was telling the story the second time, he stressed sections he had failed to notice the first time; when he told the story for the third time, it became clear to him that he could be a different person, each time he told it. Like the prince, I told stories to become myself Furiously angry at all those who had prevented him from being himself, certain that it was only by telling stories that he would come to know the history of the city and the mystery of life itself, he brought the story to a close for the third and the final time, to be met with a white silence that spoke to him of death. (4 17)

It is significant that the close of the story inevitably implies blankness and death. This is what the crown prince discovers. He spends long years sequestered in his hunting lodge dictating story after story to the scribe. However, he discovers that each of the stories he narrates carries echoes of

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books and stories he has read before, especially the stories of the European masters he avidly devoured. He tries to exorcise their ghosts by removing from his lodging all the obj ects that might kindle his memory. However, all these steps prove futile as old memories cling to him with renewed ferocity. The moral the prince's experience reveals is the pointlessness of searching for originality since all stories are implicated in other stories and all selves in other selves. As for the prince, the last word he dictates to the scribe is "nothing," after which the scribe sees his master falling into an everlasting silence, implying that death is the only option for someone left with no stories to tell. Here, we can draw a connection to the legendary Sheherzade. Sheherzade had to prolong her stories in order to survive the whimsical ruler' s sword, ready to sever her head the moment she ran out of her fictional energies. Sheherzade could stretch out her stories until the king died and spare her and many other young maidens like her, the awful fate. For the prince who had run out of stories, death was the only choice before him.

The Architectonics of Black The novel concludes with a dark note. The police investigations into Celiil's murder prove inconclusive. There are a lot of rumours and wild speculations about the identity of the murderer. Once a group of university students come forward and confess to the murder, but upon questioning their admission proves to be a hoax. On another occasion, a young man claims that Celiil was the actual Deccal (pronounced Dejjal in Turkish) or anti-Christ, and the murderer was none but the Messiah promised in the scriptures. Besides the odd rhyming of the words "Deccal" and "Celiil" and some outlandish claims that the young man made to substantiate his theory this reasoning makes little sense and is treated with contempt. After a delay of several months, the authorities, in order to create the impression that they have finally been able to nab the culprit, round up a sixty-year­ old barber and execute him. According to them, the barber had been the butt of Celiil's scorn in his articles and the murder was committed in retaliation for his sense of injured pride. Pamuk here takes a swipe at the Turkish legal mechanism that has an instinctive knowledge of whom to pick and whom to spare. Indeed, in a country that grants little room for a barber to have a sense of personal pride, the very idea of a barber's injured pride seems ridiculous. As for Galip, he ends up a victim of the traumatic memory. Like Kemal in Museum, albeit to a lesser degree, he fetishizes objects related to

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Ruya like the buttons of her coats and takes to carrying them in his pocket for days. He avoids streets that he used to frequent in her company and scrupulously keeps away from the vicinity of Aliiadin' s shop. He thus becomes the trauma victim who carries within him an "archive of loss" (Boulter, 2). His deep melancholy and the vacuum left by the bereavements make him a spectral presence. At one point he is even mistaken for a ghost. (442) This transformation in the final pages accentuates the "black" motif. In fact, it is this blackness that pervades the plot, and lends the novel its architectonic unity and reinforces its structural coherence. The images used in the novel, such as the bottomless well, the dark airshaft, the static clocks, and the ghostly homes all add to the spectrality and blackness. The chapter titled "Dark Airshaft" illustrates this best. This chapter is presented as an article written by Celal. Though apparently about a pit near the apartment, where the large family has its residence, the clever article develops it as an objective correlative to symbolize the nightmarish fears lurking beneath contemporary existence. It is into the pit that all the tenants in the nearby apartments dump their cast-off things. It is impenetrably dark and forbidding: I thought back to the pit that had once sat next to the building, a bottomless pit that made me shiver at night-and not just me but every girl and boy in the building, and the grown-ups too. It was of mythic proportions, thick with bats, rats, scorpions, and poisonous snakes. It was, I was sure, the same pit Sheikh Galip described in Love and Beauty and Rumi in Mathnawi. Lower a pail into it, and something cut the rope, they told us there was an ogre lurking in the darkest depths, a black ogre as big as our building! Never go anywhere near it children! That's what they would say. Once they tied a rope to the janitor's belt and lowered him into the pit; when he emerged from the black timeless void, his lungs were caked with cigarette tar for all eternity and his eyes were brimming with tears. I already knew that the venomous desert witch who guarded the well could sometimes assume the form of the janitor' s moon-faced wife and that the secret of the pit was buried in the memories of everyone who lived in the apartments. It haunted us all casting shadows over our lives like a secret sin that could not hide in the past forever...One morning when I awoke from a nightmare drenched in the colours of night, my head swirling with faces I couldn't read, I saw that the pit had been covered over. But my nightmare was not ended; the terror had only just begun, or the pit had turned on its axis to rise high into the sky. How to describe this dread fuunel bringing mystery and death to our windows? Some called it the gap. Others called it the dark airshaft. (206)

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Pamuk believes that literature should aim to engage with the core questions concerning human existence and vulnerabilities. (Oe 4 1 3) Black as the above passage illustrates, does exactly this. The dark pit and the airshaft built in its stead act as obj ective correlatives of the unconscious fear haunting human existence. As Lacan puts it, what lurks beneath our stable and coherent exterior is a deep, shapeless and mysterious interior. 7 It is a realm haunted by dark spirits and ogres. The exterior that we project is a flimsy facade that seeks to conceal this turbulent inner realm. Thanks to the inner chaos, we seldom succeed in achieving the desired unity and harmony. Jung uses the telling image of going down the "deep well" in order to achieve the integration of the conscious and unconscious selves. (Jung, 2 1 ) Black literally allegorizes this process. Galip ' s wanderings in search of Ruya/Dream is in fact a search for the ideal self, a self that is very much at odds with his real self and is more in affinity with that of Celal's. But his search ends with the death of his dream! Ruya and ideal! Celal. Pamuk here implies that all search for an idealized self is doomed by its very nature. This has important implications for Turkey. Like Galip, Turkey too is in search of an idealized self, tom as it is between various rival pulls. Through subtle hints, Pamuk suggests the need to be accommodative to these various strands that together constitute the fabric of the nation. For him, insularity and inwardness would only lead to further degradation and corrosion. The Japanese fish in Vasif s aquarium, that have completely degenerated through decades of inbreeding suggests this, just as the pit-the dim abode of snakes and ogres - in the above passage does. The large family in which cousins and half-siblings fall in love with each other and marry has the same semiotic resonance. For Pamuk, the way out of the blackness lies in the readiness to be receptive and accommodative to diverse strands and currents, both at the personal and the national level. It is in this accommodative spirit that Pamuk finds at least a partial answer to the central ontological question that the novel poses, viz. whether anyone can really be himselflherself. Instead of offering formulaic solutions to this question, he problematizes the very notion of a wholly independent ontology. For him, we become what we are through the stories we tell. It is fiction that lends coherence to our memory and history 7

Psychotherapy - Jacques Lacan, The School of Life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50nhOXq7m4w (uploaded on l 01l1 June 201 6.)

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which would otherwise be chaotic and turbulent. In Black, the characters try to be themselves by using the magical power of stories to reclaim their lost selves. This is the reason we have multiple stories within stories in the novel. But these attempts do not often prove successful, and stories offer only temporary ballast: because the characters find that one story invariably leads to another story and one memory into another without any terminus, like the gardens of memory described by Celal. (457) They also find that the stories that they tell are not often their own stories just as they themselves are not often their very "selves." Like Turkey itself these characters discover that they inhabit stories over which they have little control. Like Galip pursuing his dreamlRuya, they end up pursuing imaginary phantoms that always tantalize and mesmerise but manage to slip past them, triggering both emotional trauma and distress. Pamuk offers no panacea to solve the riddle, and Black ends on a rather bleak note. However, Pamuk' s tour de force lies in his ability to fashion a coherent and solid narrative about the utter chaos and anarchy that lurks beneath our lives. This is done through the skilful use of motifs and images. I earlier discussed the color scheme of the novel in which black dominates, but equally important to the overall architectonics are the use of green and blue. These two colors have symbolic associations with Turkey (in fact the word "turquoise" which means greenish blue is itself derived from the word "Turkey"), and Pamuk makes subtle use of them in this national allegory. The novel repeatedly invokes the color green with reference to Celal. It is a green pen that he lends to Galip and which the latter loses during his Bosphorus voyage in the company of Ruya. It is a green pen that Ruya uses to pen her 1 9-word farewell message. Taking a cue from his alter­ ego, Galip too starts using a green pen long before he actually assumes the latter' s mantle. More significant is the invocation of the color green in Celal's assassination scene. According to the press report, the bullet had pierced the pen in his pocket and spilled the green ink on his shirt. As a consequence, there was more green ink on his chest than blood. (446) Pamuk fuses this motif of green with blue to create a color effect that serves to punctuate and accentuate the effect of the all-pervasive blackness that envelops the novel. The color blue, evoked at the beginning of the novel is again evoked towards the end in an identical context. In both these instances, the reference is to Ruya' s blue-checked quilt. The first sentence of the novel reads :

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Chapter Two Ruya was lying face down on the bed, lost to the sweet warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt. (3)

The last few lines that bring the story to its full circle again invoke the quilt and re-enact the spectrality of the text: Today all I have left of Ruya are these words, these bleak black pages. Sometimes, one of the stories related here will come back to me-the executioner's tale, say, or "Ruya and Galip" as Celiil told it to us for the first time on that snowy evening-and it will remind me of another story in which the hero discovers that he can only become himself by first becoming someone else or by losing himself in someone else's stories: and as I dream of putting all these stories together in a single black book, I'll think of another adventure, another love story; and as I wander through the gardens of memory, through gate after gate, I will remember the story of the lover who lost himself in the streets of Istanbul only to become himself, or the story of the man who believed life's meaning and mystery resided in his face, and with each story I embrace, I become all the more enamoured of the task I have set myself-which is not to invent new stories but to set down the tale we have been telling each other for many centuries, to gather them together in the black book whose last scene I am now ready to write. In that final scene, Galip is rushing to meet his deadline, and because Celiil is no longer the talk of the town these days, this colunm will be the last to appear under his name. Toward, morning, beset by painful memories of Ruya, I rise from my desk and look down on the dark streets of Istanbul. Together we think of Ruya and look out onto the dark streets of Istanbul; together we go to bed to drift between sleep and wakefulness, and whenever I see some sign of Ruya on the blue-checked quilt, we are both plunged into misery and surprised back into life. Because nothing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation. (46 1 ) [emphases added]

With an oxymoronic twist, we might say these lines concretize the spectrality of The Black Book. In the beginning, it was the real-life Ruya who was lying under the quilt. In the end, it is her phantom that stares out at the streets of Istanbul. And the sentence describing "we" looking down on Istanbul replicates itself in successive lines accentuating the phantasmal effect. In fact, this passage, awash as it is with dark images, asserts and reasserts the spectrality of the very narrative. The reference to the blue checked quilt in the penultimate line takes us back to the first line of the novel and acts as a firm quilting point that lends coherence to the well­ structured narrative which articulates the incoherence and confusion haunting the human condition.

CHAPTER THREE THE RED-SOAKED WORLD OF DESIRE

My Name is Red portrays a rainbow-streaked world of love and dalliance punctuated by death and murder. All the traditional symbolism associated with red, like love, violence, sensuality, and death is significant to the choreography of the plot. The setting is 16th Century Istanbul. Like Black, the mystery, romance, and sensual delights of the city spice up the narrative. But while the preoccupation of Black is with the dark inner labyrinths of the mind, Red has a sunnier aspect. Like Black and Life, this novel enacts a quest motif: but, it is not the quest for an elusive angel or a missing wife. Befitting a detective story, it is a search for the perpetrator of a horrendous murder, and in keeping with the requirements of the geure, his identity is withheld till the end. The novel, narrated from multiple points of view, opens with the account of the slain man. In a solemn voice, ringing with bitterness against the murderer, and laced with the hope of encountering the enchanted brides of paradise called houris, he narrates how he has been brntally murdered and dumped in the well. The slain man's peroration throws light on the major themes of the novel, like death, time, and the conflict between art and religion. Not unlike the other fifty-odd monologues that make up the novel, the dead man's speech is poetic and replete with images of the paradise he wishes to enter. This penchant for describing gory events like death and murder with lyrical detachment is maintained throughout. Unlike other major characters, who make multiple appearances, this is the only instance the slain Elegant gets to narrate his experience. Befitting the plot of a detective novel and Pamuk's strategy of playing a genial cat and mouse game with the reader, the identity of the murderer is partially revealed and partially concealed. The murderer's own monologue reveals that he is a miniaturist working under Enishte Effendi on a proj ect commissioned by the Sultan to produce a volume of illustrations, meant to coincide with the thousandth anniversary of Islam.

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The tenor of the murderer' s speech, despite his contrary protestations, is of an anguished soul. He feels like everyone on the streets staring at him suspiciously, although he is sure that no one has witnessed him murdering the gilder. In a self-justificatory manner, he concludes that "everyone with a gleam of cleverness in his eye" is a potential assassin. The only reason why they haven't killed anyone is they didn't get the "opportunity to" do so. Though he claims that he can "forget" the fact of himself being a murderer, he contradicts himself by saying how it takes time to get "used" to it. ( 1 8-20) He has been no willing assassin either, and it is only a moment' s impulsiveness that results in him murdering his childhood companion. But, the murder has deeper underpinnings related to the main theme. The assassination follows a dispute over whether or not the vocation of miniaturists is one becoming a pious Muslim. According to conservative Islamic scholars, the depiction of living things in all forms has been proscribed and hence amounts to sacrilege. The novel makes repeated references to the "thick-skulled" priest from Erzurnm whose fanatical followers have been unleashing a string of attacks against miniaturists who dare to paint animals and humans. Elegant Effendi has lately come under their sway and started openly decrying the miniaturists. The quarrel over this issue, between the assassin and Elegant, leads to the murder. After committing the crime, the assassin takes to wandering through Istanbul. Since he cannot stand his own street, he walks to another and then to the next and thus interminably. These anguished walks that go on for days remind us of Galip ' s wanderings through the city. While Galip is in search of his missing wife, the assassin's attempt is to hide himself away even from his own accusing conscience. This kind of anguished wandering is a hallmark of Pamuk's characters. A kind of restlessness spurs them to be ceaselessly on the move: it is so with Osman, Galip, Kemal, and Mevlut. The walks through the innards of Istanbul become for them a quest for self. The photographic accounts of the city that Pamuk provides while describing these wanderings make him the true urban poet and pastoralist. The murderer' s initial monologue sets the tone. The story of Husrev and Shirin, by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami, which acts as the frame for the novel is introduced in the course of this "dramatic monologue. ,,8 Instead of telling the story as narrated by Nizami, Pamuk' s 8 Incidentally, it i s worth noting that each of the various monologues, that together constitute the novel My Name is Red, can be considered as a series of dramatic

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assassin has recourse to the version by the "master o f masters" and the "patron saint of all miniatnrists," Bihzad. You realize, in fact, that I'm explaining all these things because they relate to my predicament. But if I were to divulge even one detail related to the killing itself, you'd figure it all out and this would relieve me from being a nameless, faceless murderer roaming among you like an apparition and relegate me to the status of an ordinary, confessed criminal who has given himself up, soon to pay for his crime with his head. Give me the license not to dwell on every single detail, allow me to keep some clues to myself: Try to discover who lam from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief.. . .. .I happened across this masterpiece [Bihzad's painting] which also nicely pertains to my situation because it's a depiction of murder, among the pages of a flawless ninety-year-old book of the Herat School. It emerged from the library of a Persian prince killed in a merciless battle of succession and recounts the story of Husrev and Shirin. You, of course, know the fate of Husrev and Shirin. I refer to Nizami' s version, not Firdusi's. The two lovers finally marry after a host of trials and tribulation; however, the young and diabolical Shiruye, Husrev's son by his previous wife, won't give them any peace. The Prince has his eye not only on his father's throne but also his father's young wife, Shirin. Shiruye, of whom Nizami writes, "His breath had the stench of a lion's mouth," by hook or crook imprisons his father and succeeds to the throne. One night, entering the bedchamber of his father and Shirin, he feels his way in the dark and on fmding the pair in bed, stabs his father in the chest with his dagger. Thus the father's blood flows till dawn and he slowly dies in the bed that he shares with the beautiful Shirin, who remains sleeping peacefully beside him. This picture by the great master Bihzad, as much as the tale itself, addresses a grave fear I've carried within me for years. The horror of waking in the black of the night to realize there's a stranger making faint sounds as he creeps about the blackness of the room! . . . The indifference of the painting' s beauty and of the world to your death, the fact of your being totally alone in death despite the presence of your wife, this is the inescapable meaning that strikes you. (20-2 1 )

monologues. They all conform to the three important preconditions o f the geme, i.e. a) they are all spoken by a single character; b) the delivery is dramatic and made at crucial moments in their lives; c) the presence of a listener who does not get to speak is always presumed.

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This passage, illustrative as it is of the elemental chemistry of Pamuk' s fiction through its evocation o f spectrality, color images and suspense, brings into relief some of the major concerus of the novel viz. love, its youthful blindness, j ealousy, mutual rivalry and the essential loneliness of the human condition. The assassin drops a few hints and describes things he witnesses during his walk. These random clues become significant as the plot evolves. Pamuk is too consummate an artist to leave any loose ends hanging around, and like a carpet designer weaves all threads into an intricate patteru and harmony. For example, in chapter three we get to hear from a dog in the first person; to be sure, it is not a dog having its say; but the picture of a dog speaking through a story teller, a common feature in the coffee houses of Istanbul in those times. This monologue seems to have little connection with the rest of the sequence, but in chapter four where the murderer addresses us for the first time, he mentions seeing this picture hanging in the coffee house during his wanderings. The most significant hint that the novelist drops in the initial section is about the picture of a horse drawn by the murderer. It is a miniature produced under Enishte' s instruction. It is this picture that proves crucial later in identifying the murderer. This strategy of dropping occasional clues places heavy demands on the reader. Unless read with an attentive mind, one risks missing out on significant details thrown around with deceptive randomness. In the second chapter, the author introduces Black, the protagonist. The name is significant. Like other characters, known as Stork, Olive and Butterfly, this is a nickname. It was customary in those days to call miniaturists by such names. By making "Black" the protagonist of the novel which uses "red" as the over-riding motif, the novelist-cum-architect effects a balancing feat contributing to the visual synergy of the fictional world. The name Black also conjures up an aura of spectrality, a crucial ingredient for Pamuk, strongly evoked in the first chapter itself through the monologue of the murdered gilder. Black is back in Istanbul after an absence of twelve years. Upon entering the city he first goes to the cemetery, a point that accentuates the spectral motif. He pauses by his mother's grave and prays for her soul while contemplating a broken earthen pitcher lying around. As Black puts it, he has nothing to do in his city of birth other than wait for death. We soon learu this to be untrue. For love seems to be upmost in his mind. This love dates to his early childhood days when he is a frequent guest at his

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Uncle Enishte Effendi' s house. There he falls madly in love with his young cousin Shekure. In Pamuk' s fictional universe, love between cousins is a recurring theme. But his uncle refuses to support the match. He forbids Black from entering the house. The crestfallen young man leaves Istanbul and joins the army, spending his time fighting wars and wandering around the world. But he is unable to overcome the thought of Shekure, who has in the meantime married and given birth to two sons. Black's return coincides with a significant event. Shekure' s husband has been missing for years. As a soldier, he participates in the war with Safavids and does not return. No one knows whether he is alive or dead. His presence as "a huge absence" looms large and adds further skeins to the overarching spectrality. The "missing husband" is a glimmer of hope for Black. He goes to Enishte' s house. Enishte, who once opposed Black, is now a changed and mellowed man. Black's boyish innocence and charm make him favourably disposed towards his wife's nephew. But Shekure 's response is dubious. Unlike Black, Innocence and Silent, the female counterparts of Red's sixteenth-century setting occupy an enclosed space, away from the male arena. Hence Shekure ' s communication with Black is furtive, and from within the confines of her circumscribed inner space. She doesn't show up during Black' s visit, but sends him a letter, delivered by hand by Esther, the Jewish clothier. The letter warns him of nursing any hope of reviving their romance. Along with the letter she returns him the old painting in which a juvenile Black has depicted the scene of Husrev paying addresses to Shirin. In his own version, Black has replaced Husrev with himself and Shirin with Shekure. The fact that Shekure has treasured the painting so long contradicts the message she conveys through the letter. Her next act reaffirms this contradictory signal. Upon sensing that Black is departing, she decks herself up in purple costumes and posts herself in front of the back window. This is one of the numerous instances in which the color "red" (in this instance purple which is a mix of blue and red) comes to prominence. Her fleeting profile framed against the moon-splattered window conjures up the image of Shirin in Black' s mind. For Shevket, her son, the choice of a "fine purple blouse" at such an odd hour makes little sense. In his childish innocence, he quizzes his mom about her sartorial choice. (50) Through her dress, Shekure affirms that the old love is still aflame in her heart. The story progresses through a second murder where, again, the

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"red" symbolism dominates. The assassin is the same miniaturist who killed the gilder and his victim is Enishte Effendi, Shekure' s father. The crime has to do with the same ideological issues, i.e. the conflicting notions of art in Islam and the West. Enishte Effendi has been to Europe and is intent on introducing Western methods of art into Turkey. The murderer considers this to be a travesty of Islam. Western artists sign their paintings and use the perspectival method. By doing so, they claim for themselves a near-divine status as creators. Islamic art, on the other hand, depicts obj ects according to their importance in Allah's eyes. Enishte Effendi, in his blind zeal to introduce Western style, forces all the miniaturists to ape the Venetian masters, the assassin reasons. So he liquidates him to rid the Muslim world of the pernicious influence of the West. This reasoning reveals the confusion of the assassin, caught between his passion for art and loyalty to religion. His earlier murder is motivated by his passion to protect art from fanatics who consider it to be a devilish vocation and his second one by the opposite desire to protect Islamic tradition from Western incursions. There is enough evidence to suggest that this time over, the murder is premeditated and not something done on the spur of the moment. The murderer drops by at Enishte Effendi's residence when he is alone in the study. He confronts him about incorporating Frankish methods in Islamic art. Though Enishte recognizes his murderous intent and tries to win him over through blandishment, the man remains stubborn. Enishte' s head is crnshed to pulp by using a red inkpot, the ink splatters around adding to the goriness of the scene. The red from the inkpot and the red of the velvet cushion upon which Enishte sits merge with each other accentuating the reddish effect. The association of red with death and violence configured in this scene is brought to greater relief in a subsequent chapter where "red" speaks in the first person in a self-important vein. In it, the color traces his genealogy to ancient Hindustan and speaks about "his" indispensability to artists and lovers. Whether or not this oration succeeds in establishing his indispensability to lovers and artists, it serves to firmly anchor the color motif upon which the plot revolves: I appeared in Ghazni when Book of Kings poet Firdusi completed the final line of a quatrain with the most intricate of rhymes ! was there on the quiver of Book ofKings hero Rustem when he travelled far and wide in pursuit of his missing steed; I became the blood that spewed forth when he cut the notorious ogre in half with his wondrous sword; and I was in the folds of the quilt upon which he made furious love with the beautiful . ..

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daughter of the king who'd received him as a guest. Verily and truly, I've been everywhere and am everywhere. I emerged as Tur traitorously decapitated his brother Iraj ; as legendary armies, spectacular as a dream, clashed on the steppes . . .1 love engaging in scenes of war where blood blooms like poppies; appearing on the caftan of the most proficient of bards listening to the music on a countryside outing as pretty boys and poets partake of wine; I love illuminating the wings of angel, the lips of maidens, the death wounds of corpses and severed heads bespeckled with blood. (224-25)

This passage is a lavish exercise in craft that again makes use of Pamuk' s artistic arsenal of visuality, spectrality and other kaleidoscopic catoptrics. Pamuk' s genius can be seen in the way he balances this scene with its hyper color effects with a mellower scene depicting Shekure picking her way home through a snow-drenched courtyard after her rendezvous with Black. By juxtaposing and alternating red with white the author achieves wonderful chromatic effects. As it happens in Pamuk' s novels at all crncial moments, dogs are heard barking on the streets as the murderer goes about smashing Enishte ' s skull. Earlier too there were dog barks punctuating the silence of the evening as the miniaturist murderer "applies his last touches" to Elegant Effendi's still breathing body. The "dogs" are a familiar device that Pamuk uses to suggest the haunting quality of his scenes. This becomes more pronounced in Strangeness where the dogs are portrayed as familiar yet threatening denizens of all the dark alleys and graveyards of Istanbul. However, in the murder scene of Enishte, the spectrality is not only provided by the dogs barking in the distance. The murder coincides with a love-scene being played against a ghostly scene right beside Enishte 's house. In the abandoned house of the hanged Jewess, Black meets Shekure as appointed. They make love and talk about their imminent marriage. The love-death connection, a dominant theme in the novel as illustrated in the Husrev-Shirin story, is amplified here. The murder, nevertheless, proves a blessing in disguise for the aspiring couple. Through a series of adroit steps, Black manages to get Shekure certified a widow. By liberally doling out money he manages to get a priest to officiate at the ceremony. Making the greedy man believe/pretending to believe the slain Enishte to be still alive, he gets his way through the solemnization by installing the dead man's well-dressed body as that of a fatally ailing father, eager to palm off his widowed daughter, before breathing his last. This reads like a scene straight from Arabian Nights, but Pamuk' s ingenuity succeeds in painting the scene with such minute detail as to make the incredible appear

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realistic. The greed of the priest, who quickly falls prey to the allure of money, recalls the assertion made by the Venetian silver coin in an earlier chapter. According to the coin, the "unfortunate world revolved around" him and not around God as some believe. By portraying religious men themselves as not immune to the temptations of money, the surrealistic scene cocks a snook at the corrupt religious establishment. The presence of an unburied body during the wedding feast and procession, and a dead man acting as the guardian at the solemnization, contribute to the heightening of the spectral motif. The novel comes full circle with the third murder scene. By this time the murderer' s identity does not remain a secret. He is identified as Olive, the miniaturist renowned for his exceptional gifts and craftsmanship. His nickname Olive is in a sense deceptive, but it also yields an early clue to discerning readers. Olive has suggestive associations with peace and non-violence. By casting Olive as the murderer, Pamuk displays his usual acrobatic skills at manipulating symbols. The hunt for the murderer takes days. All of the three famed miniaturists-Olive, Stork and Butterfly-are suspected. And wagging tongues do not spare Black either. The hasty marriage in the deceased man's house provides grist to the rumour mills. Meanwhile, something else proves decisive: the picture of a horse is found on the slain Elegant Effanti' s body. It is determined that the author of the painting has to be the murderer. With the help of the illustrious painter Master Osman, it is determined that the drawing has been done by Olive. This process takes days and leads Black through several archives in the Ottoman palaces. It has to be suspected that Master Osman uses the occasion as a pretext to gain access to the private royal archives, because Olive's distinct style is something that he could have identified without much difficulty. Before his murder, the late Enishte says he can recognize a horse done by Olive from among a hundred done by mediocre artists. Two crucial motifs are brought into relief during these searches: a) The spectral motif that has been integral to the plot gains an added dimension here. As mentioned by a host of theorists including Derrida, the archive has an intimate connection with the spectral. (Boulter, 20 1 1) In the description of the long and tiring searches in the archives-which contains several digressions on the nature of art and the vocation of artists-the spectral element predominates. Black (as stated earlier, the character' s name itself evokes the spectral) carries out these searches with Master

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Osman, an elderly spectral figure. During the search, the Master deliberately blinds himself in imitation of the great miniaturist Master Bihzad. For Pamuk, as we observed earlier, all men are copies of some other men and all books the copies of some other books and all actions the copies of other actions. (BB 244) Master Osman, by imitating the great Persian master reinforces this and "fleshes out" the spectral motif. b) The horse symbol used here is an equally significant anchoring motif. The horse and its diverse associations are significant to the plot. 1) The horse is considered a phallic symbol in diverse cultures and Freud associates it with the father figure in the famous case involving little Hans. 2) It is also associated with death and war. The novel evokes all these associations. While the symbol is invoked in the love scenes involving Husrev and Shirin, and Black and Shekure, it finds its fullest expression in the chapter "I am a Horse." In it, the association of the horse with sex, war, and passion are made "explicit," in the real sense of the term: . . . I've been galloping for centuries; I've passed over plains, fought in battles, carried off the melancholy daughters of Shahs to be wed; I've galloped tirelessly page by page from story to history, from history to legend and from book to book; I've appeared in countless stories, fables, books and battles; I've accompanied invincible heroes, legendary lovers and fantastic armies; I've galloped from campaign to campaign with our victorious Sultans. . . (262-3)

The horse's self-congratulatory peroration hits its climactic point while describing a scene involving a Frankish King. The king once gazed upon the painting showing a dazzling maiden and an equally dazzling stallion. He was so enthralled by the painting that for a moment he was unsure whether he should first be mounting the stallion or the maiden. In his excitement he forgets that he is not gazing at a real horse and maiden but a painting: . . .pondering whether he should take the maiden as his wife, his stallion, suddenly aroused, attempted to mount the attractive mare in the painting, and the horse grooms were hard pressed to bring the ferocious animal under control before he destroyed the picture and its frame with his huge member. (263)

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The diverse sexual associations of the horse symbol are clear in this passage wherein the author/translator attempts a deft play on the multiple meanings of the words "maiden" and "stallion. ,,9 Following Master Osman's verdict that the murderer has to be Olive, a manhunt is launched to apprehend him. In the meantime, Olive has been making plans. He has stashed away enough money to travel to Hindustan where the Mughal emperor Akbar is splurging money and blandishments on talented miniaturists. Upon being cornered by Black and his companions at his hiding place, in a ghostly dervish lodge, Olive puts up a fight; snatches Black' s sword and strikes him in the shoulder, fatally wounding him in the process. However, he is thwarted in his plans to leave the country. On his way to the harbour, he succumbs to the temptation of having a last look at the workshop where he has spent a good part of his life. There he is confronted by Hasan, brother of Shekure' s missing husband and a rival of Black in love, who mistakes him to be an accomplice of Black. Hasan murders him with a "red" sword. The words spoken by Olive in death are reminiscent of the earlier murder scenes of Elegant and Enishte. Shekure' s summation constitutes the last chapter: The wound Black receives in the encounter with Olive renders him permanently disabled. But from a distance, he is still regarded as a handsome man, though his shoulders lose their symmetry and he walks with a pronounced imbalance. Shekure ' s children never warm up to Black. There is something fiercely Oedipal in their rej ection of this surrogate father figure who tries to impose himself upon them. Before the marriage, Orhan makes it clear to his mom that he no longer needs a father. He even promises to marry her once he grows up. ( 1 06) Couched beneath this childish expression are the not so innocent Oedipal leanings, which is one of the muted sub-themes of the story. Even after marriage, Shekure continues to sleep beside her children at night. She rightly regards it as better than sleeping with a melancholy husband. However, she makes love with Black every day, telling her intrusive children that their stepfather's wounds need to be salved. Pamuk' s deft use of the metaphors of horse, ship, quill, inkpot, wound and 9 The word 'maiden' refers both to an unmarried woman as well as to a horse yet to win a race. The word ' stallion' refers to a male horse as well as a man with great sexual prowess. Its association with the phallus is evident in the two literary references below.

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salve in this section serves to bind together the various images and metaphors in the novel. This is reminiscent of RUya' s blue quilt which Pamuk uses to sew up the narrative fabric of Black. There is also a subtle inversion of the traditional dialectic involving male and female here. Traditionally the female has been associated with the wound, the lack and the absence of agency; Pamuk, through a sleight of hand, inverts this and equates man with the wound and invests woman with agency and energy. This privileging of the female over the male is a signature feature of Pamuk as we discuss in greater detail in the chapter "The Poet of Love." During love making it is Shekure who plays the role of the subject and Black that of the object. At the height of love-making they feel Like a solemn ship that gains speed as its sails swell with wind, our gradually quickening lovemaking took us boldly into unfamiliar seas. I could tell by the way he was able to navigate these waters, even on his deathbed, that Black had plied these seas many times before with who knows what mauner of indecent women. . . A t the peak o f pleasure, he cried out like the legendary heroes cut clear in half with a single stroke of the sword in fabled pictures that immortalized the clash of Persian and Turanian armies; the fact that this cry could be heard throughout the neighbourhood frightened me. Like a genuine miniaturist at the moment of great inspiration, holding his reed under the direct guidance of Allah, yet still able to take into consideration the form and composition of the entire page, Black continued to direct our place in the world from a corner of his mind even through his highest excitement... (498)

The images of the phallus and the miniaturists' reed merge here with the suggestion of the battle horse concatenating brilliant visual and auditory effects. The neighing of the horses in the battle and Black's orgasmic cry merge to create a cacophonous and riotous canvas invoking the ancient connections between war and sex. The horse-phallus and reed connection gets accentuated relief in the following references: I can't say I completely understood why Persian poets, who for centuries had likened the male tool to a reed pen, also compared the mouths of us women to inkwells, or what lay behind such comparisons whose origins had been forgotten through rote repetition-was it the smallness of the mouth? The arcane silence of the inkwell? Was it that God himself was an illuminator? Love, however, must be understood, not through the logic of a

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Chapter Three woman like me who continually racks her brain to protect herself, but through its illogic . . . . .. However deprived and destitute I felt at not being able to pass down the streets of Istanbul mounted tall on an exceptionally beautiful horse, surrounded by slaves, lady servants and attendants-what Esther always thought I deserved-I also occasionally longed for a brave and spirited husband who held his head high and looked at the world with a sense of victory. (497-99)

The images of the tall horse and a husband who holds his head high buttress each other; but Shekure is deprived of both. Nevertheless, she draws solace from the fact that her husband can well be reined in as he is one "beneath" her. (499) The word "beneath" is a freighted one, given the neighbourhood gossip that a woman like Shekure can only marry people "beneath" her. In other words, Shekure always wants to be the rider and never the mare. In her marriage with Black, that is the role she plays from the beginning. With the last chapter, the clock has come full circle and Black is dead. His death happens near a well after twenty-six years of happy conjugal life. The death against the well in the background complements the murder in the first chapter staged beside another well. Once again like the weaver, Pamuk interlaces and intercuts the various threads and plaits of his narrative fabric. The conjugation of the well with the inkwell in the chapter connects it with the murder of Enishte Effendi, in which the murderer uses an inkwell as his weapon to bludgeon the victim. The final chapter also sheds light on the sudden twilight of a fascinating era in the Ottoman Empire, thus synchronizing the close of the novel with the death of the protagonist, as well as the passing of an epoch. It happens during the reign of Sultan Ahmed. One night, the Sultan has a vision of the prophet who warns him about the dangers of imitating the infidels and creating statues of the living. The sultan wakes up immediately and swoops down on the clock installed in his private garden. He destroys the statues surrounding it and with his mace, smashes the clock which is a gift from Queen Elizabeth of England. It is an object of great marvel and admiration in Istanbul but the Sultan sees it as a symbol of Western superiority that needs to be erased. The Sultan takes little interest in art, and Enishte ' s book is left unfinished. He instead commissions his calligraphers to compose a book titled "The Quintessence of Histories" and forbids illustrating it. This

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draws to a close the era o f art, colors and miniaturists. Black i s lucky not to survive too long into this age of blankness sans couleur. Shekure' s last wish, like her father's book, remains unfulfilled. Her lifelong wish has been to see her youthful portrait done. Now, as age wreaks havoc on her body, and as a zealous Sultan turns his back on the miniaturists, she knows her wish would remain unfulfilled. In order to immortalize her indescribable beauty she narrates her story to her younger son Orhan [we can't miss the catch in the choice of the name], but forewarns readers that the story should not be taken at its face value, for Orhan is prone to lies and exaggerations, his only goal being the creation of a delightful and convincing story. Red thus comes to a neat end heralding the demise not only of its protagonist but also of an era that marked a climactic point in the history of the Ottomans. By pointing to the uureliability of the narrator, the novelist gives a subtle postmodern twist to the final chapter. In postmodern logic, history is a series of competing narratives, none more authentic than the other and all interchangeable with fiction. (Sardar, 2003, 1 93) What Orhan, the narrator (and by extension Orhan Pamuk, the author) does is give us a narrative which is too beguiling to be true but at the same time too convincing to be untrne. Here lies the merit of Red not merely as a work of imagination but as a masterly work of art which, like the paintings of the ancient miniaturists, is attentive even to the minutest details of their subj ects' habits and habiliments. Thus Sheknre' s despair at not having her portrait done by any of the master miniaturists is more than compensated by Pamuk, the master fabulist of our times.

The Architectonics Our above discussion shows the architectonic strategies of Pamuk that rely on strong color motifs and symbols-like wells and horses-for the construction of the narrative unity. The strategy is not unlike the one he uses in Black. Like other works in his oeuvre, Istanbul is an anchoring presence in the narrative. Befitting the medieval settings, the city is peopled by djinns, devils and other supernatural creatures drawn from folklore and the popular imagination. The novel is also multi-layered and contains a plethora of intertextual echoes and allusions to art and history. However, it seems less omnivorous in this regard compared with Black, which plunders Oriental and Occidental intellectual and artistic archives to build its own echo-chamber of artistic polyphony where Ibn' Arabi, Rumi, Dante, Proust, Dostoyevsky and Freud encounter each other.

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Like other Pamuk novels, the conflict between East and West forms one of the crucial propellers of the plot. It is this conflict that leads to the two murders and catalyzes the debate on the place of art in an avowedly Islamic society. The tension involving religious and moral sanctions and the innate human instinct to breach and transgress such limits provide the impetus for the development of the story that re-enacts the primordial conflict between conformity and defiance. Nevertheless, what the novel stresses is the complementarity of polarities and their mutual dependence. The 2: 15 Quranic verse, stating that "East and the West" belongs to Allah, used as an epigraph, emphasizes this complementarity. The same principle is visible in the way the novel treats the question of male-female opposition. Despite the conflictual nature, the novel stresses the importance of mutual dependence through the examples of Black and Shekure. What they do in effect is act as salves to each other's wounds, the literal wound in the case of Black and the emotional one in the case of Shekure, who loses her husband at a young age. Pamuk' s ability as a craftsman lies in his ability to blend this message into the texture of art without striking a homilizing posture.

CHAPTER FOUR THE POET OF LOVE

I can't live without being passionately in love with someone or something beautiful. -Necip in Snow

Love, in all its vanetIes and with all its vagaries, is a pulsating presence in Pamuk' s fiction. It is one of the central themes of all his novels, except The White Castle. lo It is the presence of love in its rich oriental fragrance and evocativeness that lends his works their poetic chann and cadence. For his characters, who engage themselves in deep cogitations concerning the mysteries of life, death, virtue, evil and the essence of existence, love is the most indispensable element of self­ fulfilment. His characters testify to the power of love as a metaphysical presence whose gratification goes beyond mere physical consummation. However, despite the awareness of its magical power, they are made to grapple with the stark realization of its elusiveness both as an embodied and disembodied presence. It is this awareness that prompts his characters like Osman, Galip, and Ka to embark upon endless pilgrimages in their quest for love. For them, it defines the essence of self-realization. But the path towards the goal, they discover, is neither smooth nor free of danger; any wrong tum on their path would mean total despair and doom. Many of his lovers meet with dangerous and untimely deaths, underlining the dangerous nature of the lover's mission. Hence his lovers are prone to perennial fear and anxiety. In a sense, this is similar to the anxiety displayed by Eliot' s Pmfrock, who finds himself in a world overwhelmed by the mins and fossils of past experiences and frustrated at his own lack of the necessary temerity to bring things to a head. Unlike Pmfrock, however, Pamuk' s characters do not doubt their virility, nor do they dread the total breakdown and fragmentation of the world they inhabit. This is because, unlike Eliot's London, Pamuk' s Istanbul inhabits a time-zone which still retains a 10

This statement applies only to his novels available in English.

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medieval aura with its moorings in religion and tradition. But like Prufrock himself, they seem to dread the other sex as something mysterious and forbidding, while at the same time being both alluring and mesmerising: in short, as the dark-continent described by Freud. Hence, Pamuk' s heroes, unlike his heroines, strike us as less invincible, and more vulnerable to the vagaries of fate. While heroines like Shekure, Fusun and Janan are capable of using love and physical beauty as powerful weapons in their hands; their male counterparts are psychosomatically incapacitated by its overwhelming demands. Like the heroines of Arabian stories, his heroines radiate a rare and at times dangerous energy (e.g. Jenan in Life and Fusun in Museum). The heroes, who fall in their magnetic radiance, feel themselves to be at the mercy of their beloved. The traditional subj ect­ male/ object-female position is here rendered precarious, and women are invested with agency.

Female Superiority and Male Gullibility Osman's case is exemplary. He finds himself very much under the spell of Janan. He constantly worries whether she would slip through his fingers and go her own way. In her absence, he acts like a crazed immature boy. The female in Pamuk' s novels is not merely a presence that tickles and titillates male desires and fancies, but is also a repository of mysterious powers capable of ensnaring the gullible male. The departure of both Ruya and Janan leaves their partners deep in sorrow and misery. Their absence makes them turu their attention to obj ects used and touched by them; they fetishize such objects. Osman leaves Janan, who is running a high temperature, at Dr Fine' s house. Upon his return he finds she has left the place, leaving him little clues. He goes to the room where Janan was recuperating and in a fit of rage squashes a mosquito buzzing around. In a quick swipe he dispatches it. When its blood smears his palms, he feels overwhelmed, thinking it would be Janan's blood. (Life 232) This instinct to fetishize things connected to their sweethearts reaches its apogee in Museum, which we discuss later. Following Janan's disappearance, Osman feels utterly hopeless; he continues looking for her for years until he learns that she has married a doctor from Samsun and emigrated with him to Germany. Once he learns of her marriage, he feels a sudden fog to have descended upon his whole being. (240) In Black, Galip ' s trails and travails in pursuit of Ruya have a similar tenor. The word "Galip" (pronounced Galib in Turkish and Arabic) literally means victor or conqueror. But once his wife forsakes him, leaving behind

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only a slip announcing her departure, Galip turns into a helpless and frnstrated man who is anything but a victor. He wanders in a semi­ somnambulistic state around Istanbul looking for his wife in whose absence he feels grossly incomplete and inadequate. As his cousin and lover since childhood, he has idealized Ruya. If the word "Galip" means victor, "Ruya" means "dream." For Galip, the marriage with Ruya after a period of anxious waiting and crises is a conquest and victory of sorts. But Ruya' s disappearance one fine dawn means the sudden metamorphosis of the dream into a nightmare. In Galip ' s mind, her departure creates a void, like the crater caused by a meteorite. Like Janan, Ruya is charming, mysterious and elusive. It is this mystery, elusiveness, and ethereality embodied by Ruya and Janan that lend them the aura of Shakespeare' s fatal Cleopatra minus the imperial trappings and excessive carnality. In this gender equation, men fare as perfect foils for the superiorly endowed women who behave with authority, in the perfect knowledge that they have the unfair sex within their dragnet. This superiority that women enjoy over men is also evident in Snow, whose locale is the snow-bound border town of Kars. Like Osman and Galip, Ka the protagonist of Snow is a pilgrim in search of love. The secret intention of his journey to Kars, from Frankfurt, where he has established himself as a poet and writer, is to meet Ipek his childhood sweetheart. Upon learning of Ipek' s recent divorce, his hopes of a life with her are rekindled. Like other heroes of Pamuk' s, Ka feels insubstantial and lacking in the absence of his beloved' s soothing presence. When Ipek accepts his proposal, he feels as if a new world of sun and rainbows has replaced the old, stale world of monotony and meaninglessness. Like Black, he feels love to be the faculty that makes the "invisible visible." (Red 139) As it happens in the case of the Osman-Janan and Galip-Ruya couples, it is Ipek who demonstrates greater strength and presence of mind in her relations with Ka. The woman as the embodiment of strength and determination is one of the main motifs of Snow. It is they who provide the much-needed emotional and psychological ballast for the male characters. This receives an ampler treatment in the equation involving Ipek's sister Kadife and her male friends Necip and Fazil. They both lack the boldness to announce their love for her and content themselves with admiring her from a distance. They write stories about her and pen letters to her but lack the courage to face her. Her presence sends a chill down their spines and renders them speechless. In Blakean terms, the men in these novels represent "innocence" and women the opposite pole of "experience."

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Compared with Kadife, Necip and Fazil lack experience and matnrity. Samiha' s audacious statement that "All boys are idiots" (Strangeness 142) reflects this overwhelming sentiment in Pamuk. Belbo' s statement, in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum describing a thirteen-year-old girl as "already a woman" and boy of the same age as a "snot-nose kid" has a strange resonance in this context (330). The helplessness and haplessness of men in the absence of women and the resourcefulness of women both in the absence and presence of men form contrasting motifs in this matrix.

Love's Labour Recovered Though Museum makes use of slightly different templates in narrating the love involving people of two different social classes, the advantage in the sexual dynamics is still in the hands of the female. In fact, the "innocence" in the title itself refers to the innocence of male pitted against an adverse fate, and an intransigent fiancee. This is a novel that has its focus entirely on love to the exclusion of other major themes and hence hardly bears comparison with works like Red or Black or Snow in thematic density or textnral complexity. However, the ability to penetrate deep into the psychic geography of the characters, together with the rich poetic descriptions and mellow style makes the book a rich aesthetic fare. The protagonist Kemal belongs to the aristocratic upper-strata of Istanbul society. This rich and handsome boy is to wed Sibel, a beautiful girl befitting his pedigree. But an unforeseen incident causes things to take an unexpected tnrn. With the intention of buying his fiancee a gift, Kemal visits a boutique in Istanbul to buy a genuine Jenny Colon leather bag. There he meets Fusun, an impoverished distant relative and a childhood friend of his. The encounter has the effect of a sudden downpour upon a freshly furrowed land. Old memories come flooding back to him: memories of Fusun' s visit to his house in the company of her seamstress mother; his mother' s decision to give away his old tricycle to Fusun, and the myriad occasions he sat admiring Fusun' s shapely matchstick thin legs. When he hands the bag to Sibel, she gives it a thorough examination, turning it inside out. She eventnally concludes that it is no genuine Jenny Colon. Turning to Kemal she remarks: "You are so knowledgeable darling, so clever and cultured. . . but you have absolutely no idea how easily women can trick you." ( 14)

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These lines state a general truism about Pamuk' s female characters. Tricking men into obeying their wishes and whims is something they effortlessly manage to do: Janan tricks Osman into reading the book that turns his life upside down and makes him an endless wanderer, searching for something about which he has hardly any clues; Ruya lures Galip into a world filled with uncertainty and unpredictability through easy tricks. In Kemal' s case, Sibel' s words prove prophetic : he is even tricked out of his sanity by Fusun. With the intention of returning the bag and confronting Fusun for having duped him, he goes back to the boutique. The conversation that ensues is unsavoury, but it triggers in him a flood of emotions and memories. He is swept off his feet in that swirling rnsh of emotions. Fusun slowly becomes an obsession for him. Probably it has already been the case when he revisits the boutique to return the fake bag. The fake-original dualism that the author manipulates here is striking. The girl with the fake bag turns out to be Kemal' s genuine love, and the one who warns him about faking women proves to be the one to whom he is forced to fake love in order to satisfy the expectations of his family. On the eve of the engagement, Kemal' s dad Mumtaz gifts him a pair of earrings. Over a few glasses of raki, he divulges the long-held secret concerning the earrings. It happens when he is forty seven: he falls madly in love with a girl working in his company. He is at that time married to Kemal' s mother and is already the father of his two children. But his heart is fully given to the younger girl working under him. Eventually his wife demands him to make up his mind and choose either the one in his heart or the one at his hearth. Family loyalties force Mumtaz to opt for the latter. Depressed and crestfallen, the younger woman leaves the company announcing her marriage to an engineer. Ever since, Mumtaz has spent his life in desolation. The earrings he gifts to his son on his engagement are those he bought as a gift for his beloved: the girl whom he thinks has married an engineer and vamoosed to a distant place. For years he tries to trace her; to patch things up with her, and give the earrings as a token of his abiding affection. At last, when he traces her phone number and gets through to her mother, he learns the trnth: the girl has died of cancer and she had remained unmarried till the end. In her cancer and death, Mumtaz perceives a revenge against him. Despite the trauma that both partners undergo, it is again the woman who strikes us as the stronger character. She deludes Mumtaz into believing that she is living with an engineer and has nothing to do with him, her ex­ lover. Until death, she refuses to bend to his wishes and keeps him dangling in a state of perpetual melancholy and despair. The picture of

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smart and clever girls capable of outwitting men is a looming presence in the Arabian stories, and Pamuk' s stories share the same genetic topography. Kemal' s experience proves equally devastating. Fusun's memory exerts a vice-like grip on him. He can't help meeting her. He begs his mom to give him the keys of the apartment she owns in another part of the city. His mom is apprehensive, but relents. Pressing the key into his hands she gives him a strange look and says: "Be careful." It is the kind of look that she would give him when he was a child. It contained a waming about the failure to "take proper care" of the key. ( 1 9) The symbolism of the key in these lines is unmistakable. The Freudian phallic symbol-i.e. the key-in this instance is not a source of power and authority that can penetrate and open forbidden territories. What it opens is a potential Pandora' s Box that bedevils the one who dares to open it. What lurks inside is the mythical cave of Ali Baba, with the prospect of death and doom. The old apartment that Kemal chooses for his rendezvous with Fusun proves to be what the robbers' cave proves for Qasim. He enters the beguiling world of love but cannot find his way out since he forgets the "open sesame" that unlocks the doors. As his affair with Fusun flourishes, his engagement with Sibel begins to fray. Fusun confesses she is surrendering her virginity to him. As for Kemal, he is surrendering his whole life; a fact of which he is probably unaware at that time. As a mature girl who has had her upbringing in Paris, Sibel tries to wean him off the obsession. But Kemal proves incorrigible. At last she is forced to give up. She gets involved with a friend of Kemal's; marries him and mends her broken life. The superior resilience of Pamuk' s women is again on display. Sibel in this regard occupies her place in the gallery of other heroines like Shekure, Salma (Famk' s divorced wife in Silent House) and Kadife, all of whom are capable of refashioning their lives from the mins of deaths, broken marriages and liaisons. Partly relieved, since he is now free to resume the affair with Fusun, Kemal sets out looking for her in the boutique where she works. To his fmstration, he discovers that she has quit the job. But he doesn't give up. He looks for her in the mn-down part of the city where she lives. But her family has vacated their house and moved to a new place. The eerie parallelism that this voyage has with Kemal' s father's peregrinations in

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search of his young beloved attests to the theme of genetic vulnerability that haunts Pamuk' s characters. Read in Freudian terms, we can say that Fusun represents the pressures of the id upon the ego/superego as represented by Sibel. In this battle it is the ego that finally capitulates. The rundown streets, through which Kemal travels in search of Fusun, form a symbolic contrast to the fashionable parts of Istanbul where Kemal and Sibel have their residence. This too can be considered a spatial metaphor demarcating the sublimated zone of the ego and the regressive terrain of the id. After a series of endless searches, Kemal eventually locates Fusun' s residence. It i s with great anticipation that h e asks his driver to take him there. Many a time, he mentally rehearses the words that he is to speak to her: The world is going to be theirs and it is only a "yes" from her that is needed to open the doors of the eternal paradise. However, this "yes" was neither easier said nor done. At the dinner table in Fusun's house, disillusionment strikes him in the shape of a fat young man. Fusun introduces him as her husband. For Kemal, it is like the seven skies plummeting. Once again it is the scene of the clever woman luring the unsuspecting man into the well-woven snare that we detect here. Fusun, certainly, has her reasons for revenge. It is her inferior economic and social status that made Kemal overlook her as a prospective bride in the first instance. Relations between the two families had been strained for years after the young Fusun participated in a beauty pageant as a child. Kemal's family found this obj ectionable and beneath their status. Fusun's revenge does not end with the humiliation she inflicts on Kemal. She pesters him for money to finance a movie venture of her husband's. The plot of the film is curious: it is about a wealthy man trying to seduce a beautiful girl who happens to be his distant relative. The girl loses her virginity and the man abandons her. The story is about the girl' s attempt to take revenge on the man. Fusun succeeds in eliciting Kemal' s consent to finance the film entitled Broken Lives (385). The import o f this story within the story powerfully resonates with the thematic and structural implications of the play within the play in Shakespeare' s Hamlet. Fusun thus takes sweet revenge upon her rich relative. However, things take a different tum. Before the film proj ect takes off, the relationship between Fusun and her husband Feridun takes one wrong tum after another. Re-igniting Kemal' s hopes, their marriage collapses. He

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again proposes to Fusun. But Fusun chooses to keep him on a tight leash. She sets forth her conditions: it should be a traditional wedding; the engagement party should be held at the same Hilton hotel where Kemal has had his engagement with Sibel. Moreover, Kemal' s mom should personally call on Fusun's mom and seek her daughter's hand in the manner of a traditional Turkish wedding. A helpless Kemal accedes to all the demands. Fusun, however, puts forth one more condition. Before the engagement, she wants Kemal to take her along with her mother on a trip to Europe by road. For Kemal' s mom this is a real humiliation: Going to the house of a seamstress and asking for her daughter' s hand. But it is the way Fusun wants to exact her revenge on her rich relatives. Seeing her son's distraught state, Kemal' s mom gives in. She goes to Fusun' s house; meets her mom. However, she stops short of straightaway asking the latter to give away her daughter as daughter in law. Instead, she puts it in a way that suggests that since things have been so, it will have to be thus. In order to obtain visas for Aunt Nesibe (that is what Kemal calls Fusun' s mother, after the Turkish custom) and Fusun, Kemal resorts to something ingenious. In the application, he prepares documents designating both mother and daughter as highly paid employees in his firm "Satsat." Fusun' s face turns purple as she emerges from the Austrian consulate after the interview. She is livid and tells Kemal that she has decided to drop the planned European tour and call off the marriage. She bursts out: "To be worthy of you I need to see some of Europe, is that it? Well, I've also given up the idea of marrying you." (467) Fusun's rage has to do with the way Kemal manipulated the papers to obtain the visa. She considers designating her as his employee as a further affront from her rich relative. The dynamics of love as something prone to emotional vagaries and vicissitudes comes into relief here. Love seldom enjoys a smooth ride in Pamuk's work. The road is always bumpy and danger-prone. After much coaxing and cajoling, Fusun agrees to go to Europe as planned. They reach Bulgaria by road and stay at a fashionable hotel. The next morning, Fusun quarrels with Kemal and leaves the hotel in a rage. She is dressed in red clothes and as Kemal pursues her in his car, she rnns away from him. After another round of pleading, she finally gives in but setting her own conditions. She wants him to allow her to drive the Chevrolet. She is not an experienced driver and the thought of her driving

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the vehicle in a foreign country alarms Kemal. But h e i s helpless in the face of Fusun' s stubbornness. As Fusun' s rage translate itself into deadly acceleration, the car rams into an old tree. In the far distance, her friend the dog seemed to have recognized Ftisun and was coming out into the middle of the road to meet the car. I was hoping he would take note of the speed and get out of the way, but he didn't. Now going even faster, even faster, Ftisun honked the horn to warn the dog. We jerked to the right, and then to the left, the dog still far ahead of us. Suddenly the car began moving in a straight line, as a sailboat will cut straight through the waves without listing when the wind has died. But this line, though straight, deviated from the road. It was when I saw we were speeding not towards the hotel, but right for a plane tree on the side of the road, that I realized an accident was inevitable.

All the same, I shouted, "Watch out!" - a pure reflex, as if Ftisun could not see what was happening. In fact, it was the instinctual shout of someone trying to escape a nightmare and return to the beauty of ordinary life. If you ask me Ftisun was a little drunk, but driving at 105 kilo-meters an hour, headed for the 1 05 year old plain tree, she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. And so I understood we had reached the end of our lives. (487-88)

As in other momentous scenes in Pamuk, there is a dog to witness the tragedy of Kemal and Fusun. The author also performs some number crnnching, the way he does in the scene describing Ruya' s disappearance. After three months, Kemal who is now a full-blown psychological wreck visits the site and inspects the wreckage: Months later I found the wreck, and I remembered, as I touched the various parts of the mined Chevrolet, what I had recalled in my dreams: that just after the crash, Ftisun and I had looked into each other' s eyes. (488)

Unlike Life and Snow, it is the female counterpart that meets with a bloody end in Museum; all these deaths, nevertheless, serve to imply the connection between 10velEros and death/Thanatos in Pamuk' s imagination. But despite the suicidal intent, there is a deadly struggle inside Fusun between the life and death instincts as described by psychoanalysts:

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Fusun doesn't " really" want to die. But she wants to do something nearly as daring and it is conceived as revenge against Kemal. Her decision to demand the driver's seat is symptomatic of Pamuk's heroines. In their equations with the male characters, they are the ones who call the shots and men are forced to act as their willing assistants or fawning admirers. This is the case in the relationships involving Kadife and Fazil, Black and Shekure, Osman and Jenan, and Galip and Ruya. Fusun's death makes Kemal a physical and psychological wreck. The mangled 1 950s Chevrolet car is an objective correlative for his mental state. After recovering from his near-fatal injuries, he returns to Istanbul. Though Fusun is dead, he finds himself a helpless hostage held captive by her memories. In other words, the memory of the dead Fusun exerts a more powerful influence upon his psyche than the Fusun who was alive. He devotes his life to building a museum for her. He buys the house in which Fusun and her family lived and painstakingly converts it into an archive of love. He arranges the museum complete with Fusun' s clothes, the tricycle she rode as a child (the same that Kemal had ridden until he outgrew the tricycle age and was handed over to Fusun as a poor relative), and the wreckage of the car in which she met her death. Added to these are the butts of many a cigarette that she had smoked [the fact that a museum of this sort has actually been set up by Pamuk in Istanbul deserves mention here]. The name he calls the museum is the title of the book: "The Museum of Innocence." Kemal' s museum is, in a sense, a more eloquent testimonial of love than the most famous mausoleum Emperor Shajahan built in memory of his beloved. The thousand plus cigarette butts displayed there testify to love 's ability to deify itself in a way that defies logic and reason. Kemal fetishes these cigarette butts to the extent that he convinces himself that each of them has an individual soul. (3 95) The decision to call it the "Museum of Innocence" captures the essence of male-female dualism for Pamuk. Though the museum is the repository of the possessions and memory of Fusun, it actually institutionalizes the innocence and purity of Kemal' s love.

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Kemal' s case is typical of Freud's description of melancholy. While delineating the distinction between melancholy and mourning, Freud describes the melancholic as one who fails to come to terms with the loss. In "mourning" the bereaved, albeit with difficulty, comes to terms with his/her loss whereas in melancholy the loved object simply refuses to be buried. The image of the loved one resurfaces and constantly haunts the conscience of the living. As Derrida puts it succinctly, the "corpse" of the dead in the case of people suffering from melancholy refuses to be "incorporated" into their routine scheme of things. They thus narcissistically tum the dead into an object of the libido. This failure to externalize the dead obj ect makes them archives of loss and trauma. (Boulter, 7-8) Farnk, the archive hunter in Silent House also happens to be a victim of the same trauma due to unfulfilled love; but in his case, it doesn't assume the same catastrophic proportions as Kemal's, whose very ontology is rent asunder; rendering him a "subj ectivity without a subj ect" in Boulter's terms. (Boulter, 9) Farnk's marriage ends in divorce; soon after the divorce Selma, his ex-wife, remarries and repairs the tears she suffers. As Farnk learns to his despair she is even expecting a child. For Faruk, however, the divorce creates a yawning chasm he is incapable of crossing. He feels himself "trapped in a nightmare" from which he cannot "wake up and escape." (SH 23 1) The familiar trope of the resourceful woman is replicated here.

Love: The Emotional Ballast In Red, one of the greatest love stories to be produced in our times, the trope finds a more nuanced articulation. Though it is again the central character Shekure who plays the ascendant role in the novel, it is her compassion and self-sacrifice for her beloved Black that captivates us in this epic story. Black' s passionate love for his uncle ' s pretty daughter proves to be his undoing. His uncle, Enishte Effendi, does not approve of the match. He does not consider his nephew a worthwhile match for his daughter. The boy "has set his sights" too high is his reaction when he learns of Black' s advances towards his daughter. His wife remonstrates, pleading not to break the boy's heart, but Effendi refuses to relent. (48) Distraught at his Uncle ' s intransigence, Black leaves the country and joins the army. He visits several lands and fights many wars. But journeys and wars do not heal his wounds; they only rekindle his passions:

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In this instance, love is more than a physical passion and has been invested with mystical and metaphysical qualities. The satisfaction of carnal longings is something Black is able to achieve with countless women during his military voyages. But it doesn't help him overcome his obsession with Shekure. In her absence he feels the world metamorphosing itself into an abyss. This is akin to Kemal's thoughts about the dead Fusun, and Galip ' s about missing Ruya. The "nightmare" from which Farnk finds no escape also exemplifies the same pattern: men in these instances form helpless foils to resourceful women. Black needs Shekure for his very survival. It is as much a physical as an emotional need. For the other Pamuk heroes, though it is the emotional need that is stressed, the physical lack remains equally strong. Though Aristotle thought women could be defined through lack, in Pamuk's oriental tapestry, it is men that are defined by absence, like the Prince in Black who feels "a part of himself missing" without women. (432) As stated earlier, women occupying ascendant roles is something seen in many oriental stories stretching all the way back to the Arabian Nights. In a sense, this has to do with the oriental tradition in which mothering occupies a more pronounced role than it does in western capitalist societies. The powerful mother figure acts as a domineering presence in Pamuk' s novels; this is so intense that his protagonists are unable to extricate themselves from the apron strings of their maternal figures. In their lovers and fiancees, they see a replica of the same intimidating mother figure; this is how Fazil and Necip look upon Kadife, and Galip upon Ruya. Jung' s formulations about the mother archetype are revealing in this context. He discusses the complex nature of the mother-child relationship in various cultures. In Indian mythology, for example, this complexity

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finds its articulation in the figure of the "paradoxical" deity Kali. (Jung, 84) Further expounding on the theme, Jung delineates how certain kinds of mothers display "a ruthless will to power and a fanatical insistence on their own materual rights." Such mothers, he says, "succeed in annihilating not only their own personality but also the personal lives of their children." (Jung, 88) In Pamuk, the presence of motherly figures is apparent in the cases of Osman, Kemal, Galip and Enver; in all their lives we see the presence of powerful mothers/mother-like figures. But in the case of Black, there is hardly any mention of his mother in Red. For this reason, probably, it is not surprising that he is among the few Pamuk heroes whose love finds eventual fulfilment. But his path towards fulfilment is fraught with practical impediments. Another stumbling block in his path, besides Shekure 's father, is her brother-in-law, Hassan. Having convinced himself that his brother is unlikely to returu, he begins paying attention to Shekure. In his love letters, he paints himself alteruately as a tearful rabbit or a mournful lion sadly awaiting the return of his beloved. These drawings with which he decorates the margins of his letters epitomise the state of Pamuk's protagonists: they find themselves wholly vulnerable to the enchantment of love. Its power renders them delirious and infantile. The initial response of Shekure to Black' s advances is cold. Upon seeing him talking to Enishte at her home, she deliberately stays away from him and sends a terse message via Esther, the clothier. Her message is straight and uncompromising: Black is warned against using his status as a relative to visit their house as she is yet to fully recover from the wounds inflicted by him. It has taken her a lot of effort to redeem her personal esteem in the eyes of her dad. So Black would do well never to venture into the house again. Esther, the clothier is a clever Jewish woman. Every young man and woman in Istanbul trusts her to carry their messages of love, secure in the knowledge that she couldn't read. But no love letter passes through Esther' s hands without her knowing its content. Through the striking figure of Esther, Pamuk conveys the nature of love as something simultaneously inscrutable and candid. As an illiterate woman, the contents of the letter are unknown to her. But as a seasoned woman, who has been doubling up as a match-maker, she has an intimate knowledge of how a lover' s heart works. Despite the stem warning delivered to Black, Esther knows that Shekure is secretly hankering after his love. The letter that contains the warning is written on perfumed paper. The trope of the

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scented letter containing the warning message re-enacts the trope of love as something both alluring and intimidating. Attached along with Shekure ' s letter is the old miniatnre that Black sent Shekure during the early days of their romance. The fact that Shekure has kept the letter as a souvenir for many years attests to her love for Black. By retnrning the picture, Shekure, despite her protestations to the contrary, is trying to rekindle the embers of their old affection. The picture depicts a lovelorn Husrev having nocturnal communion with his beloved Shirin through her chamber window. As Black picks his way out of the house on his horse, he catches a glimpse of Shekure against her window. She is dressed in smart red clothes. The association of the color red with love, Eros and death are subtly hinted at here; in fact, these motifs are evident in the very title of the novel: My name is Red. It is worth remembering here that Fusun in Museum meets with her death while dressed in alluring red clothes. Love, death and red in these instances form a triangle. In My Name is Red, the mysterious murderer is first introduced as Red. It is only towards the end that we come to recognize him as Olive. Both olive and red are contradictory symbols. While "olive" traditionally stands for peace, Olive ends up as an agent of blood and violence through his murder of Enishte, spilling in the process not only blood but the red ink lying by his side. For Black, his beloved Shekure, dressed in red, symbolizes the charm and magic of love which eventnally proves to be the cause of his undoing. Black is seriously wounded in his confrontation with Olive and ends up permanently handicapped. During his years of marriage with Shekure, it is she who manages the house for him and ministers to his manifold needs. They make love every day until Black dies one fine morning of heart failure by the well. Her children who continue longing for the retnrn of their missing father are not positively inclined towards Black. They harbour a mysterious notion that Black is responsible for the rnmoured death of their father. This aggravates their resentment towards him and Shekure has to placate them each time she steals herself into the bedroom to make love with her wounded husband. In order to stave off their persistent questions, she tells them that Black needed her attention and his wounds have to be administered salves. The traditional paradigms of male-female dialectics are rendered topsy-tnrvy here. Conventionally, women have been equated with the wound and men with the agent ministering to the wound. Here, it is the man's wound that needs female care. In other words, it equates men with

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the wound and women with healing power. The sections describing the last days of Black are mainly narrated by Shekure herself. By assuming the narrator' s voice, Shekure reasserts female agency and autonomy. By describing Shekure 's craving for sex and love in the first person, Pamuk exhibits his ability for androgynous imagination, as described by Virginia Woolf. (Woolf, 1928) Shekure considers her feminine self to be the inkwell from which Black, the pen, draws his energy. Here, a view of the complementarity of the sexes is emphasized. This emphasizes the mutual dependency of male and female elements based on a harmonic synthesis. However, befitting the general pattern of Pamuk' s imaginative geography, it is the woman (symbolizing the inkwell) that represents the primal element in the equations. The male element depends on it to draw its sustenance and energy. In trying to account for this tilt towards the female pole in Pamuk's creative geography, I think it apposite to discuss the Oedipal dimensions of love in Red. As stated earlier, neither Orhan nor Shevket are fond of Black. They eagerly hope for the return of their long-awaited dad. Once, while seated on his mother's lap, Orhan promises her that he is going to marry her once he grows up. ( 1 06) The character' s name being "Orhan" here offers vital clues about the nature of love and maternal attachment in Orhan Pamuk. His male heroes' attachment to their lovers is one that smacks of infantile dependency. This shows itself in their attempt to seek something approaching maternal affection and beyond spousal affinity from their partners. Their panic and fretting in the absence of their beloveds can be traced to this underlying condition. In other words, what they enact is the typical agony children display, during the absence of the mother as Freud described it. (De Berg, 75-85; Carnth, 4) This has probably something to do with the strong maternal presence in Turkish culture. While in the West, children are trained to be independent from a young age, in Eastern cultures the mother-child bond remains on the same provider-dependant axis well into the onset of adolescence. Even in early adolescence, it is not uncommon to see parents and children sharing the same bedroom. This engenders a greater sense of dependency in children, and in the case of male children results in a more prolonged period of direct Oedipal attachment to motherly figures. In the case of Turkey, the presence of such motherly figures is something well illustrated in history. Mansel describes the enormous power wielded by

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Valide Sultans or the mothers of Sultans, and even the wives of Sultans in the Ottoman Empire : Unlike her contemporary Anne Boleyn, Hurrem did not enjoy a public coronation at which the entire capital celebrated her elevation. Nor did she obtain a public rank at court and a household of several hundred men and women at her orders. However, from behind the harem walls, she exercised greater influence than the Queen of England. (Mansel, 85) The people of Constantinople and the Ottoman government accepted the Valide' s [the queen mother' s] authority. At times it was no less than that of the queen mother's Catherine de Medici, Marie de Medici, and Aune of Austria in Paris. In their different situations all commanded men, and helped preserve their son's authority. As a mother, a Valide was a symbol of stability and hierarchy. . .The Valide, as much as the Sultan, came to represent the prestige and munificence of the dynasty, and on occasion, its last renmant of common sense. (Mansel, 92)

The joint family in which Pamuk grew up is marked by the presence of many such commanding matriarchal figures; a whole ensemble of aunts all presided over by a grandmother figure. In Istanbul, Pamuk describes the nature of his mtImate relationship with his mom. While his father's presence in the family sphere is marked by frequent absences, it is his mother who always remains as an anchoring presence for him. He finds childish pleasure and warmth in her and fetishizes her possessions including dress and toiletries. (68-73) We have a likely key that serves to unlock the complex behaviour of Pamuk' s heroes in this biographical detail. For Pamuk' s heroes who look for motherly warmth from their beloved, every obj ect related to them is a thing to be cherished and treasured, the extreme case being Kemal in Museum. While describing his relationship with his mom, and the frequent quarrels that his parents had, Pamuk talks about the perennial childhood fear that his mother would simply disappear. (70) This is the same fear that haunts Pamuk' s characters such as Osman, Kemal, Galip and Black, all of whom suffer separation from their beloved ones. Another clue that offers some insight into the sense of vulnerability that Pamuk' s lovers' exhibit is available from his early life. Pamuk had once fallen in love with a girl; in his memoir he stops short of naming the girl, and instead mentions the meaning of her Persian name, which happens to be Black Rose. Many a time, he meets her alone in his studio and once does a sketch of her which greatly delights her. One can glimpse here echoes of the Kemal-Fusun affair which flourishes in the privacy of Kemal' s

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mother' s vacant apartment; the apartment-studio where he meets Black Rose is owned by Pamuk' s mother in Cihangir. A favourite haunt of Pamuk with his girlfriend during this period is the Museum of Painting and Sculpture, the privacy of whose inner chambers afford them ample space for kissing and canoodling. This connection of the museum with love is remarkable in the context of Museum of Innocence. He remarks how he and Black Rose use their student identity cards to gain access to the museum, as they walk past guards who stare at them suspiciously. This experience may have provided Pamuk with the idea of using changed identity cards as a motif in Life, where Osman and Janan use the identity cards of a deceased couple killed in a bus accident. Pamuk' s affair with Black Rose does not last long. Her father discovers the affair and is not happy about it. When the school closes that year, he takes his daughter to Switzerland and eurols her in a school full of "rich Arabs and cracked Americans." (1 3 07) For days on end, Orhan walks to the girls' school where she studies, expecting his sweetheart to emerge through its gates. Eventually, he is informed by her brother of her joining the Swiss school. This is a bolt from the blue for the young Orhan. In this biographical instance we have another clue to the extreme vulnerability of love in Pamuk. Just as he considers the soothing motherly presence as something that could be denied to him at any moment, he dreads the possibility of other narcissistic obj ects doing similar vanishing acts. This is the experience that his protagonists like Galip, Osman, and Kemal are made to undergo. However, despite the vulnerabilities and vicissitudes that it is subject to, love, for Pamuk, is the very essence of life. For him, it is a sickness as well as a cure for sickness, a restlessness as well as restfulness. As Shekure reflects, love is not something that must be understood through its logic but its illogic. It not only causes pain and suffering but also helps relieve pain. Kemal suffers physical pain in the absence of Fusun but upon approaching her house feels the leadenness in his feet vanishing and the pain in his stomach subsiding. (MOl 1 6 1 ) In Snow, Ka too feels love's agony. Like Kemal, it is for him a pain that starts somewhere in the belly and gradually radiates to the chest and then to the entire body. (252) But he believes that he can mend his broken life through the rekindled love for Ipek. When Ipek seems to reciprocate his love, he feels "his eyes, his mind and his memory" fully opening to the world because she brings "such life" with her that makes his mind "soar to dizzy heights." (2 1 6 - 1 7) Her presence fills him with poetry which he effortlessly translates onto the page. Same is the feeling that overwhelms Black when his path towards

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fulfilment is eventually cleared after many setbacks; he becomes ecstatic and marvels about the "mysterious balance" of the world. (Red 242) This is the magic of love that Pamuk's characters feel. In the following passage in Life Pamuk succinctly summanzes the dialectical nature of love: Love is submitting. Love is the cause of love. . .Love is a kind of music. Love and the gentle heart are identical. Love is the poetry of sorrow. Love is the tender soul looking in the mirror. . .Love is a process of crystallization. Love is giving. Love is sharing a stick of gum. You can never tell about Love. Love is an empty word. Love is being reunited with God. Love is bitter. Love is encountering the angel. Love is a vale of tears. Love is waiting for the telephone to ring. Love is the whole world. Love is holding hands in the movie theatre. Love is intoxicating. Love is a monster. Love is blind. Love is listening to your heart. Love is a sacred silence. Love is the subject of songs. Love is good for the skin. . . Love i s the urgency to hold fast to another and to b e together in the same place. It's the desire to keep the world out by embracing another. It is the yearning to find a safe harbour for the human soul. (Life 244-45)

As this passage illustrates, love is imbued with contradictory qualities. It is the whole of life; it is music and, a la Nietzsche, without music-in this instance, the music of love-life would be a mistake. Thus, in Pamuk, love has been invested with a spiritual dimension that transcends carnality. This is something we had in early European fiction, for example with Hardy's Giles, but seems conspicuous by its absence in modernist and postmodernist works. T. S. Eliot' s "carbuncular" and Alfred Prnfrock epitomize the evisceration of spirituality in love. We have a more perfect example of it in Italo Calvino' s If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. The scene describes the murder of Jojo while having sex with his partner Bernadette. The narrator, who is the murderer himself, describes how Bernadette could even without a moment' s notice and with no semple switch her animal passion for Jojo to a workable equation with her assassin. ( 1 1 1) In Pamuk, love has its habitat in more traditional surroundings. There, lovers still experience the mystical dimension of love of which Ibn' Arabi and Dante speak: a love that makes "invisible" things "visible" and numbs the body to a heap of "inanimate" mass. (Life 258) For Calvino, this is the kind of love that is no longer possible in the advanced commoditized West, where the "dimension of time has been shattered" and people can

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love only in "fragments." Calvino says that w e can rediscover such time­ and by implication, such love-only in novels written at a time when time had not lost its "continuity." (CalvillO, 8) This is what we discover in Pamuk' s novels written in our own times, but in a zone where the clocks move at a different pace.

CHAPTER FIVE To BE OR NOT TO BE : THE QUESTION OF TURKISH IDENTITY

In the two initial chapters, I discussed how questions of individual identity are central to the thematic concerns of Orhan Pamuk. In that context, I hinted at how these questions are inextricably entangled for him with the question of Turkish national identity. This chapter attempts a more detailed engagement with this theme in the light of post-colonial theory and the current debates on globalization and Western cultural imperialism. The main novels that forms the focus of this discussion are The White Castle ( 1 983) and Snow. (2002) The questions confronting marginal identities in the present context of global capitalism exemplified in phrases like "Westoxication," "McDonaldization" and "Coca-colonization." affect their very survival as Wa Thiong'o points out. (2005, 4-25) The culture bomb, as he describes it, is more dangerous than conventional bombs because it is invisible, ubiquitous, and invincible, given its amorphous and "amphibiavian" characteristics. Just as Monsanto' s Terminator seeds pose a threat to our bio-system, the Terminator culture spawned by the hegemonic western culture industries poses a threat to cultural eco-systems at the periphery. Though this situation is not exclusive to Turkey, its geographical and socio-historical location contributes to an added sense of vulnerability. Being (n)either Western (n)or Eastern, (n)either European (n)or Asian, (n)either Secular (n)or Islamic, the country finds itself caught between various narratives. In Pamuk' s novels we have a clear articulation of these discordant discourses, both at the micro-individual and macro-social levels. His characters exemplify what Robins describes as the typical schizoid condition Turkey is prone to. (Robins 1 996, 63) According to Malpas, schizophrenia is typical of postmodern times while paranoia is a characteristic of modernism. (Malpas 2007, 8) In Turkey's case, neither seems mutually exclusive. There is both paranoia and schizophrenia at work: schizophrenia caused by its inherent geo-historical traj ectory, and paranoia that springs from a perceived threat to its tradition and culture; a

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threat from inside and outside, from forces that enjoy an asymmetrical power over it. This is a struggle between two competing discourses; two iconographies and symbolisms: one traditional and historical steeped in national memory and consciousness; the other, propped-up by hegemonic powers who want to erase the traditional discourse and super-scribe it with a supposedly superior alphabet. According to Robins, the transplantation of the European model in Turkey was flawed because it lacked the dynamism of its parent model. (Robins 1 996, 62) My effort in this chapter is to trace these flaws to more fundamental issues that have to do with identity, the artificial transplantation of cultural codes, notions concerning superior and inferior cultures, vernacular versus global, traditional versus modem, etc. "Identity," because of its fraught nature, is a "treacherous" word as Maalouf puts it. (Maalouf, 9) For many years it has been an object of much critical attention for sociologists and political scientists. For some, the global village will be a melting pot where vernacular identities are dissolved and reconfigured into a homogenous cast. Maalouf hints at the "impossible possibility" of such a dreadful scenario where everybody speaks the same language and listens to the same music. (Maalouf, 871 15) As Maalouf rightly says, such a world, while remaining a distant possibility, is not entirely beyond conception. The problem is the massive and crnshing impact Western culture is having on other cultures. In Turkey, this westernization drive was led by military-backed authorities. It was a transplant surgery that stretched all the way from how people wrote and spoke their language to how they dressed and thought. In this sense, the Turkish experience provides a clinical case to study the effects of cultural imperialism. 1 1 Pamuk offers a vantage point to map out these problems from a perspective different from orientalist scholars. Unlike them, he is an insider and outsider at the same time. Born in Turkey and having lived as an immigrant for some time in the US, he belongs to a pidgin culture and exemplifies a schizoid situation like his mother country.

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It has to be noted here that a reversal of the policy of the forcible imposition of secularism has happened in Turkey since the ascension of power by the Justice and Development Party dominated by Islamist.

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(How) To Be or Not to Be: That is the Question The key questions that this chapter addresses are : a) how is the East­ West question articulated in Castle and Snow? What happens when an alien discourse is forcibly transplanted into a vernacular system with a different set of "horizontal" and "vertical" allegiances? How does Cultural imperialism act as Wa Thiong'o's "culture bomb" upon those at the margins, reducing them to the status of slaves? What is Pamuk's own stance in this conflict zone where rival discourses compete for supremacy, given his status as a Westernized writer?

A Battle of Discourses The EastIWest tension these novels enact exemplifies what Sayyid presents as a conflict between two competing discourses (Sayyid 1 997, 726). For Sayyid, these two have been defined in terms of a set of binary oppositions, viz. irrational/rational, obscurantist/modern, superstitious/scientific, religious/secular, incipient/mature, etc. These dualisms do not rest on any obj ective realities but on a process of naming that he describes as an act of "primal baptism." Through this process, positivities and negativities are apportioned according to the imperial desire, which monopolizes the means and apparatus of meaning-making. As Sayyid explains, this involves a consciously constructed memory in which "copyright" is established on those events and obj ects deemed desirable and a simultaneous disavowal of things unsavory. (Sayyid, 148) The success of imperialism lies in its ability to indoctrinate the obj ect populations in such sanitized versions of history. It makes them fit fodder for imperialist causes and accentuates the process of "intropression," i.e. the act of the oppressed perpetuating their own victimhood. (Bulhan 1985, 126) We have a telling instance of this in the "secular-minded," "progressive" people of Kars (the setting of Snow), who equate their city and country with all negativities and posit themselves as perfect foils for the "superior," "enlightened" west. They are eager to shed all the trappings of their "demeaning" past. The rnling class has been so completely brainwashed by this colonial discourse that all of its attempts are directed at attaining western status. If anybody is unwilling to submit to the process, they are bulldozed into conformism. The principle is: everything Turkish is an anachronism. Neither the Turkish religion, nor its traditional dress are compatible with the ethos of modernity, and hence must be cast off to attain "progress."

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Fanon' s insight into the natnre of the master-slave relationship is helpful in analyzing the operation of cultnral imperialism that is both overt and subtle: Drawing from the Hegelian model, Fanon formulates his theories of mental and physical subjugation. According to Hegel, the master-slave dialectic emerges when two rival parties come into a relationship wherein one recognizes the other but fails to be recognized in tum. The one who accords unreciprocated recognition becomes slave and the other, master. In Fanon's reformulation, the one who fails to gain recognition develops an inferiority, and the other a superiority complex. In the age of neo-colonialism, this logic extends beyond the master/slave dualism and operates in a reconfignred format, viz. the dominant/marginalized. Tnrkey' s failure to be recognized by Europe is symptomatic. Even dnring the period of its imperial glory, Tnrkey was refused recognition by the West and constantly subj ected to a disconrse of "othering." This process was in tune with global imperialist proj ects but took on a special intensity in Tnrkey' s case, because it was the "Other" continually knocking at the gate. In its military engagement with Turkey, the West met with periodic failures and victories. Both failnres and triumphs made it a looming presence in Western demonology. This has been a long­ drawn-out process stretching all the way down from the Crnsades to the present. It is the image of the "savage" Tnrk spawned by this disconrse that over time colonized the Tnrkish psyche itself, breeding Fanon' s inferiority complex. Tnrkey's defeat in World War 1 and its reduced rank accentuated the process. (Aydin 1 999, 29)

Turkey's Mut(il)ation Bulhan explains how oppressors want victims to be "psychologically mutilated," if they could not be physically "annihilated." (Bulhan, 1 26) The extent of this "mutilation" can be traced in the Western representations of Tnrkey over the centuries. In Western literatnre and art, including Hollywood films, Turkey exists more as a discnrsive category than a geographical reality. Aydin traces the long history of Western representations in which it is invariably represented as infantile, savage and blood-thirsty ( 1 999). Thus we have Shakespeare, Byron and a host of other writers waxing eloquently about the barbarity and crnelty of Tnrks :

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And say, besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and turban'd Turk Beat a Venetian and traduc' d the state, I took by throat the circumcised dog, And smote him thus. (Othello v. ii 354-58)

The Turk that emerges in these lines is a malignant fanatic. His being circumcised shows how different an "animal" he is from the European. By putting the words into Othello' s mouth, himself a Moor, Shakespeare doubles the "othering" effect. The imaging of a people by another is constituted by a process of selective memory and desire, a conscious as well as unconscious process in which certain things are willfully remembered and others willfully forgotten. The word "philistine," for example, originally meant a person from ancient "Philistia" but now means a vulgar and uncivilized person. The semantic tum has to do with representations of Philistines by their antagonistic neighbors as synonymous with savagery and lack of sophistication. A reality check on Philistines might have yielded a picture incommensurate with the stereotype. The "Turk" was similarly represented as the epitome of lust and violence. In Turkish Tales ( 1 8 1 3- 1 816) Byron excreted them using every cliched stereotype. (Kidwai, 1 995) But in a separate statement he observed: If it be difficult to pronounce what they [the OttomansJ are, we can at least say what they are not; they are not treacherous, they are not cowardly, they do not burn heretics, they are not assassins . . . (Sardar 2000, 46)

Byron' s statement shows how "Turkey" is more of an imaginative construct than a lived reality. Like the wider orient, Turkey proved a handy canvas for the West to paint its lurid fancies. There was both dread and desire at work: dread because it stood for what was "out there" beyond the boundaries; desire, because it symbolized the exotic with a suggestion of "erotica." A whole series of books written in the twentieth century like Stamboul Train ( 1 932), The Eunuch of Stamboul ( 1 935), Murder on the Orient Express ( 1 956), Diplomatic Death ( 1 96 1 ), Murder with Minarets ( 1 968), The Light of the Day ( 1 962), The Mask of Dimitrios ( 1 939), Pascali's Island (1980), On the Shores of the Mediterranean ( 1 9 84), Journey to Kars ( 1 9 84), and In Xanadu: A Quest ( 1 9 89) to name only a few, recycle the familiar stereotypes. These texts not only reinforce the "savage" Turk, but also posit him/her in neat opposition to the sophisticated and civilized European.

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"Othering," as it happened with Africans and Asians, operates with the help of a vocabulary that is ambiguous, self-serving and contradictory. In Turkey's case, it relies on the familiar oriental tropes of lust, violence, bestiality, infancy, femininity and hyper-sensuality. If it is skin color that offers an instant rationale in the case of Africans, this is not possible for the white Turks. In this regard, they are more like the Irish and the Jew who resemble the European. But this only makes the need to "bestialize" more urgent. Like the Irish who were compared to Gorillas and Chimpanzees, the Turks were animalized as dogs and pigs in Western representations. If they are "circumcised dogs" for Othello, they are "pigs" for Billy, the protagonist of Midnight Express. Billy is arrested in Turkey for drng trafficking. His spell in prison is a sensational exercise in voyeurism. He is so repulsed by everything Turkish that he blurts out at the judge during the trial: "for a nation of pigs, it sure is funny you don't eat ' em." (Sardar 2002, 106) Charles Kingsley' s description of the Irish in the 1 9th century has the same tenor: I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country . . . But to see white Chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tauned by exposure are white as ours. (McClintock 1 998, 5 1 4)

Kevin Robins quotes Magris to show how Turks were identified with the Jew, another figure in European demonology until recent times: [MagrisJ notes the bauner of the defeated Turks bore, not the Crescent, but the Star of David: the Turks were simply identified with the enemy, which is to say the Jews, by means of a falsification. . .The Turks were treated as pariahs. (Robins 1 996, 66-7)

Taking our cue from Fanon, we can say that this is the result of a deliberate failure by the Westerner/oppressor to recognize the Other/oppressed. Rose notes how the 1 9th century British used to clump together various "Others" in one broad category. The "Others" thus clumped included not only blacks and Irish, but even East Londoners living in the unfashionable part of the city. For fashionable Londoners, a trip to the "east-end" was considered as dangerous as a journey to the "Dark Continent." (Rose 200 1 , l 3 8-53) In Turkey's case, the familiar tropes have taken sinister contours. Aydin notes how being Muslim and Islamic prompts Westerners to classify Turks along with Arabs, Mongols, Tartars and all those dreaded Others of whom Europe harbors fear and

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SUSpICIOn. (Aydin, 14-56) Turkey is thus the land of imperial seraglios; voluptuous baths and cruel sword-wielders ready to decapitate anyone at the slightest provocation. V. J. Guerinot' s statement explaining Rose Macaulay' s portrayal of Turks sums up the mood: Turks she dislikes and Goths, those disgusting savages who roamed over Europe sacking other people's cities, who are so praised by German historians, and who ought never to have left the Vistula. (Aydin, 76)

Savagery and cruelty are here portrayed as exclusive to Turks, Goths and others who live beyond civilized borders. Unlike, the Thames or the Rhine, the Bosphorus is muddied with the guilt of generations and laden with skeletons of hapless victims consigned to it by cruel, whimsical rulers: There had been one such Sultan who had made a thoroughly fresh start by ordering a hundred concubines tied up in sacks that were well weighted with stones at the feet, and gathered and tied tightly below the chin so that no struggling would be possible when they were dropped into the Bosphorus. (Whitney, 1 1 4)

The title of Forsyte' s novel Murder with Minarets ( 1 968) conjures up worse fears. The title suggests the "undeniable connection" between Turkey, Islam and death: I've never come across a place like it. But it isn't because they live like animals. They put down poison for the dogs in the street. It is because Mohammad made cats sacred. Like the cows in India. They won't even drown the kittens. But they will leave them to be run over or to starve to death. (Forsyte 1 988, 1 80)

These examples illustrate how Turkey has been used as a byword for cruelty, barbarity and lust. The etymological origin of the word "seraglio" is illustrative of such metaphorics. The Arabic word "harem" originally means "sacred" or "inviolate." Any place that is off-limits for someone or certain activities is a "harem" in this sense. The women's quarter of an Ottoman palace was designated "harem" because men had no access there; actually a woman's private area in any house, and not necessarily a palace, can be described as a "harem." The word "Seraglio," used as a translation for "harem," on the other hand is derived by clubbing together the Turkish word "saray" (palace) and the Italian word "Serraglio," which means "menagerie." The word evokes images of a palace where women are kept like "caged birds" for princely delight. Translations and representations are not politically neutral activities and, in this case, political intentions

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have been ill-concealed. In the Western mind, "harem" stood for exotic sensuality, something they were denied at home because of the puritanical injunctions concerning sex espoused by the clergy. The Western imagination, however, went so far as casting the harem as a gilded cage where sex-starved concubines anxiously waited for their tum. Such was their hunger that: Even cucumbers and other vegetables of inflammatory shape and size were cut into slices before being allowed in, for fear of misuse. In this harem nothing was left to chance. And it is therefore not surprising that those odalisques who were not occupying the Sultan's bed and might never do so, sometimes took an interest in one another. (Newby 1 985, 2 12)

The Infantile and the Indolent I shall now examine to what extent Pamuk reflects/resists western representations of Turkey. To begin with, both Castle and Snow portray Turks in largely unflattering terms. As a writer exercising his craft in a primarily western medium, i.e. the novel, Pamuk must have been influenced by the cliched stereotypes of his country produced and perpetuated by western predecessors. However, there are crncial differences in the tone of the two novels. The narrator of Castle is a European and his attitude is one of bemused scorn and derision. In Snow, on the other hand, where both the protagonist and the narrator are Turkish, the tenor is, though Eurocentric, ambivalent. As a critic of both Islamic and secular fundamentalism, I think, this is the voice that Pamuk can be more readily identified with. Castle is presented as an ancient narrative retrieved by chance, a trope not uncommon in postmodern works, including Umberto Eco' s The Name of the Rose. The narrator/protagonist is a Venetian sailor who falls captive to Turks. Circumstances eventually prove fortuitous after a series of tribulations and he ends up becoming the weapons designer cum deputy to the imperial astrologer. The descriptions he offers are orientalist through and through. Turkey has been infantilized and "othered" to a degree that there is no character who emerges with a modicum of respectability. The Venetian is asked to abandon his faith and embrace Islam. When he refuses, he is threatened with execution. Though the Venetian refuses to renounce his faith even after his head was placed on the block, he is spared for some unknown reason and handed to a savant called Hoja, who bears a remarkable physical resemblance to him.

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The novel relies on a neat binary logic in which Europe through the metonymic figure of the Venetian represents wisdom, enlightenment, tolerance and scientific progress. Turkey is its negative. It is a Dunciad with a young infantile ruler, fanatically devoted to hunting: he gloats over the exploits of his ancestors who could smite a horse into two with a single stroke. Hoja treats the ruler like a bothersome kid and cajoles him into believing all the grand prophecies he makes about the plague that strikes the empire or the ailing lion in the zoo, or the rabbit that manages to tear itself away from the Sultan's hounds. (32) Even Hoja has no genuine intellect. His greatest doubt is "why fools are so stupid." (36) He is reliant on the European for everything innovative and his proj ect to develop an ambitious weapon is rescued at crucial times only through the Venetian's interventions. Once, after a series of humiliating experiences, the Venetian leaves Hoja in despair and seeks refuge on an island. Hoja is incapable of doing anything by himself and goes in search of the Venetian that very evenmg. The two devise games in which they share their most intimate secrets. Hoja thus comes to learu about his slave ' s homeland, family and fiancee. Their sharing of brains evolves to such an extent that they become confused about their identities. To quote Pamuk in another context, they did not know where the one "ended" and the other "began." (BB 3 84) But the weapon program turns out to be a disaster. During the Sultan's expeditions, the heavy contraption proves to be a burden; it gets stuck in bogs, and misfires resulting in the deaths of several home soldiers. One day, during an expedition, Hoja disappears fearing the consequences of the failure. It is years later after retiring from the court that the Venetian learns more about the whereabouts of his ex-master. A traveler from Venice informs him about his friend who has been "reunited" with "his" fiancee and family in Venice. The news shocks the European. The cunning Turk, he realizes, has outfoxed him and married his fiancee. In Venice, he is informed how Hoja is making a name for himself by disparaging Islam and Turks. At the end of the novel, even the Venetian wonders whether he is actually "himself' or the "Turk." This points to Turkey' s own identity crisis vis-a-vis Europe; because of its physical resemblance and geographical proximity, it aspires to European status and inclusion but finds itself a constant outsider. At every tum, it is mocked, infantilized and insulted by Europe as the Venetian in the novel mocks and insults Hoja and other Turks; but the confusion lies deeper: both Europe and Turkey, like Hoja and the Venetian are confused about what demarcates them from the Other; where their

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boundaries start or end. The borders, each realizes, are porous and artificial. Senocak explains how Europeans consider Turks different since they don't go to the opera and instead "read the Koran." (Robins 1 996, 645) But this difference is not even skin-deep and Turkey presents to Europe the constant dilemma of whether it is another "it" or "itself." The novel's dialectics, however, privilege the West as Hoja's eventual impersonation and migration suggest. What matters is the way this presumed superiority has been framed against Turkish inferiority. Europe stands as a dreamland that lies beyond: a heaven where honest, civilized people live. Turkey and the wider East represent barbarity, primitiveness and backwardness. It should be remembered that the story takes place sometime in the middle ages, a time when European superiority was not something considered incontestable, as it has now been made out by our present discursive regime. The Ottoman Empire was a power that could match the mighty European forces. In science and learning Europe was only playing second fiddle to Asia. As M. J. Akbar notes, there were more than a hundred bookshops in Baghdad during this period but not a single one in London or Paris. (Akbar 2003, 80) Neither, the literacy rate nor the life expectancy of Europe was enviable. The novel's portrayal of Ottomans as religious bigots and fanatics also begs questions, pitted against worse European records. Istanbul and Turkey were during this period home to many Christians and Jews, whereas none of the major European cities had any cosmopolitan presence. (Maalouf, 56) The Jews in European cities were hunted and harassed and had to live in separate ghettoes. In Istanbul, on the other hand, they formed an influential section, and enjoyed such liberties that it was the city where many European Jews sought refuge from their tormentors. They grieved the fall of the Ottomans in the initial half of the twentieth century because it was a dynasty that offered them the protection that no one else could. (Akbar, 120) In spite of these facts, the narrator presents Turkey as a country with few redeeming features: for him, it is fanaticism, exotica and erotica writ large. The voice of the author is completely submerged in the voice of the narrator. Though Pamuk' s stance is one of ambivalence and hesitancy, as hinted earlier, Castle suggests a definitive western tilt. Sengupta's observation on Tagore re-tailoring himself to fit into "familiar stereotypical role[ s]" in English translations of his own poems is relevant here. (Sengupta, 58) Though an anti-imperialist, the medium and the language were imposing themselves on his craft; this is as true of Pamuk

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as it is of Tagore: the orientalist legacy of the novel as an art pokes its fingers through the persona of the Venetian narrator. But there is something not to be missed: Though the novel is awash with orientalist stereotypes, the characters in Castle, unlike Snow are under no mythical western spell. This owes to the differing temporal frames of the novels. For the people of Turkey, the West was not something to be feared, admired, and awed during the Middle Ages. "Europe" for them constituted a less civilized land and Europeans a band of marauding nomads. (Lindqvist 1 996, l l l ) In other words, the discursive categories "West/Europe" versus "Turkey/East" had not taken their current superior/rational versus inferior/irrational connotation during this phase. So, the Sultan and his soldiers see Europe/an only as something/someone lying/living beyond the borders and not something/someone emblematic of superiority. They think they can fight and conquer Europe, and face it on equal terms rather than as someone inferior. In contrast, Snow chronicles life in the twentieth century: In this secular, pretentiously modem Turkey, rnlers and rnled are under the hypnotic spell of Europe; it hovers on the horizon as the paradise of their secular mythology. All they aspire to is the attainment of European status, i.e. in religious terms: attaining the Western paradise. This Europe is not the Europe of unemployment or economic recession, of rising despair and increasing divorces, but a continent that exists in the idyllic imaginations of Turkey's modernist proselytizers. It is here we see cultural imperialism at its lethal best.

Zaim versus Kadife or West versus Veil The author is himself the narrator of Snow. But, unlike Castle where the story is told from a single point of view, it has a more dialogical strncture in which conflicting voices play out without being dissolved in the authorial monologue. The characters in Snow are also different: they possess greater cerebral and emotional investment and are not caricatures like Hoja or the Sultan. The novel presents Kars as a gloomy, dreary city; an anachronistic presence in the modem world from which those who could afford it have fled, seeking refuge either in the West or wherever they could. The presence of a strong section of bearded men and girls in headscarves fit in with this image. In fact, the city remains divided between Islamists and Westernizers. Ka, the protagonist, arrives when the battle lines are clearly drawn. Matters come to a head when a group of girls wearing headscarves

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are expelled from school and forced to discontinue their studies. Some of them commit suicide, provoking what is described as a "suicide epidemic." Ankara is concerned; they send a counselor to advise the girls. But there is little sign of improvement. It now tries a different strategy. A theatre troupe, headed by Sunay Zaim the reputed actor, is sent to the city. With his iconic status as a popular actor, Zaim is expected to drive home the official message against the veil. The novel is built around the central thread, which involves the conflict between "modernity" and tradition. While Zaim and his wife, the celebrated actress Funda Eser, represent "modernity," the "head scarf girls," stand for tradition and resistance. Turkey has had a long and troubled experience with women' s headdress. In her study, Ozdalga ( 1 998) describes the experiences of three headscarf-wearing women and their attempts at negotiating identities in a context where the scarf is identified with the most regressive elements. Snow presents a plethora of experiences that suggest the multiple potentialities of this semantically recalcitrant mode of dressing. This is a semantic confusion to which Turkey owes much of its current identity crisis and modernization predicament. In this sense the headscarf is not merely an article of clothing. As Joppke shows in her study of the veil, the controversy surrounding it has had great political implications for Europe and the wider world. (Joppke, 2009) In Snow, the veil is invested with all its rich political and religious symbolisms. 1 2 But it is not only a group of rebellious college girls who are wearing the veil: the snow that covers the entire landscape clothes the city itself in a veil. The veil is thus a full-blown literary motif and pervades the whole ambience of the novel. Ka's journey through frozen snow-covered landscapes continually evokes a sense of being veiled: veiled by the inclement elements and time, which seems frozen in Kars because of its isolated existence. However, the novel does not submit itself to any single semantic. For the religious schoolboys and headscarf girls, Islam and its metonymic symbols like the veil, beard and fez represent the defining features of their identity and an articulation of resistance against hegemonic culture. But for Zaim and his acolytes, the scarf and beard symbolize atavism and 12

In this study, I have used the words head-scarf and veil interchangeably though there is a clear difference between them in their Islamic conception. While the face-covering veil is known as Niqab, the head-scarf is known as Hijab.

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regression. Living under the mythical spell of the West, they want to get rid of everything Islamic, construed to be throwbacks to a forgettable and shameful past. They are, in this sense, classic victims of Wa Thiong'o's "cultural bomb": The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their nnity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is farthest, removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples' languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life . . . The intended results are despair, despondency, and a collective death-wish amidst this waste land which it has created, imperialism presents itself as a cure and demands that the dependent sing hymns of praise . . . (Wa Thiong'o, 3)

As Wa Thiong'o implies, the culture bomb acts through two coterminous but antithetical processes of hyper-valuation and devaluation. Hyper­ valuation involves the process of ascribing higher values to everything coming from a privileged outside: its religion, culture, ethics, physique, and language. The reverse process of undervaluing the indigenous and traditional ethos is devaluation. This process, though assisted by powers outside, is coordinated and carried out by a cabal of insiders who hold the levers of power and are psychologically colonized. Though victimizers, they too are thoroughly victimized, but scarcely aware of their status as prisoners. They are intellectually lobotomized Lilliputians aspiring to be "blue-eyed blonds" like Ataturk. (S 1 94) The drama that Zaim presents at the national theatre is titled My Fatherland or My Scarf It shows a deeply reflective woman in a scarf walking down a street. A deep sense of melancholy haunts her. Suddenly, she is overcome by a sense of enlightenment: she gets rid of her scarf and feels liberated. But her fiance and relatives who materialize on the scene, along with several bearded men, obj ect to her unveiling. Overcome by fury, she bums the scarf. The fanatics, outraged by the show of defiance, drag her by her hair; but in the nick of time, the "enlightened" soldiers of the republic step in to save her from the mob. The drama is an unambiguous statement of Western cause. Unless Turkish women get rid of the headscarf that stands for tradition they can't modernize-read westernize-themselves. Once this piece of clothing is

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cast off, everything is going to be perfect: the woman in the drama feels happy and liberated the moment she takes it off; there is no longer any poverty or disease ! What can be detected here is the subtle but fierce operative mechanism of the culture bomb; of how it makes a population consider its past, religion and dress as worthless, while investing the imperial master with a mythical halo, creating an incorrigible sense of inferiority among the oppressed. The drama encapsulates the official Turkish dream. By "demolishing" the God of Islam and its mythology, Zaim and the authorities are not becoming iconoclasts : instead, they are installing a new god and mythology in its place. This new god is the state, which is incarnated through the persona of Ataturk, whose statues and images fill up the landscape. Elaborate rituals celebrating the glory of the state and its founder replace religious and traditional observances in the secular religion championed by the authorities. In effect, what happens is one form of theology replaces another, resulting in a secular eschatology instead of a religious one. The drama does not offer the audience many choices: they have to choose between the flag and the scarf. These aren't even choices either, because they aren't free to choose the latter. If they do, the "brave" soldiers of the republic, those that rescued the hapless unveiled woman, will play a reversed role. The doors of schools and courts will be closed to them and they will have to make themselves at 13 horne III · state pnsons. .

The performance does not proceed as planned. Eser, who plays the role of the emancipated woman, sprinkling petrol and burning her scarf, is given petrol in a bottle bearing stickers of a detergent. As she dips her hands into the bottle, there is a shout from the back: "That's the way to do it! . . . Scrnb out all the dirt!" As she bums the headscarf, there is panic around; the theatre' s old furniture seems in danger of catching fire. Eser goes through her peroration describing how the fez, scarf and turban signify the "reactionary darkness in our souls;" and how "we should liberate ourselves" from this darkness to join the "modem nations of the West." At this, somebody remarks, "So why not take off everything and rnn to Europe stark naked?" ( 1 55) The remark triggers thunderous laughter. The military is unimpressed by the show of defiance; it steps in 13 The situation that the novel describes is that of the Kemalist Istanbul. The situation of modem Turkey following the election of Recep Erdogan presents a different picture, but the battle between the two narratives continues to be as strong as it was earlier.

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and begins firing at the crowd. Within moments the theatre is littered with corpses. Among those dead is Necip, a religious schoolboy whom Ka has befriended. The military declares a curfew and clamps down on the "enemies" of state. The message that Zaim and Eser want to convey is the inherent inferiority of being a "Turk" and a "Muslim." The sarcastic remark that came from the audience, on the other hand, symbolizes resistance and the naivete of idolizing the West. Zaim's fault is as much that of Turkey' s. Sayyid describes how "modernity" and "progress" are being used as synonymous with the "West" through a process of massive semantic appropriation. (Sayyid, 143-53) The Kemalist Turkey submitted itself completely to this logic to gain the Master' s recognition. But instead of bringing recognition it brought further contempt. Akbar describes how even early attempts at westernization by the Ottomans were something Europe publicly applauded but secretly scorned. (Akbar, 1 63) When a culture mentally surrenders to the superiority of a rival culture and re­ inscribes itself in terms of its "superior," it loses its inner dynamism and energy. Both individuals and collectivities cement their notions of identity through a process of selective memory. The memory of a nation, as much as that of individuals, is constituted by what it remembers to remember and remembers to forget. Bulhan explains how western imperialist projects simultaneously depended on the wholesale dehumanization of the other beyond Europe and an aggrandizement of the "self' as guarantors of civilization and liberty. (Bulhan, 1 1 6-20) In Turkey, it was a reverse process after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Instead of aggrandizement, it consisted of a mutilation and "mummification" of the past: The secular dream of reaching the status of "European" demanded getting rid of what was "unsavory" because of its association with Islam. Mustafa Kemal' s statements that Islam was a "putrified corpse which poisons our lives" (Sayyid, 65) and the "Caliphate will only be a laughing stock in the eyes of the civilized world" (Sayyid, 59) sum up the attitude. Neither Turkey's Muslim history nor the record of the Caliphate as an institution has been flawless. Like many other national and institutional histories, stories of blood and lust punctuate their legacy. But in Turkey something else went wrong: Instead of trying to rectify the historical wrongs, it committed further atrocities with the aim of homogenizing a heterogeneous population under the flag of a nation state. While the Ottoman Turkey had a cosmopolitan character, the Kemalist utopia demanded a state that fitted the western template: a territorially defined nation with a homogenous

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population. The unification effort was doomed; as Serdar Bey says, unlike the Ottoman days, when people thought of themselves as one, they are now "Kurds," and "Azeris." (S 26) The Kemalist error was in relying on the European diagnosis and cure for their society' s illnesses, perceived or real. The West presented Turkey a warped mirror, and the more it relied on this mirror the more distorted its self-image became. For Nicholas 1 of Russia, speaking in 1 853, Turkey was a "sick man, a gravely sick man." (Akbar 2003, l l 8) In 1 925, Arnold Toynbee wrote : The Turks, like the Jews, have been, since they fIrst made contact with the West, a "peculiar people;" and while this is an enviable position so long as you are "top dog" . . . it becomes an intolerable humiliation as soon as roles are reversed . . .in both cases the status of peculiar people has ceased to be a source of pride and has become a source of humiliation; and in both cases, therefore, a strong movement has risen to escape from it. (Robins, 64-5)

Toynbee, according to Robins, saw this "movement . . . to escape" as a "spiritual conversion." There was, however, little "conversion" at the micro-level. The "conversion" was imposed by authorities from the top and rejected by those on the ground. In Snow, the religious school boys and girls in headscarves epitomize the rejection. For them, the veil, beard and other Islamic insignia represent resistance to colonialism and its cultural artifacts. Sayyid's interpretation of Islamism as a response to western imperialism is as relevant (Sayyid, 1 997) here as Maalouf s pithy observation: You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its very beginnings and you still wouldn't understand what is going on in Algeria. But read thirty pages on colonialism and decolonisation and then you'll understand quite a lot. (Maalouf, 66)

When Ataturk and his acolytes tried to replace Islam and its mythology with secular mythology, their attempt was to replace a narrative with historical dynamism and energy with one that was propped up by artificial respiration. The rhetoric that the new system assumed had all the colorings of a religious discourse. According to official television, those who criticized the state were "anti-Ataturk perverts;" (S 72) the question posed to the suicide girls by the counselor from Ankara was "Is God more important than the state?" (S 1 24) Idolization of the state and its founder, placing him on a par with God, were prerequisites for founding the new mythology, itself an instance of

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western legacy. When Christianity lost its hold in the western imagination, and Galileo, Copernicus, and Darwin tightened their grip, it was the mythical nation state that filled the metaphysical vacuum. Religious rituals were replaced by rituals of state and crnsades by nationally inspired wars. War memorials and the mass graves of soldiers replaced shrines and sepulchers. The attempt in Turkey was to duplicate the western experience. The Ottoman Empire was a loose confederation of semi­ independent states and it was not the sense of nationhood but the notion of an Islamic empire that drove its expansionist plans. In this sense, there was a crncial difference between Ottoman imperialism and its western counterparts for whom national flags and royal insignia played a more defining role. When the Kemalists replaced Islam with the western­ inspired doctrine of state, it had to be invested with the same metaphysics that Europe found useful for nationalistic projects. But in Turkey, the old metaphysics of Islam refused to die or give in as Christianity did in Europe. The reasons were manifold: a) Islam did not posit itself as an antagonistic discourse vis-a-vis modem science the way Christianity did, but claimed itself to be compatible with modem notions of the universe; b) the separation between religion and state was not as easy to achieve in Muslim countries, like Turkey, that did not subscribe to the logic of dividing loyalties between God and Caesar. According to Sayyid, the West saw in Islam a distorted image of itself; the resurgence of God it had killed, so that men could live. (Sayyid, 4) When the Kemalists tried to import the European religion of nationalism and replace the God of Islam with Ataturk, a westernized idol, they pitted themselves against the old faith and tradition. In Snow, the Zaim-Kadife conflict exemplifies this struggle. Zaim's credentials went beyond being a thoroughbred Kemalist. For long, it was believed only a famous Western actor could play the role of the "blue-eyed blond" Ataturk; but now many considered Zaim to be up to the task. ( 1 94) This meant Zaim, though a Turk belonged to a superior species, since he had achieved European status, the secular equivalent of sainthood in Westoxicated Turkey. When his first proselytizing mission ends in bloodshed, Zaim decides to stage another performance. This time, he plans an adapted version of Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and wants a real headscarf girl to unveil herself. As it is in any totalitarian system, the people of Kars are not in a position to know fact from fantasy. Totalitarian systems, in this sense, have much in common with Baudrillard' s postmodern world. (Baudrillard, 1 983) If it is the constant bombardment of images from multiple sources that confuses the post-modem citizen, it is the constant and continual

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feeding of lies by the official media that characterizes totalitarian societies: in both situations trnth is the casualty. In Kars, the propaganda is masterminded by the Border City Gazette. Though the newspaper has only an old outdated press, it is not hampered by technological backwardness: the Gazette writes the news even before it happens; in other words, the authorities plan the events and print them before they actually occur. As Serder Bey, the editor of the Gazette explains, many events take place only because his newspaper wrote about them in advance. According to him, writing up the news before it happens is what "modern journalism" is all about. (29) With the help of Ka, Zaim manages to rope in Kadife, leader of the headscarf girls, to play the heroine in Spanish Tragedy, which he recasts as Tragedy in Kars. The choice of a western play is also inspired by his slavish mentality that considers "West: Best." As usual, the Gazette prints the news in advance with the title: "Death on stage. Illustrious actor Sunay Zaim Shot Dead during Yesterday's Performance." (S 343) But Zaim hasn't planned a real death. He wants to present Kadife pulling off her scarf and shooting him. He wants her to be like those Western women who have liberated themselves from patriarchy and are ready to take on men with arms if necessary. Kadife, however, goes a step further. Instead of firing blank shots at Zaim, she uses a loaded gun. It happens quickly: When Kadife unveils, it brings applause from the "elite" sections of the audience. When she fires at Zaim, and the bleeding actor reels under the impact, they continue applauding his ingenuity at simulating realistic effects. When the shooting proves real, it is the religious schoolboys who applaud before the military intervenes. This cataclysmic scene illustrates the East-West tension and identity question central to Snow. While Zaim yearns for westernization and "modernization," Kadife represents a militant resistance. The blood­ spilling on stage is an enactment of the conflict: as stated earlier, it is a clash of two conflicting iconographies and semantics. For Zaim, the headscarf and, by extension, Islam stands for female bondage and atavism. His "westoxication" makes him incapable of reading his culture in its own language. Like other Westernizers, he is not satisfied with the adoption of the European alphabet. He perceives the change as superficial and wants the very terms with which indigenous people speak and think "Europeanized." Kadife thinks differently: the scarf for her symbolizes allegiance to faith as well as resistance to state totalitarianism. ( 1 1 6) By shooting Zaim she avenges the death of her victimized friends.

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Grace's observation on the multiple semantic import attributed to the veil is significant. (Grace, 1 - 1 3) The "veil," as she observes, can be liberating or oppressive depending on the circumstances in which it is practiced. It has a particular semiotic import for a woman who is coerced into wearing it by her oppressive husband, but a totally different meaning for one who considers it as part of her faith and tradition. It is in this context that it became a symbol of nationalistic resistance against colonial oppression in Algeria and found support by Fanon. (Grace 2004, 1 32-35) Kadife clad in a headscarf is a symbol of strength in the novel. Placed beside her, male characters, like Necip and Fazil, lack charisma and dynamism. Zaim's failure is his inability to decipher the import of the veil the way Kadife discerned it. For him, its meaning is what the western Master defined. In western discourse, oriental women are couched in words suggestive of lust, and lechery and portrayed as nothing but caged sex-slaves. This construct has more to do with western desires than reality. According to Mary Montagu, who visited Turkey in the nineteenth century, women in harems enjoyed a lot of liberties and only a few of them worked as chambermaids. For Billie Melman, another traveler during this period, the Turkish women had greater liberties than Victorian wives. (Grace, 40- 1 ) The projection o f the lives o f western women as liberated and enlightened against the benighted lives of women in Asia and Africa is debatable given the fact that domestic battery and rape still exist on a massive scale in Europe. 1 4 The female body in Western capitalism has been appropriated by consumerism to a degree that women have little choice but to dress and undress the way the market wants them to. In Habermasian terms, the life-world of the female has been fully colonized by the system world, that it is the patriarchal market rather than the patriarchal family structure that rules them. (Habermas, 1 987) Leila Ahmed has observed how the Victorian corset was as restraining a garment to women as the Muslim veil is; in fact, this is true of many items of female dress prevalent today. (Sayyid, 1 0) Defending the veil, the Iranian woman writer Rahnavard observes that Western opposition to the veil is driven by its desire to find a market for its "rotten" fashion goods and accessories which are not marketable "unless there are unveiled female bodies to wear them." (Grace, 23)

14 https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/20 1 4/mar/05/violence-against­ women-european-union-physical-sexual-abuse

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The new commercial imperialism of the West, as Sardar points out, is trying to conquer the other using more sophisticated weapons in the form of digitally packaged cultural goods. (Sardar 1 998, 123 -200) In its attempts to penetrate the other, it scarcely tolerates impediments in the form of veils, scarves or beards because these are symbols of an alien culture, of resistance and difference. The failure to recognize this makes Zaim don the mantle of Bulhan's intropressors and perpetuate their own oppression. Intropressors are people who lose hold of their own tales; the grammar and logic of their indigenous narratives, their alphabets and language, and find themselves in an alien tale over which they have little control. Like Pamuk's protagonist in The New Life (1 997) who finds himself lost in a new world, a new story, and a new time-frame, they wander aimlessly not knowing whether "to be" or "not to be." Ka exemplifies this situation: All that he knows about Islam and its prophet is what he learns from watching Anthony Quinn' s film The Call. (S 95) Despite being an intellectual, Ka's knowledge of his own culture and its narrative comes from the master; the master who processes and represents it the way he wants. Unlike Zaim, this has left Ka a confused man. He sympathizes with the Islamists but his intellect pulls him towards Europe. Zaim lampoons him: What are we to do with this poet of ours, whose intellect belongs to Europe, whose heart belongs to the religious high school militants, and whose head is all mixed-up. (S 2 1 0) IS

As Pamuk admitted, Ka shares his own hesitancy and ambivalence. In the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, the slave fails to gain recognition from the master; but in the media-saturated modem world driven by technology, the slave/marginalized is made to recognize him/herself the way the Master dictates. The impact is more pernicious and debilitating than a face-to-face encounter. In the altered situation, the slave/marginalized is even deprived of the agency that Hegel conceded to him, and the master is empowered through a media rhetoric that portrays him/her as benevolent and benign rather than tyrannical and oppressive. Unlike Hegel's docile master, he is always active: devising new strategies to keep the enslaved/marginalized in hislher helpless subordinate position. The effect is a perpetuation and reinforcement of the divide, different from how Hegel visualized it. (Bulhan, 1 0 1 -07)

1 5 (http://turkishpoliticsinaction.blogspot.coml2009/0l /pamuk-on-multiculturalism­ secularism.html).

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Dostoevsky' s lines, used as an epigraph in the novel, have particular resonance in this context: "Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people." (Snow unnumbered opening page) Since Europe and the West are signifiers that are equated with all positivities while everything else is treated as demeaning, Zaim and the authorities consider people to be mere fodder for their revolution. It is the hegemonic discourse that makes them believe this. They are completely unaware of the dark underbelly of the Enlightenment or the non-European genealogy of much of its ideals. (Sardar 1 998, 246) The powerful hegemonic discourse succeeded in blinding the West to its non-Western legacies which extend all the way back to ancient Athens, as Bernal demonstrated in his epochal Black Athena. The act of "primal baptism" succeeded in Europeanizing and Christianizing those legacies. (Sayyid 1 997, 1 46-49) For the Other, that finds itself economically and culturally bankrnpt due to the process, there is nothing left to do but beg at the doors of Europe as Turkey is doing in Snow. But dubbed "gravely sick," it is quarantined and made to wait at the turnstile.

Conclusion This chapter has discussed how a dominant culture subjugates and dispossesses subordinate cultures and reduces them to the status of mere lackeys. In modem times, this tendency has only intensified because recognition is no longer sought from the master directly by subordinates but from the institutional mechanisms, especially the global media that has its own well-entrenched hierarchy. It is the discourse these institutional strnctures produce that creates modem subj ectivities. Sardar notes how America has become the norm and yardstick by which everything else is measured in the postmodern world. Citing the example of the World History and Encyclopedia DVDs produced by the Microsoft Corporation, he observes how the rest of the world, including Britain and Europe, have been portrayed as marginal by these cultural artifacts. He finds a corollary to this in Hollywood, that portrays the world beyond the United States as backward and pre-modem in films ranging from Die Hard ( 1 988) to Parent Trap. ( 1 998) According to him, the "Orientalization" process marshaled by Californian culture industries covers the entire world east of the United States. (Sadar 2002, 1 09- 1 8) In this world of "digital imperialism" propelled by Microsoft and Intel, marginal identities are increasingly at risk of being formatted, configured and reformatted according to the desires of the Master. It leaves little room for agency and

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self-innovation for the marginalized. If Zaim and his friends are busy trying to replicate the European paradise in Turkey, it is only because they are unaware of the fact that paradise had changed its address to the US and Los Angeles. To sum up : Neither culture nor identity are anything fixed or pre­ given. In other words, it will be erroneous to treat them as mere nouns and not verbs. Identity and culture are constituted and configured through human agency; but to be perennially consigned to an obj ect position will be debilitating for cultures. It will only lead to what Maalouf has termed as "culture suicides." (Maalouf 2000, 1 1 3) This is what literally happens in Snow where the headscarf girls go on a suicide spree. The dominant culture creates a Manichean dualism which prompts the underdog to consider him/herself and hislher country as nothing but a wasteland. The graffiti in one of Kars' tea houses express this: Even if our mother came back from heaven to take us into her arms, even if our wicked fathers spared her a beating for just one night, you would still end up penniless, your shit would still freeze, your soul would still wither, there is no hope! If you're unlucky enough to live in Kars, you might as well flush yourself down the toilet. (S 1 04)

It is tempting to compare this with a statement by Beatrice Webb : "If I ever felt inclined to be timid as I was going into a room full of people, I would say to myself, 'You're the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world, why should you be frightened? '" (Russell, 96)

Both these statements are inspired by constructs and not anything real. Neither can Kars be considered a Godforsaken place, nor England the cleverest nation. We can hardly imagine an English man/woman making a comparable statement now, when Britain is no longer considered "Great." Bulhan's observation that the colonizers , "history books are replete with self-adulation," is also true of their biographies and other artefacts. (Bulhan, 1 1 7) This self-adulation involves a massive "dehumanization" of the other. Actively indoctrinated with their own insignificance and worthlessness, the psychologically mutilated Others crave for self­ immolation. They consider themselves to be consigned to hell which is as delusional as the paradise their masters "inhabit." Milton' s Satan had it right when he was expelled from hell: The mind is its own place, and in itself

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Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. (Paradise Lost, Book-I , Lines 254-55)

The psychologically mutilated and culturally pillaged Others are capable of perceiving nothing but hell: they have been so completely robbed of their resources, dynamism and creativity. Worse still, they tum masochistic, attuned to their own oppression: The national goalkeeper who makes his appearance before Zaim's performance at the theatre is emblematic: his description of how the English team put eleven goals past him during a match in the sixties is a piece of bad memory a less slavish society would have shoved into forgetfulness. (S 1 4 1 ) But it is the kind of memory which gives sadistic pleasure to an audience brought up on a diet of scraps and leftovers served by Zaims. This is the dilemma Turkey finds itself in despite voices of resistance. But this is in no way exclusive to it. Despite all the positive signs, the postmodern world, the global village as we call it, might become a "graveyard" of cultures as Maalouf warns (Maalouf, 1 22). The alternative here is to foster a culture of mutual tolerance and recognition: a cosmopolitan spirit where Europe recognizes Turkey as Turkey, and Turkey acknowledges Europe as Europe, as cultures that have a right to exist and cooperate side by side along with other cultures, and not one as "Culture," and others as mere "cultures." (Eagleton 2000, 1 1 6-3 1 )

CHAPTER SIX TOWARDS AN ISLAMIC AESTHETICS? A SURVEY OF RELIGIOUS MOTIFS AND IMAGES

This chapter explores the nature of Islamic themes, motifs and images in Pamuk, and discusses the possibilities of their appropriation in terms of Islamic aesthetics. Part- l , which discusses the images and symbols in The New Life, serves as a stepping stone to a more detailed analysis in the later sections; part-2 focuses on My Name is Red, and part-3 concludes by taking up the question of Islamic aesthetics and ontology as evinced in Snow and Silent House. As a prelude to this discussion I shall briefly dwell on the nature of Pamuk' s stance vis-a-vis Islam as a religion and faith: As a Western­ leaning liberal postmodernist, and as one among the first Muslim writers to openly come out in support of Rushdie, following Khomeini' s death sentence, Pamuk is often read as a champion of Western values and a critic of Islamists. Despite the apparent trnism of this statement, I argue that we can detect an inner core in Pamuk where he seems largely undecided about his stance on the Islam versus West dialectic. In this sense, he has much in common with Ka, the protagonist of his novel Snow who is accused of being divided in his loyalty towards Islam and Secularism, with his intellect inclining towards Europe and his heart tilting toward religion. (2 1 0) The novel, being a dialogic art form, the intellectual confusions and the emotional conflicts of the author, as well as his characters and the nation to which they belong, are bound to play themselves out in its artistic dynamic. Hence, there are many instances in Pamuk' s novels where the novelist has a laugh or two at the expense of the Islamists; but even when he pokes fun at them in due measure, his ambivalence tinged with sympathy manifests itself on a few occasions. This is clear in Snow where religious students like Necip and Fazil are portrayed with empathy. In a sense, Pamuk seems equally opposed to both forms of fundamentalism:

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whether it be the religious or the secular version, while being sympathetic to the moderate forms of either. As already stated, Pamuk belongs to the elite Westernized section of the Turkish society in whose daily life religion plays little part. By his own admission, it was only once he dared to fast in Ramadan; not the entire month of course, but a single day. (Istanbul 167) However, Islamic themes and images play a prominent part in his works whose very texture and fabric owe to Islamic ontology. Celal's musings in Black attest to this awareness : Once, in a copy of his manuscript, the celebrated columnist­ an alter-ego of both Galip and by extension, the author-traces the meanderings of an ant that finds its way onto the paper. With his green ink pen, Celal traces the path of the ant until the point it dies of exhaustion on the fifth page. His scrawls form a pattern resembling a "slender river snaking across a plain." The lines terminate on the fifth page at the dry carcass of the ant. Ruminating over the fate of the ant Celal writes, invoking Rumi: [the ant] sees the pen that has created this garden of words; then it sees the hand that directs the pen and the intelligence that directs the hand, "And then. . . the ant saw that there was a higher intelligence directing that intelligence." Once again Celiil's dreams had merged with the imaginings of the Sufi poet. (BB 274)

Master Mahmut, the well-digger, too reflects the same sentiment about God' s omnipresence. As Cern says, Master Mahmut wasn't the type to pray five times a day. Even so, when we were digging this well thirty years ago, it felt not as if we were burrowing into the ground but ascending towards the sky and stars, to the kingdom of God and His angels. (Red-Haired 2 1 7)

Pamuk, who compares the vocation of a novelist to that of a well­ digger, (Oe 407) identifies himself with Master Mahmut. Like the well­ digger, who probes the bowels of the earth for an elusive trickle of water, the novelist explores the depths of the human psyche for his material. What they both discover in the depths is the unmistakable presence of the "higher intelligence." Just as Celal's dreams merge with the Sufis, Pamuk' s creatIVIty partakes of the Islamic philosophic and creative traditions. Living in Istanbul, a city steeped in Islamic history and tradition, this was inevitable for him, and as he admits in Nai've, part of his "identity is Islamic." ( 1 15) An all too visible mark of this is the towering minarets of the Suleymaniye

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mosque, against whose backdrop his characters live out their destinies. But even when the scene shifts from Istanbul (as it does in Snow, which has the border city Kars as its locale) his battalion of angels, devils and even 6 Deccal 1 (the Islamic equivalent of the Anti-Christ) follow him in train. These images are seldom presented in their raw form, as available in Islamic scriptures in Pamuk' s fiction. Befitting a creative artist, especially one with postmoderu inclinations, Pamuk subj ects them to all kinds of genetic mutations and permutations and uses them for both serious and ironic ends. The flashing but telling image of Azrael in The White Castle best illustrates this. Azrael, according to Islamic faith, is one of the chosen angels of Allah. Though an angel, his job is the not so pleasant task of snatching people 's souls and consigning them to death. In Castle, Azrael is portrayed as a drunken spirit wandering the streets of a plague-ravaged Istanbul in a feverish frenzy. (79) Though this image of Azrael gels with that of his description as a dark-faced guest at a King's feast in Red­ Haired, it jars with the Islamic notion of angels as pure beings incapable of defying God' s diktats. However, Pamuk is a creative artist whose pilgrimage is not to any holy land of Islam. He is a pilgrim to the (un)holy shrine of imagination, where angels drink, devils quote scriptures and Deccal himself hides behind the facades of the seemingly gullible and innocent. (MNR 350; BB 9 1 ) In other words, he morphs the Islamic images and motifs to suit the demands of his craft. This is evident in the use of number 1 9 in Black. Black is essentially a mysterious love story involving Ruya, her cousin and husband Galip, and half-brother Celal with thinly disguised suggestions of incest. According to Galip his marriage with Ruya takes place exactly nineteen years, nineteen months, and nineteen days after their first meeting. Later, when Ruya leaves him for good, it is a nineteen-word message that she leaves behind. The invocation of the number 1 9 has Islamic resonances. According to some Islamic scholars, the number "nineteen," mentioned in the Quranic verse 74:30, has mystic significance. Some even aver that the number of times each letter in the Arabic Alphabet appears in the Quran is always a multiple of 1 9 . Others see in this number, a secret formula that holds the key to our cosmic architecture. 1 7 By using the number to describe a love story, bordering on

16 Deccal will be better spelt Dejal in English; but I have stuck to the Turkish form used by Pamuk's translators. 1 7 The following sites contain detailed discussions on this topic:

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incest, involving one belonging to the lineage of the prophet (as Ruya is described in the novel), Pamuk exhibits his knack of rehabilitating religious imagery within a secular ambience. The repeated comparisons of Deccal to Cyclops in the novel are another telling instance of this tendency. But despite the genetic mutations, the moorings of these images in Islamic literature, folk beliefs and popular superstitions are unmistakable.

The New Life of Epiphanies Pamuk' s preoccupation with Islamic images goes beyond references to mosques, minarets, angels, and djinns that form an inalienable part of his aesthetic tapestry. Given the prominence of Istanbul, as his prime canvas, these references are something he could have hardly avoided. But his passion for Islamic images goes beyond such mundane references. One of the instances in which this is most discernible is the numerous epiphanies his novels present. The New Life abounds in such epiphanies. The novel narrates the experiences of Osman, a young architecture student and his sweetheart Janan. Osman's life, usual and ordinary for a boy of his class and upbringing, suddenly plunges into chaos: On a fine day he happens to read a book; the book transports him into a world where the familiar and everyday obj ects become mysterious. It is a world saturated with an ominous blinding light: . . . the book worked its influence not only on my soul but every aspect of my identity. It was such a powerful influence that the light surging from the pages illuminated my face; its incandescence dazzled my intellect but also endowed it with brilliant lucidity. This was the kind of light within which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light. (3)

This experience, epiphanic as it is, has parallels with the prophet' s experience following his first encounter with the Archangel Gabriel, an incident to which Pamuk refers in a sublimely wrought passage in the novel. (26 1 -62) Like the prophet, who was handed the first part of the scripture/the book with the commandment to read, Osman too is overcome with a sudden and blinding revelation whose force sees him hurtling into a new realm of experience. "Quran Miracle of 1 9" Youtube, uploaded by Indeed2Knowthis 1 8th December 20 l 0.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMOdWPOdhNY "The Miracle of the number 1 9 in the Holy Quran" Youtube, Uploaded by Kibrisli7 on 6th November 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBvjnmJr3l8

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Like the prophet, he is mystified and cannot come to terms with his experience. He wonders whether he would lose himself in the profusion of light that seeps from all the "fissures in the ground" (33) and be consigned to a life of endless wandering in that strange "land of light." ( 1 5) In fact "light" and "dawn" are metaphors used in the Quran repeatedly to invoke the prophet' s experiences of revelation. The Quranic chapters 93 (The Glorious Morning Light), 89 (Dawn) and 9 1 (The Sun) attest to this. Similarly, books are archetypal images used in the Quran, and the book that transforms Osman's life may have associations with Quranic allusions to the books handed to the virtuous and evil on the Day of Judgment. The books thus given would contain a record of all the deeds of the individual: the virtuous will be given the book in their right hand and the evil in their left. The books would seal their fates once and for all: the evil will be consigned to eternal perdition and the virtuous rewarded with a life of eternal bliss. In Osman's case too, the book seals his fate; it spurs him on to an endless journey in search of the mysterious angel. The journey is fraught with danger and urgency. Osman expects the angel to be capable of transporting him to the world mentioned in the book. But he is hardly aware of who the angel is or where his/her habitation is. Actually his journey is a replication of the journey that is undertaken by the presumably dead Mehmet, his "double," in the novel (the religious resonances of the name cannot be missed). Like Osman, Mehmet too has read the book and fallen under its spell. Like the former, the book spurs him to travel interminably through the nooks and crannies of Turkey. It is reported thus about his [Mehmet's] journey: "" .this young man is searching for something that will lighten his burden, and although I am not entirely sure I know what he is looking for, I don't think he knows it for sure either." ( 1 49) The "lightening of the burden" is a motif used in the Quranic chapter titled "The Expansion:" Have we not expanded thee thy breast And removed from thee they burden The which did strain thy back. (94: 1 -3)

Like Mehmet's, the obj ect of Osman's journey is mysterious: his angel is as mysterious and enigmatic as the Holy Grail. Adding to the mystery is the presence of the sweet and elusive Janan who befriends him at the engineering college where he is a student. Incidentally, it is in her hands that he first notices the mysterious book bearing the same title as the novel, i.e. "The New Life. "At one point, he even doubts whether it is his

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secret desire to befriend Janan that prompts him to seek out the book in a sidewalk stall. (20) The name Janan has an added religious resonance. The Arabic term denotes "soul," and the Turkish equivalent means "soul-mate." Osman's quest for Angel viewed thus is a search for his own soul. Its slightly altered form "Jinan" is the plural form of Jannah which means paradise. Pamuk' s awareness of Janan's connection with the garden/paradise is revealed in the following lines: And then hours later, when I was bidden awake by a prankish ray of sunlight that was as cold and refracted as cut glass, I realized that the lavender-scented sultry garden cradling my head had all along been her neck; and remaining there quietly a while longer between sleep and wakefulness, I blinked my greetings to the resplendent morning outside, the mauve mountains and incipient signs of the new life, only to behold with grief how very remote from me were her eyes. (7 1 )

The pictorial landscapes through which Osman and Janan travel are reminiscent of Eden before the fall. But neither Osman nor Janan are able to afford the luxury of a restful stay in those picturesque locales. The quest for the angel spurs them to travel nonstop in buses-mysteriously named Safeway, Trne Safeway, Express Safeway, etc.-that invariably meet with accidents. Pamuk anchors descriptions of these journeys in Islamic aesthetics and ambience. We can hardly conceive of a western hero of our times, except in sci-fiction, setting out in search of an angel. For the supernatural hardly enjoys the status of such proximity in secular western imagery. So, we can scarce imagine a Portnoy (protagonist of Potrnoy's Complaint) or an Esther Greenwood (protagonist of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar) or a Simon Caulfield (protagonist of Salinger' s Catcher in the Rye) on a voyage resembling Osman's. Osman's journey is, nevertheless, not one of eventual fulfilment. Both his companion and the obj ect of his search, the vaguely defined angel, prove elusive. Janan appears and vanishes like an ethereal presence. Even her belongingness to this world seems suspect: I looked at her, afraid to look in her face . . . Her face was pale, her hair light brown, her gaze gentle; if she was of this world, she seemed to have been drawn from memory; if she was from the future, then she was the harbinger of dread and sorrow. I gazed at her without being aware of gazing, as if I were fearful that if I looked at her too intently, the situation would become real. (20)

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The sense of his beloved being un-"real" is something Osman finds difficult to come to terms with. Simultaneously, being of a dreamy disposition, he dreads the possibility of her "becoming real" and less angelic. The ethereal becoming real is something he hasn't much patience for. It is in unceasing travels in search of the angelic that his mind finds its restless peace. He is unable to rest until he would find the angel but is unsure about the identity of the angel. Confusing the identity of the angel further is the repeated references to Janan herself as the angel. This prompts us to think that the angel he is searching for is none but his companion. The Turkish meaning of the word Janan as "soul mate" assumes significance in this context. In the latter part of the novel, where Osman loses track of Janan, he re-embarks on unending travels to track her down, again fusing the figures of the angel and Janan. The love Osman feels towards Janan has a burning intensity. It goes beyond carnality and acquires a supernatural dimension as she gradually begins to epitomize a sporadically vanishing ethereal presence. Her superior wisdom and ability to remain detached without allowing him to consummate his love augments the ethereality. Osman is both delighted and perplexed by this angelic quality. In a moment of ecstasy, during their journey, he calls his mother and tells her about his decision to marry Janan, announcing: I am getting married tonight, in a little while, now, in fact we are already married, she's upstairs in the room, there's a staircase, I married an angel, mom, don't cry, I swear, I will come home, don't you cry, mom, I will come back with an angel on my arm. (96)

In fact, Osman is unsure about his dream of marriage. Janan has not yet given him her word. He even doubts whether she is a temptress who has come to lure him into the deceptively alluring world. Throughout, Janan appears enigmatic and Osman finds himself unable to grasp her motives. Love towards the mysterious girl makes him miserable because it contradicts all the notions of love he nursed as a teenager: "Contrary to how love is portrayed in the movies, I felt more miserable than just miserable following my feet wherever they took me." (25) Even in the latter part of the novel where the image of the angel has been used in a banal manner, Janan retains the mysterious quality that sets her apart. Osman leaves her in the cranky old Dr Fine ' s house. Upon return, he discovers that she has once again vanished; this time for good. Years later he comes to learn that she has married a doctor and settled in Germany. Osman thus ends up a loser in his struggle to win her over. To

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his despair, he comes to realize that there indefinable and enigmatic about her.

IS

something unattainable,

Janan's radiance, her mysterious qualities and wisdom give her the attributes of an angel. These are qualities that angels are endowed with in Islamic lore. However, the choice of the female gender here attests to Pamuk' s postmodern inclinations. In Islamic mythology angels are asexual creatures. But there are quite a few instances in the Quran where they are mentioned as taking human form. In the eleventh chapter, Hud, for example, there is a description of the angels sent to the town of Sodom being first received by Ibrahim at his house in a town nearby. The chapter "Maryam" similarly describes the Virgin Mary's encounter with an angel who came to announce to her the imminent birth of a son. On both occasions, the angels manifest themselves to humans in the shape of men and not women. Pamuk, while drawing upon Islamic mythology in his portrayal of angels, in this instance feminizes them to suit his aesthetic requirements. However, Janan is only one of the likely candidates for the Angel in the novel. In fact, Pamuk peoples Life with many angels; all of them in one way or another exhibiting the vagueness and mysteriousness that celestial beings are invested with in Islamic mythology. Pamuk himself, albeit obliquely, suggests their Islamic connection. During his long journeys in pursuit of the angel, Osman does elaborate research on angels and corresponds with scholars about the nature of the angels mentioned in the Quran and the Bible. He is unable to figure out the exact difference between them in the two scriptures: . . . Rilke says the "angel" of the Elegies has less to do with the angel of Christian heaven than with the angel figure in Islam . . . Having learnt, from a letter that he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome from Spain the very year he began writing the Elegies, that Rilke had read the Koran, which "astounded, astounded" him, I was engrossed for a time with the angels of Islam, but I did not find in the Quran any of the accounts I had heard from my mother, the elderly women in the neighborhood nor from any of my know-it-all friends. Although Azrae1's likeness was available to us from many sources, be it in cartoons in the newspapers or in traffic posters or in natural science class, he was not even named in the Koran; he was simply referred to as the Angel of Death. I couldn't find anything more than what I already knew about Archangel Michael nor about Israphe1 who was to play the trumpet on Judgment Day. A German correspondent closed the subject by sending me a pile of likenesses of Christian angels, which had been photocopied from books of art, in response to my question as to whether the distinction made in the beginning of the fifth surah [chapterJ in

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the Koran in terms of those angels possessing "two, three, four wings" was peculiar to Islam. Aside from trivial differences such as the Koran referring to angels as a separate class of beings, or that the fiendish crew in hell was also considered to be of angelic descent or that the Biblical angels provided a stronger connection between God and His creatures, there was little else to prove right about his distinction concerning the angels of Islam versus those in the Christian heaven. (26 1 )

Despite Osman's disavowal, the affinity of the angel he is searching for with the ones mentioned in Islamic sources is clear from the references to the Quran which the novelist makes. In fact, in the very next paragraph, he makes a reference to the Archangel Gabriel "appearing to Mohammad on the clear horizon." (26 1 -2) For Rilke, angels represent a world of perfect bliss and happiness. This is perfectly in keeping with the Islamic view of angels as incorruptible beings, unlike the Christian view which categorizes them into fallen/rebellious versus virtuous/loyal groups. In the latter part of the novel, however, Pamuk trivializes the picture of angels and together with it the quest of Osman. Unsure about the identity of the angels, Osman surmises he could learn about them from the manufacturer of New Life Brand Caramels (the name "New Life" is again worth noting). These candies that he has eaten as a child came in wrappers with pictures of angels and a four-lined doggerel to boot. The novel here assumes an ironic tone that was largely mute in the initial chapters. By reducing the lofty angels mentioned in Islam-which inspired the great poetic imagination of Rilke-to figures on candy wrappers Pamuk makes them literally a fallen lot. The nonsensical doggerels that accompany the pictures further serve to caricaturize them. But despite the irony and levity, Pamuk later strikes a more serious note that has particular resonance in the context of his preoccupation with the TurkeylIslam-Europe/Secular dialectic : New Life Caramels were manufactured by an indigenous Turkish firm that found itself out of business following the influx of western confectioners. Thinking that the manufacturers of these candies will be able to enlighten him on the mystery of angels, Osman undertakes another journey years later. At last he encounters Surayya, the old blind man whose company manufactured the confectionary, at his remote home. Like Dr Fine, Surayya believes Turkey to be the victim of a giant global conspiracy. The conspiracy, hatched by giant western corporations, has left Turkey robbed of its history and future and led to its inundation by western cultural goods and the erasure of its collective memory. Dr Fine and his men want to set back this process by reclaiming the ancient knowledge and creating an

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alternative cultural space that could rehabilitate the sacred Islamic ethos. His television, that would show a real angel on the screen, is part of this counter proj ect. Surayya considers Dr Fine and his accomplices to be as misguided as the people whom they oppose. He believes Turks to be at the end of their "autonomous history" like other colonized societies. Given to a mood of extreme defeatism and pessimism, he thinks Turkish cities and towns have been invaded by the descendants of the crnsaders. The members of the eighth crnsade, according to him, got stuck in Anatolia; from there, they built a subterranean network of tunnels, enabling them to surface anywhere in Turkey at will. These people, according to Surayya, are responsible for westernizing Turkey and spreading all the noxious doctrines. (28 1 ) The political note is unmistakable; it allegorizes the historical experience of modem Turkey: The book which transports Osman into the strange world, viewed in this perspective, is the alien narrative to which Turkey finds itself transplanted. Like Osman, Turkey too finds itself unable to come to terms with the new-world and its blinding reality, despite the deluge of light it promises. The anxiety that Pamuk' s narrator expresses about the problem of inhabiting a "foreign toy" called the novel is symptomatic of this national neurosis, the consequence of the transplantation from an indigenous narrative to an alien script. (Life 243) The following lines capture this predicament: "When God blew his soul into the creation, Adam's eye beheld it. We then saw matter, in its true guise, yes, just like children might, but not in the unreflecting mirror that we see now. We were such joyful children back then, naming what we saw and seeing what we named! Back then, time was time, hazard was hazard, and life was life. It was a state of true happiness but Satan was displeased by our happiness; and he who is Satan conceived of the Great Conspiracy. One of the pawns of the Great Conspirator was a man named Gutenberg, known to be a printer and emulated by many, who reproduced words in a manner that outstripped the production of the industrious hand, the patient finger, the fastidious pen; and words, words, words broke loose like a strand of beads and scattered far and yonder like hnngry and frenzied cockroaches, words invaded the wrapping on bars of soap, on cartons of eggs, on our doors and out in the street. So words and matter, which had formerly been inseparable, now turned against each other. And when asked by moonlight what is time, life, grief, fate, pain, we were confused like a student who stays up all night before an exam learning his lessons by rote, although we had once known the answers in our hearts. Time, said a fool, is a noise. Accident, said another, is fate. Life, a third said, is a book. We were confused, as you see, waiting for the angel to whisper the right answer in our ears." (106-07)

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Though these are the confused mumblings of a drnnken Osman, they have deeper metaphysical resonance. The reference to Adam and his expulsion from heaven posit the earlier state of innocence with the current state of experience in the case of Turkey. The earlier innocence is characterized by handwritten manuscripts instead of printed letters; by an Arabic alphabet for Roman letters and by an Islamic teleology for the modernist dogma of scientific salvation advocated by Mustapha Kemal. Viewed thus, the invasion of Gutenberg is an invasion by the Western culture industry. On Turkey, it has a pestilential impact, as the "frenzied cockroaches" signify. Cut off from its primal Islamic moorings, Turkey in the novel is portrayed to have been consigned to a fate of indeterminacy like the perennially wandering Osman. As Salman Rushdie ' s Moor puts it in a different context, Turkey finds itself to have suddenly slipped into another book, another narrative in which it neither finds itself at home, nor is it capable of extricating itself. (Rushdie, 1 995, 285) Besides the descriptions of the angel, the journeys too can be treated as an Islamic motif with religious import. Journeys are symbolic of the perennial quest motif that forms the main theme of many a classical work including Ulysses and the Biblical (as well as Quranic) stories of Abraham, Moses and other prophets. In Life this motif has been habilitated in an Islamic ambience, though it inclines towards a more ironic and at times sarcastic timbre in the latter part of the novel, defying the initial seriousness. Osman's journey and encounters with people professing mysterious beliefs resemble the quest of Moses described in the Quran. Moses' companion on the journey was the wise Khidr. Khidr was wiser than Moses but was a reluctant divulger of his own learning; he waited till the last moment to test the patience of Moses before coming out with the answers to the hidden mysteries and strange happenings. Osman's female companion Janan is wise and mysterious like the mythical Khidr. She knows more about the book (and the world to which they have been transported under its impact) than Osman; she is, nevertheless, reluctant to share the knowledge with her new-found boyfriend. Her mysterious qualities, like Khidr, link her to the supernatural. Again, like Moses, the eventual "secret" that Osman is searching for is the essence of existence itself which is uuravelled by Khidr through a series of shocking experiences described in the Quranic chapter "The Cave," a chapter which Pamuk alludes to in My Name is Red. Like Moses, Osman is confused about the mystery of life and feels restless. It is only in death he finds the answer to his existential dilemmas:

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Looking at the broken median line in the high beams of the bus, I was reminded of the refrain. . . What is life? A period of time. What is time? An accident. What is accident? A life. A new life . . . it was at that magic moment of equilibrium between the light inside the bus and the light outside that suddenly my eyes were dazzled by a bright light. In the new light on the right side of the windshield, I beheld the ange1. The angel was so close to me and yet how far. Even so, I still knew this: the profound, plain and powerful light was there for me. . . The brilliant light kept me from seeing what the angel looked like for sure, but I knew from the sense of playfulness, the sense of lightness, the sense of freedom I felt inside me that I had recognized the ange1. The angel looked nothing like those in Persian miniatures, nor like the ones on the wrappers of caramels, not anything like the photocopied angels or even the presence in my dreams all those years whose voice I longed to hear. . . The angel was as pitiless as it was distant and wondrous._Not because it wished to be so, but because it was only a witness, and could do nothing more [italics added] . . . As to myself, ensconced in the first seat in the front, looking straight into the light of approaching trucks, my eyes dazzled in amazement and fear, just as I had once looked into the incredible light that surged from the book, I would be instantly transported into a new world . . . I absolutely had no wish for death, not for crossing over into the new life. (294)

This death scene is another instance of epiphany: here the angel is restored to its classic mooring and invested with an Islamic religious halo. He is no longer the pale caricatured figure that appears on toffee wrappers, but the angel of death mentioned in the Quran: a la Islamic angels, the angel here lacks agency and autonomy because he is a mere witness. In Islamic mythology, angels lack individual volition and can act only upon the prescriptions of Allah. This is one of the features that distinguish them from the Biblical angels who could conceive of a mutiny against God. For Osman, this death is a wish-fulfilment notwithstanding his claim to have "had no wish for death." Earlier he had remarked thus about the secret motive of his interminable journeys: I realized then that I did not want to die of a bomb or a heart attack, but in an actual traffic accident. Perhaps I thought that the angel must appear to me at the moment of impact and whisper in my ear the secret of life. When, oh when, 0 Angel? (1 06)

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The Red Zone o f Djinns, Demons and Greedy Priests The story of Red locates itself in sixteenth century Turkey. As Amin Maalouf puts it, for people living in medieval times, hell was so realistic a concept that they probably pictured it as a place somewhere in Asia Minor peopled with all kinds of cloven-hoofed devils thrusting sinners into eterual fire. (Maalouf, 1 02) Dalrymple was probably more to the point when he remarked that "demons were considered to fill the air as thickly as flies in a Turkish market" in medieval times. (Dalrymple, 55) In keeping with the zeitgeist of the times, Red abounds in references to angels, djinns, devils, heaven and hell. Setting the tenor of the story are the three Quranic verses given as the epigraph: You slew a man and then fell out with one another concerning him. (Quran-The Cow, 72) The blind and the seeing are not equal. (Quran-The Creator, 1 9) To God belong the East and West. (Quran-The Cow, 1 1 5)

All the verses are closely related to the development of the plot. The first verse refers to the murderls that the story relates. By referring to the murder at the time of the prophet Moses described in the Quran, the novelist shows how all murders are related to one another: how j ealousy, selfishness, religious bigotry, professional antipathy and rivalry in love underlie the universal theme of murder. Red unveils a world where these passions reign supreme and contribute to the making and unmaking of its characters. Art, especially visual art, forms one of the main themes of the novel and the second verse underlines this aspect. The novel is built around the intrigues and counter-intrigues that mark the lives of the master miniaturists attached to the Ottoman royalty. Light, colors, shade, and visuality form some of the anchoring motifs of the novel. The second verse, driving home the difference between the blind and the seeing, throws light on this aspect. But the blind and the seeing of which the novel speaks are not what we consider them to be in our ordinary parlance, i.e. people suffering from hearing or visual impairments. The use of these two binaries have parallels with the Quranic concept: the Quran uses the term "blind" as a synonym for terms like "imbecile," "mindless," or "numb." Unlike the "seeing," the "blind" are incapable of perceiving truth and are mired in an illusory sense of self-importance.

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Those physically endowed with eyes may in this sense be blind and those literally "blind" otherwise. The story of the great miniaturist whom the novel narrates attests to this. This miniaturist serves at the palaces of many a Sultan; they are powerful rulers known to be great connoisseurs of art. However, the master miniaturist soon discovers them to be pompous braggarts with no real grasp of art. So he leaves their palaces and finds refuge in the palace of a minor ruler. According to the master miniaturist, this modest ruler is the only person with any real notion of what constitutes "art." The stunning truth about this ruler is the fact that he is blind! ! (3 8 1 ) Another key conceru o f the novel i s the Eastiislam-West dialectic and the conflicting views of art that these societies maintain. The reason for the murder of Elegant Effendi, and later that of Enishte, are traceable to this conflict. The third verse has been used as a pointer to this centuries­ long conflict, while at the same time emphasizing the view that both East and West eventually belong to God. This is also an assertion of the Islamic concept of universal brotherhood and human unity, despite all seemingly irreconcilable differences. The first chapter titled "I am a Corpse," which follows the prologue, is a beginner' s lesson in Islamic eschatology. Like all the other chapters, this is a monologue by one of the characters : in it, the murdered Elegant Effendi describes how he meets with such a horrible fate. Lying at the bottom of the well, he describes his after- death experiences : Contrary to the claims of the sinful infidels who have fallen under the sway of the devil, there is indeed another world, thank God, and the proof is that I am speaking to you from here, I've died, but as you can plainly tell I haven't ceased to be. Granted, I must confess, I haven't encountered the rivers flowing beside the silver and gold kiosks of Heaven, the broad­ leaved trees bearing plump fruit and the beautiful virgins mentioned in the Glorious Koran-though I do very well recall how often and enthusiastically I made pictures of those wide-eyed houris described in the chapter "That Which Is Coming." Nor is there a trace of rivers of milk, wine, fresh water and honey described with such a flourish not in the Koran but by visionary dreamers like Ibn 'Arabi. (4)

As the murdered Elegant Effendi continues his monologue, he throws light on the pivotal conflict upon which the plot evolves. As stated earlier, this is owing to the differing westeru and Islamic views on mimetic arts like painting and sculpture. In Elegant Effendi's view, his murderers are the enemies of Islam who have hatched an elaborate conspiracy against the

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Muslim world. Though h e i s part o f a proj ect commissioned b y the Sultan to prepare a book of miniatures depicting glorious moments in the history of the Ottoman Empire, Elegant has strong reservations about it. The Sultan, by asking the miniaturists to paint like the Western masters, is, according to Elegant, defying the sanctity of Islamic art. According to the adherents of Islamic art, painting always has to stress the majesty and primacy of God vis-a-vis his creation, while western art lacks such a theo­ centric dimension. Olive, one of the miniaturists, makes this clear in his final speech addressed to Black and his companions: The old masters of Heart tried to depict the world the way God saw it, and to conceal their individuality they never signed their names. You however are condenmed to signing your names to conceal your lack of individuality. . . (487)

The practice of signing the name on pamtmgs, borrowed from the West, conflicts with a basic Islamic concept: according to the orthodox interpretation, artists should not try to paint or sculpt images of animate obj ects since it constitutes an infringement upon the divine privilege of creating and endowing creations with life. The refusal by early Muslim artists to sign their works was in recognition of the fact that the eventual creator is God himself and not the artist. Western-inspired artists, however, asserted their individuality and began signing their artefacts, resulting in acrimonious disputes. Conflicts of opinion like this are elaborately discussed in the novel, presented in the frame of a detective story. The characters in it have three differing attitudes towards art: the first group consists of the followers of the ardent fundamentalist preacher Nusret Hoja: they are absolutely opposed to painting in all forms since it constitutes an infringement of the right of the creator; the second group is composed of miniaturists who believe in an Islamic orientation of art: according to them, works of art should always stress the primacy of God over the individuality of the artist; the third sect are western-leaning artists, like the Enishte, who draw their inspiration from Western (especially Venetian) masters. The conflict of interests between the three schools triggers the tension in the novel and animates the lengthy discussions on art. It is these conflicts of interest that lead to the second murder as well: Enishte, a firm adherent of the Western masters, is murdered by the same assassin who killed Elegant. The murder is again described in terms elaborately couched in Islamic eschatology: the dying Enishte reaches out for water. Suddenly a strange but ebullient face zooms into view and

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smilingly offers him a glass of water. As he stretches out his hand for it, the glass is pulled back. The face now asks him to denounce the prophet if he is to be served water. Enishte is quick to realize that it is part of the devil' s guile to deceive him. He refuses to acquiesce to his demand. The spirit vanishes only to reappear but soon takes flight as he sees the approaching angel of death, full of light and luminescence. (2 13) The description of Ezrael and the imagery of the light here remind us of Life. Earlier in the novel too we have the description of a miniaturist trying to depict Azrael. He compares Azrael to the arch-angel Gabriel who had spoken to the prophet and admits to the inability of the "artistry of the infidels" to depict the supernatural creatures. (153) Once again, light and luminescence is the overriding motif. Brightness and darkness, virtue and evil, God and Devil, heaven and hell and East and West are the dualisms upon which the plot evolves. Pamuk draws several images and parables from the Quran and other Islamic sources to highlight these dualisms and fashion the architectonics of this complex story. The fate of Elegant, repeatedly compared to the lot of the Prophet Joseph who was similarly thrown into a well, relies upon this motif of the eternal conflict between virtue and evil. But Pamuk does not take sides in this battle. He traces the contours of it with insight and points to the hazy area that marks the boundary between the two. Like Dostoevsky, who he greatly admires, he allows the divergent views and claims to wrestle themselves out in the open without being either party's advocate. In the novel, he even allows the devil to have his say. Like other characters, the devil too speaks in the first person: He begins his address by stating that he wants to set straight certain rnmours circulating about him and warning his listeners against fully disbelieving him for the simple reason that he happens to be the devil. He proudly boasts how his name has been mentioned more than fifty times in the Quran and justifies his proneness to evil as an essential part of the divine scheme. He objects to being held responsible for every paltry sin, be it even that of a masturbating teenager. He similarly sounds peeved at being depicted as ugly and misshapen, while it is most often in the guise of a beautiful woman that he tries to lure people away from the righteous path. He takes issue with scholars like the mystic Mansur and Ahmed Gazzali for refusing to grant him his due by considering him a mere cog in the divine scheme of things. In another chapter a dog makes his peroration, again drawing liberally from the Quran. Due to the ambiguous nature of certain prophetic sayings,

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the creature has always been an obj ect of hatred among some Muslims. In his speech, the dog challenges such widely held prejudices against his species: how can a creature, referred to in most honourable terms in the chapter "Caves" in the holy book, be the object of such scorn and derision for Muslims? Besides the Quran, the novel also liberally draws upon the tradition of the prophet and classical Muslim scholars like Ibn 'Arabi, Gazzali and a host of others. Such allusions include the reference to Karnn, the tyrannical rich Jew who lived during the time of Moses; the punishment to be meted out to idol makers as explained in the prophetic tradition as reported by Bukhari; the Barzakhlin-between zone where the souls will be first transported to after death; the account of the prophet' s heavenly ascent and so forth. Reading the novel, one wonders at the range of Pamuk' s scholarship and his astounding familiarity with ancient Islamic texts. The novel's scathing attack on clerics and priests may also be traced to the Islamic tradition. Some of the Quranic verses are unsparing in their criticism of greedy priests who "sell God's words" for cheap personal ends. (e.g. 5 :42, 9 : 9 and 1 0 : 34) The clerics in Red fit this archetypal pattern. Black is able to bribe a cleric into solemnizing his marriage with Shekure, a union to which he had initially obj ected since the "death" of her first husband was yet to be confirmed. (235) The chapter "I Am a Gold Coin" in a similar vein points to innate human avarice and the undying proneness to greed. The gold coin brags: Nothing's considered valuable anymore besides me, I am merciless, I am blind . . . the unfortunate world revolves around, not God, but me, and there is nothing I can't buy-All this is to say nothing of my dirty, vulgar and base nature. ( 1 27)

Once again the priestly class comes in for some not too gentle raillery: [the gold coin continues its monologue] But despite all such heartless comparison and thoughtless slander, I have realized that a large majority do sincerely love me. In this age of hatred, such heartfelt -even impassioned - affection ought to gladden us all. . . . I've seen every square inch of Istanbul, street by street and district by district; I've known all hands from Jews to Abkhazians and from Arabs to Mingerians. I once left Istanbul in the purse of a preacher from Edirna who was going to Manisa. On the way we happened to be attacked by thieves. One of them shouted, "Your money or your life!" Panicking the miserable

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Chapter Six preacher hid us in his assho1e. This spot, which he assumed was safest, smelled worse than the mouth of the garlic lover and was much less comfortab1e . . . 1 don't dare describe the agony we suffered in that cramped hole. (1 27-8)

From this analysis, it is clear that Red is a novel satnrated with Islamic themes and images. Though many postmodern novels, including those written by authors like Umberto Eco (e.g. Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum) and Louis Borges have made use of images from Islamic mythology and history, they appear peripheral compared with Pamuk and, unlike Rushdie, he packs them with a positive charge which is refreshing.

Snow and the Abyss of Atheism Snow presents the conflict between Islam and the West in most dramatic terms. Despite the author's professed affinity with modernity and western secularism, Islam and Islamists are portrayed sympathetically in the novel. The author, in this sense, has a lot in common with his protagonist Ka, who is accused by the zealot westernizing campaigner Sunay Zaim as one "whose heart belongs to the religious High school militants" despite his intellect belonging to the West. (S 2 1 0) The author' s sympathy for Islamists finds its clearest expression in his portrayal of Necip, the religious school boy who befriends Ka. Ka, a poet of Turkish extraction living in exile is in Kars to study the rising suicide epidemic there. A number of girls in this border town commit suicide because of the school authorities' decision to clamp down on women with headscarves. On his visit to Kars, Ka befriends Necip. Necip is the very picture of innocence and devotion: the nature of his friendship with Fazil, admiration and love for Kadife and the ontological doubts he harbours invest his persona with a religious and spiritnal aura. Necip ' s ambition is to become the world' s first Islamic Science fictionist. He reads out to Ka a story he has been writing. The story is partly autobiographical and narrates life on an imaginary planet called Gazzali in the year 3579. Just as the name of the planet recalls one of the greatest philosophers of Islam, the epistemological and ontological questions the story poses are also couched in Islamic terminology. Despite their material prosperity, the inhabitants of the planet experience a spiritual vacuum and discover that they have to retnrn to their Islamic roots in order to find spiritual solace. To rediscover the wisdom embodied

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in ancient Islamic learning they set up a Lycee where the best students are admitted. Necip ' s story is about two boys studying in the Lycee who happen to fall in love with the same girl. Both are so unselfish that each is willing to sacrifice himself so that the other would be able to consummate his love. Eventually, Fazil is murdered by an assailant and Necip marries the beautiful Hicran. However, they are unable to consummate the marriage as the thought of Fazil haunts them. One night they find the passion too overpowering to resist and fall "upon each other like lunatics." (S 1 07) After making love they switch on the television and on the screen emerges the ghost of Fazil. Fazil narrates his experiences in the other world. The descriptions of hell and heaven he offers are directly drawn from Islamic eschatology. As the novel unfolds, this story within the story proves prophetic. However, in real life it is Necip who dies and paves the way for his friend Fazil to consummate his marriage with their mutual girlfriend. Ka's experiences after meeting with Necip have an added spiritual dimension. Like Necip, he too experiences God' s unseen hand in unexpected places: He feels the divine presence in the snowballs that crystallize around him; just as he recognizes his invisible hand in the poem that takes shape inside him: "When I sense a poem coming to me, my heart is full of gratitude for the sender, because I feel so very happy . . . It is God who sends me poems." (1 26)

He finds the landscape covered with snow and the snow itself as divine manifestations : "The snow reminded me of God . . .o f the beauty and mystery o f creation, of the essential joy that is life . . . now I want to believe in that God who is making this beautiful snow fall from the sky. There's a God who pays careful attention to the hidden symmetry, a God who will make us all more civilized and refined." (98-9) How beautiful, this falling snow. How large the snowflakes and how decisive. It was as if their silent procession would continue until the end of time . . . As he listened to his footsteps and the sound of his own short breath, he could feel the call of happiness as if for the first time, and yet he also felt strong enough to tum his back on it. . . He could barely keep his eyes open; he felt himself floating, as if the whole room, the whole hotel were floating with him. This is why the new poem, which he jotted down in his notebook line by line as it came to him, portrayed the bed, the hotel

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Chapter Six in which he lay and the snowy city of Kars as a single divine entity. (1 6671)

Ka's journey from Nietzsche 's Godless Germany to Kars (embroiled in a battle to preserve its religious moorings) is, in this sense, a pilgrimage from the secular to the sacred. After his conversation with N ecip, he is singularly alarmed thinking of a world devoid of the presence of the divine, and plans writing a poem with the title "The Place Where God Does not Exist." What is so frightening about a godless place is the sense of total loneliness and forlornness it exudes. Necip describes to Ka his horror of such a place in one of the most revealing passages in the novel. The scene is epiphanic : "I love God a great deal," Said Necip . . . Sometimes I ask myself what would happen if-God forbid-God didn't exist-1 do sometimes even without meaning to-a terrifying landscape appears before my eyes . . . 1 see this landscape at night, in darkness, through a window. Outside there are two white walls, as tall as the walls of a castle. Like two castles back to back! There is only the narrowest passageway between them, which stretches into the distance like a road, and when I look down this road I am overcome with fear. The road where God does not exist is as snowy and muddy as the roads in Kars, but it is purple! There is something in the middle of the road that tells me, "Stop !" But I still can't keep myself from looking right down to the end of the road, to the place where this world ends. Right at the end of this world, I can see a tree, one last tree, and it is bare and leafless. Then, because I am looking at it, it turns bright red and bursts into flames. It is at the point that I begin to feel very guilty for being so curious about the land where God does not exist. So, just as suddenly, the red tree turns back to black, so, I tell myself I had better not look again, but then I can't help it, I do look again, and the tree at the end of the world starts burning red once more. This goes on until morning." (1 44-45)

The absence of the divine Centre creates an abyss; a vacuum. It is this vacuum that Necip dreads. The bare leafless tree that continually bums here evokes the picture of hell described in the Quran. In the Quranic hell, sinners undergo a repetitive process of burning into ashes and then getting reequipped with skins only to be singed anew. Necip discusses his fear of the empty landscape with Ka. For him, emptiness and loneliness stand for desolation and despair-akin to what a man abandoned by God feels. It is this solitariness that Benjamin mentioned while describing the predicament of modem man who feels that the "stones in the womb of the earth" and "the planets at celestial heights" have grown indifferent to his fate. (Benjamin, 95) According to Necip, the

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state of atheism entails a fierce loneliness as the word athos suggests. For the atheist, the world is a lonely place even if he/she is surrounded by hislher "intimates" in the coffee house. ( 145) It is the same emptiness that Pamuk feels in his westernized childhood home : . . . in the secular fury of Ataturk's new republic, to move away from religion was to be modern and western; it was a smugness in which there flickered from time to time the flame of idealism. But that was in public; in private life, nothing came to fill the spiritual void. Cleansed of religion, home became as empty as the city's ruined yalis and as gloomy as the fern darkened gardens surrounding them. (1 1 63)

It is this same emptiness that haunts the atheist doctor Selahattin in Silent House. Being a chronic dreamer, and a polymath, Selahattin considers himself to be a secular crnsader against the religiosity of his compatriots. He assumes the surname "Darvinoglu" as a tribute to Charles Darwin, whom he believes to have dealt the death blow to the idea of a God-created universe. Selahattin's greatest mission is to produce an encyclopaedia in the Turkish language, which he hopes would go a long way in curing the Turkish masses of the lingering symptoms of religiosity, something that Ataturk himself described as a "putrid corpse." (Sayyid, 65) Selahattin misses no opportunity to scoff at religion, especially while sparring with his wife Fatma who, despite her husband' s passionate espousal of atheism, clings to faith and religion: Foolish woman, stupid woman, they brainwashed you just like everybody else, there is no God, no hereafter, the other world is a terrible lie they made to keep us in line in this world, there' s no proof of God . . . my duty is to explain to the whole East that there is no God . . . I am ashamed of you, I'm going to make all these people grow up but I can't even put two thoughts in my own wife ' s head, you're such an idiot, at least realize how stupid you are and believe in me . . . (SH 67 -8)

The husband and wife here resemble the less bombastic Adam Aziz and his wife Naseem in Rushdie ' s Midnight's Children. Adam, a physician by profession grows fed up with "Mecca turned parroting," while his wife continues to be passionate about religion. The acrimony on this score reaches a combustion point in the case of the Aziz family, and Naseem stops feeding her husband after he decides to dispense with their children' s religious instrnctor. ( 1 1 ) In the case of Selahattin and Fathima, a tense trnce prevails. Selahattin sacrifices his career as a physician to fulfil his "encyclopaedic" ambition. The project lingers on and even after he spends more than a

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decade and a half trying to put it into shape, it fails to materialize. (SH 1 2 1 ) Meanwhile, the spelling reform comes as bolt from the blue. ( l 05) A book written in the old script can no longer sell in Turkey, let alone be a catalyst for a revolution. The man who thought himself to be the scientific messiah of his people ends up being a clownish recluse begging money from his wife, a once rich heiress who finds herself pushed to the brinks of penury, thanks to her husband' s whimsicality. With no God to tum to, Selahattin finds himself staring into a huge, threatening abyss: I am not talking about the body: where at this point is his [i.e. the dead man's] awareness, feeling his mind? Nowhere. It doesn't exist. You see, Fatma, it's where there isn't anything, buried in what I call Nothingness; it neither sees nor is seen anymore. What a strange, horrifying thought! When I try to summon it my hair stands on end! . . .Whi1e the corpses of our dead are rotting in the nauseating and icy silence of earth . . . what about their consciousness? Ah, that is buried in the bottomless depths of Nothingness; and they topple down an unfathomable abyss head over heels toward eternity, they are like blind men unaware of what is happening to them. And so I don't want to die, when death comes to mind, I want to fight, dear God what an uunerving thing, to know you will just be lost in the darkness, never ever to emerge and never to feel anything . . . you will descend into this lonely nothingness like a stone going to the bottom of a dark sea. . . until you have completely disappeared, all alone in the pitiless icy mud of Nothingness, Fatma, do you understand? (296-97)

This pathetic drawl addressed to his wife illustrates Selahattin' s utter despair at the time of his death. The Godless landscape that godly Necip envisions in his nightmarish imagination and the icy abyss that the ungodly Selahattin conjures up are equally terrifying. Like Sylvia Plath, who complained about the agony of atheism, Selahattin too feels lost and rndderless in a world where God has lost his address. This ontological uncertainty and vacuum he feels counterpoises itself with the certainty and confidence that mark Necip, Kadife and Fazil. Through the portrayal of the distress that Selahattin suffers towards the end of his life, Pamuk strikes, perhaps despite himself, a note that can be read positively in terms of Islamic ontology and its world view. Tom Holland' s comment about Pamuk as a bridge between western culture and a "heritage quite as rich as ours" becomes relevant in this context (unnumbered opening page). The "rich heritage" he refers to is undoubtedly the Islamic heritage. Its influence is palpable in all the works of Pamuk.

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Conclusion This reading shows how the various novels we have examined lend themselves to an interpretation based on the parameters of Islamic aesthetics. In a sense, it is not only in their thematic orientations that Pamuk seems to borrow from Islamic sources. The use of certain narrative strategies in Silent House and Red seem to be influenced by the Quran. The repeated use of rhetorical questions in the perorations of Selahattin, the frequently shifting points of view through which the novelistic plot evolves, and the ingenious juggling of time have rich precedents in Quranic narratives. However, the irony here is remarkable. While the Quran employs these strategies to affirm the centrality of God, Selahattin uses the same strategies to demolish the notion of a theo-centric universe. While trying to convince his wife about the non-existence of God he declaims: After all I have eyes to observe and hands to perform experiments and, thank God, a mind that works better than anyone else's in the country, yes Fatma, have you seen the peaches bloom, . . .have you seen how the fig tree grows uncontrollably, I wonder how ants signal to one another, how the sea rises before the south wind blows and lowers again before the north wind comes, one must notice everything, observe it all, because only that way can science advance, only that way can we develop our minds; otherwise, we are no better than all those people who waste their hours sitting in the corner of cafes, who say oh! when the sky begins to thunder, then run mad with delight, like the devil fleeing two steps at a time, to get to their garden and stretch out on their backs and stare at the darkening clouds until they find themselves soaked to the bone . . . . I guessed that he was going to write about the clouds and that he was merely looking for his excuse to do so, because he used to say: When people realize that everything has its own reason for being, then they won't have room left in their heads for God, because the reason for flowers blooming and the chicken laying eggs and the sky thundering and the rain falling isn't a divine command as they think, but what I describe in my encyclopaedia. Then they'll realize that things are made by other things and absolutely nothing exists by the hand of God. They will see that even if he's there, that God, our science has taken out of his hands everything that he could possibly do, forcing him to content himself as spectator. (1 42)

These lines read very much like the arguments that the Quran uses to affirm the concept of a God-created universe:

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Do they not look at the camels; how they have been created. And at the sky, how it has been raised; and at the mountains how they have been planted firmly and at the earth how it has been spread out. . . (88: 17-20) Allah is he who sends the winds, so that they raise clouds, and spread them along the sky as he wills and then scatters them into fragments, until you see rain drops come forth from their midst! (30: 48)

Selahattin' s arguments constitute an inversion of these arguments in the Quran. But despite his avowed denial of God, Selahattin finds it difficult to wriggle free of the hold that the religion has on him. That is why he thanks God for giving him a "mind better than that of his countrymen." Like Selahattin, Pamuk too finds it difficult to break free of the shackles of religion despite his secularist and western upbringing. Artistically, this is a gain for him because it adds to the rich texture of his works and opens up its dialogic and polyphonic possibilities to the maXImum.

CHAPTER SEVEN INCONCLUSION : THE METROPOLIS AND THE STRANGE VOICE OF THE SUBALTERN

Pamuk' s world explored so far is one largely peopled with elite westernized Turks. In novels like Castle and Red where the temporal focus shifts to medieval times, the characters, though not westernized in clothes and outlook, are those drawn from classes close to the ruling hierarchy. If the novel has been variously described as a "Bourgeois epic" or a "capitalist romance," his works perfectly fit the bill. One need not be a thoroughgoing Marxist critic to take issue with Pamuk for his reluctance to engage with live social issues affecting the downtrodden. Indeed, the reluctance to write "socially committed novels" is something that the author himself makes no bones about: Turkey had a sophisticated tradition of highly refined ornamental literature. But then the socially committed writers emptied our literature of its innovative content. (Oe 367)

It is because of this aversion to socially committed novels that Pamuk , 8 claimed Snow to be his "first and last political novel. , 1 The novel that evokes the spectral landscape of Kars with its history of Armenian massacres is indeed strongly political. It marks an intense engagement with the theme of political Islam and issues related to identity. However, the larger frame of multiple love stories, involving Ka and Ipek on one hand, and Kadife and Blue on the other, greatly deflects attention from these core concerns. Thus, we have the figure of Blue whose Islamist credentials fly in the face of his ill-concealed liaison with Kadife. An Islamist having a secret adulterous relationship with a girl is not inconceivable, but him/her having a public affair a la Kadife and Blue stretches credulity. Freudians might be inclined here to see an instance of the transference of the authorial libido onto the character. Or this might 1 8 https:llemu.edulnow/global-conflicts-global-novels/20 1 6/05/0 5/the-politics-of­ other-peoples-pain-orhan-pamuks-snowl

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entail other explanations like the market dynamics discussed introduction.

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the

The point to be debated is Pamuk' s unwillingness to allow social concerns to interfere with his aesthetic enterprise. As he professes, offering social comments is not his idea of art. (Oe 3 67) Pamuk has largely stuck to this position until Strangeness. Barring those striking passages in Life where he reflects upon the environmental degradation caused by multinationals, his oeuvre is largely bereft of a genuine engagement with pressing social issues like poverty, economic disparity, marginalization, and exploitation. Strangeness marks a radical break with this tradition. It is an intensely political work and effectively gives the lie to Pamuk's statement that Snow was to be his first and last political novel. It is also the only novel (available in English) by Pamuk in which the experiences of the proletarian characters form the main focus. To be sure, Strangeness is not the only novel of his where we have the subaltern presence. In Silent House, for example, there is a plethora of characters drawn from the lower strata of society. Recep, and his nephew Hasan, belong to this category. However, the novel uses them mainly as foils to the main characters from the Darvinoglu family. In Strangeness, on the other hand, the focus is on the subaltern, mainly on Mevlut. Just as the focus shifts to subaltern subj ectivity, the novel also engages with issues such as urban proliferation, environmental degradation, political corruption, ethnic tensions, and the urban-rnral divide, concerns which were marginal in the other novels. Though this means a radical shift of focus, the fictional world of Strangeness is not without the familiar ingredients of Pamuk' s fictional world. The usual concern with time, love, existence, and death strncture the novel's dynamics. Besides, the same melancholic and spectral aura that shrouds Snow, Red, and Black color its geography. But the novel is not as thickly layered as its precursors and there is a perceptible lack of intertextuality which renders the narrative a far cry from the heights of Black and Red. Like Red, it uses multiple points of view but, unlike it, makes use of an omniscient point of view as well. Set against the backdrop of Istanbul through some of its most momentous decades, the family saga simultaneously becomes a history of the city viewed from an underdog' s perspective. The novel grapples with fundamental existential questions. It depicts an individual pitted against an indifferent and at times hostile society. He

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has to battle against powers that are far mightier than him, a fate that is hostile, kinsmen intent on exploiting him, and an official machine that values him as nothing more than a statistic. However, the novel contains one positive note: almost echoing Mathew Arnold's sermonising in "Dover Beach," Pamuk pays homage to the power of love to act as a ballast in the face of the glorious uncertainties that life presents. But even love here is subj ect to the vagaries of fate, and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time. There is almost a Hardian view of fate operating in the story, and individuals, especially those at the lower levels, find themselves fully at its mercy. The crnel fate conspires with the corrupt official system to pulverize people and their eco-systems. Mevlut, the protagonist happens to be a victim of both. But he accepts it with a calm resignation in a way suggestive of the individual' s helplessness against the overwhelming odds stacked against him. The novel also exemplifies Pamuk' s ire at quick money and the false piety used to camouflage its dirty tracks. The epigraph by Rousseau sets the tone: The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying "This is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. (unnumbered opening page)

The novel that problematizes the binaries involving "civil" and "evil" presents many characters that indulge in such fencing off to claim what is not rightly theirs and shut off others. Viewed historically, the genesis of all friction can be traced to this human tendency to appropriate and expropriate. While the expropriated are consigned to perpetual slavery and become stigmatized and ostracized, the appropriating classes become wielders of power, money and influence. In Strangeness, Mevlut and his father Mustafa Karatakas belong to the former category while his uncle Hasan Aktas and his children belong to the latter. They fence themselves off into a cloistered comfort zone depriving Mustafa and Mevlut of their rights. Mustafa dies a shattered old man in miserable circumstances, and Mevlut ends up being a prey to his cousin's machinations. The explanation by Pamuk as to why people named Hasan often appear as negative characters in his novels, has a particular resonance in the context of Hasan Aktas' characterization: When I was little, a boy the same age as I his name was Hasan-hit me just under the eye with a stone from his slingshot. Years later, when -

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Chapter Seven another Hasan asked me why all the Hasans in my novels were evil, this memory returned to me. (Oe 50)

In Strangeness, Hasan is a character who commands readers' ire. He and his brother Mustafa leave their village Cennetpinar hoping to make it big in the city. The allure of hope and the frustrations caused by its failure are recurrent themes of the novel. The city of Istanbul portrayed through its transformations over the decades from the 1 960s to the 201 Os embodies these hopes and frustrations. As in other novels, the city is a powerful trope that represents life and its vagaries as well as the human unconscious, which forms the stage of an equally compelling but ultimately elusive drama that defies logic and rationality (I will be elaborating upon this point later). Hasan and Mustafa arrive in Istanbul at a time when the city still retains its Ottoman aura. It hasn't yet been witness to the rapid urban proliferation and the resultant decadence, nor has it swallowed the neighbouring villages and made them part of its cancerously multiplying cells. The brothers set out to make a fortune selling boza, a fermented and mildly alcoholic drink. They remain close to each other; sleep in the same gecekondu (a single-room shack on unauthorized land) built with their own hands in KUltepe; pool the money they make every day and send a portion of it to their families back home. The camaraderie between them is cemented by the fact that they are married to siblings. However, they fall out following the completion of the house they jointly build at Duttepe. After the house is built, Hasan takes possession of it-in Rousseau's terms, fences himself in-and leaves Mustafa to rot and slave away in the old gecekondu. Mustafa's bitteruess and anger grow proportionally as Hasan's family prospers. At the time of Mevlut's arrival in Istanbul things have already come to a head and the relationship between brothers is on the brink of a breakdown. This shows the peruicious influence of money on human relations. The situation gradually worsens and Mustafa forbids Mevlut from visiting his uncle and cousins. He warus him that his cousins would one day "stab him in the back." (59) Mevlut, the innocent teenager, however, continues meeting his uncle and aunt. In their house he can temporarily forget his desperation, latch onto the little luxuries of city life and enjoy human company. This eurages Mustafa who feels estranged from his own son. The estrangement pulls him further into a cocoon where he has nothing else to nurse but an endless litany of grievances and a fierce sense of loneliness.

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The first chapter itself brings to the fore the theme o f strangeness. Rayiha elopes with Mevlut in his cousin Suleyman' s van. His affair with her dates back a few years. It is at the wedding of his cousin Korkut, son of Hasan, that his eyes first light upon the charming eyes of the girl who happens to be the bride' s sister. Suieyman, Korkut' s brother, convinces him that her name is Rayiha. The elopement is dramatic. Gumusdere, the village to which Rayiha belongs, is hundreds of miles away from Istanbul. It is only once that Mevlut has set his eyes on his would-be-bride before the elopement. All their contacts since have been through letters. Mevlut is assisted by his Kurd friend Ferhat in composing the letters. The letters are never replied to. In the fiercely patriarchal village community of Turkey, it would take unusual boldness on the part of a girl to reply to the letters, and Suleyman convinces Mevlut that Rayiha surreptitiously reads and admires the author of the letters. After a long and adventurous trek through semi-navigable roads, Mevlut casts his first glance at the eyes of the girl that have held him captive for years. It is to those eyes rather than the girl herself that he has written the love letters with the help of dictionaries and friends. But once he looks into those eyes he is disillusioned. They are not the same eyes that had held him mesmerized for years. Mevlut realizes that it is all part of an elaborate deception and, as his dad has forewarned, his cousin has stabbed him from behind. The girl with the bewitching eyes is her younger sister Samiha whom Suleyman plans to marry. His complicity in arranging the elopement is not motivated by fraternal feelings, but by a selfish longing. Unless Rayiha is married off, her father Abdurrahman Effendi would not allow Suleyman to marry his youngest daughter. Mevlut thus becomes a victim of his cousin' s shenanigans. Suleyman' s representation as a villain i s in keeping with the novel' s portrayal of Hasan Aktas and his family members as treacherous capitalists, with no qualms about exploiting others. The elopement scene sets the tone and highlights the central theme, namely the yawning gulf that separates dreams and reality. Humans pursue their dreams like desert travellers chasing a mirage. At the end of their long drawn travails, they realize the futility of the whole enterprise. This makes them permanent exiles from the paradise of their dreams. It is remarkable that the village from which Mevlut and his father migrate is named Cennetpinar. The term "cennat" means paradise and this underlines the exile motif. They become prey to a perennial feeling of alienation

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which creates a vacuum in their minds. The first time Mevlut looks into the eyes of the woman who elopes with him, he is engulfed by this feeling: As he was shutting the door on the girl, there was a flash of lightning, and for a moment, the sky, the mountains, the rocks, the trees---everything around him-lit up like a distant memory. For the first time Mevlut got a proper look at the face of the woman he was to spend a lifetime with. He would remember the utter strangeness ofthat moment for the rest of his life. (7) [emphasis added]

The word "strangeness," introduced for the first time here, recurs several times, serving as a refrain. In a sense it is this word and its associated motifs that hold together the sprawling narrative. Other familiar Pamuk ingredients are visible in the opening chapter itself. Mevlut' s path to his beloved's house takes him through the village cemetery, and he pauses there to make a prayer. This introduces the spectral element, which finds an accentuated relief through a reference to the familiar barking dogs: The dogs barked. The window lit up for a moment and then went dark again. Mevlut's heart began to race. He walked towards the house. . . (5)

Through the darkness Mevlut manages to get near Rayiha and together they begin to run: When they reached the end of the footpath, Mevlut made for the hill ahead, as planned . . . The dogs kept barking a s i f possessed. . . (5-6)

They finally reach Suleyman's van. As the van makes its way through a wooded land Mevlut realizes that he is entering a place of "endless silence:" The rain peppered the roof, the windshield wipers wailed... The forest, dimly lit by the van's pale orange headlights, was thick with darkness. Mevlut had heard how wolves, jackals, and bears met with the spirits of the underworld after midnight; many times at night, on the streets of Istanbul he has come face to face with the shadows of mythical creatures and demons. This was the darkness in which horn-tailed devils, big-footed giants, and horned Cyclops roamed looking for all hopeless sinners and those who had lost their way and whom they would catch and take down the underworld...

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They would be met by barking dogs every time they crossed a village, only to be plunged once again to a silence so deep that Mevlut wasn't sure whether the strangeness was in his mind or in the world. In the darkness, he saw shadows of mythical birds. He saw words written in incomprehensible scripts, and the ruins of demon armies that had traversed these remote lands hundreds of years ago. He saw the shadows of people who had been turned into stone. (8)

The landscape is spectral and haunted by shadows and hom-tailed demons. While this description underlines the novel's hormonal bonds with Black and Red, it also serves to underline Mevlut's difference to characters like Ka, Kemal, Galip and Celiil. Unlike these Westernized secular elites, Mevlut is prone to superstitious forebodings and premonitions. His landscape is peopled with terrifying and phantasmagoric creatures. Despite being a denizen of Istanbul, it is the pulse of the village that determines the rhythm of his heart and it is the creatures of the rnstic imagination that people his mind. On his journey Mevlut thinks of taking Rayiha back to her village so that he can get rid of the wrong woman for good. But it doesn't happen, and he resigns himself to his fate. This decision to calmly accept what fate dictates proves rewarding in his case. Anne Sexton had in a moment of extreme desperation called life "a trick" and a "kitten in a sack." (Phillips, 77) Pamuk, it seems, would agree to the first part of this statement. Thanks to the trick that fate plays, Mevlut finds comfort in the wrong woman who elopes with him. However, out of life ' s bag of tricks spring further surprises: the woman whom Suleyman plans to marry elopes with another man. The novelist holds the reader on tenterhooks for several pages before revealing him to be Ferhat, the schoolmate of Mevlut. Suleyman suspects Mevlut to have been complicit in the elopement and thinks his cousin has finally exacted his revenge. He seethes with rage; takes to drinking and threatens to kill the man with whom Samiha elopes. This provides an opportunity for the novelist to build on an earlier narrative clue. As stated earlier, Pamuk is a craftsman who weaves all his narrative strands into some form of pattern. It is Ferhat who used to help Mevlut compose his missives of love. So marrying the woman for whom he deputized in the writing of the love letters is a natural culmination of events, given the unnatural twists that love takes in Pamuk' s world. Years later Ferhat is killed in mysterious circumstances. Though the authorities fail to solve the crime, Suleyman is suspected of having orchestrated the murder. Meanwhile, many changes take place in the life of the cousins. Suleyman plunges headlong into an acrimonious affair with

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Melahat, a singer; he is forced to marry her when she becomes pregnant. His tempestuous affair with Melahat can be construed as a form of revenge on the world. Rayiha dies; her end is tragic and tinged with bitterness. After several years into their marriage, she realizes how the love letters from Mevlut that she read as a teenager were actually addressed to Samiha and not her. She suspects Mevlut might still be continuing his liaison with her widowed sister. This envenoms her and she seeks revenge in a curious fashion: by subjecting herself to the risky self-abortion of her third child which leads to her death. In these instances, involving Suleyman and Rayiha, there are hints of the secret mechanisms of the human mind and the machinations it devises to exact revenge upon the world, often in a self-destructive and suicidal manner. Despite his pressing and demeaning poverty, Mevlut has been pinning hopes on his third child turning out to be a boy. Rayiha's decision to terminate the pregnancy can be interpreted as a means of getting even with Mevlut who acts as if their marriage is no accident of fate. One of the things his wife says a few days before her death stings him: "Maybe you would be happier if ! would just die and you could marry Samiha." (4 1 4) Rayiha' s death plunges Mevlut into loneliness. To add to this, one after another his children leave him. The elder Fatma falls in love with a boy and marries with her father's consent. The younger Fevziye elopes in a manner reminiscent of her mother, stressing the theme of genetic proclivity in Pamuk. Loneliness adds to Mevlut's sense of desperation. The strangeness in his mind thickens and he is reduced to a spectral presence, wandering the streets at night selling boza for which there is little demand. Few people now want Boza, given the inundation of the market by multinational products of all descriptions. During his somnambulistic wanderings through the innumerable bylanes of the city, an image keeps haunting Mevlut. It is a picture from Righteous Path, a religious journal, showing a graveyard with tilted headstones and ominous cypress trees. Even before Ryiha' s death, the picture has made a definitive impact on him, and after the bereavement it becomes a chronic obsession. By another curious twist of fate, Mevlut marries his widowed sister-in­ law Samiha, the woman to whom he had written letters as a teenager. But it is after the marriage that a stark realization hits him: it was really the "wrong" woman that was made for him and not the woman whom he had passionately adored. Samiha proves bossy; unyielding, and makes Mevlut

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yearn for Rayiha. These are the curious mechanisms o f love which, for Pamuk, always has something tricky and elusive about it. The strangeness in Mevlut's mind grows thicker and the marriage aggravates it. He has repeated visions of the old graveyard scenery from the Righteous Path, but together with it he also sees another vision: Rayiha waiting for him in "a palatial old wooden mansion." (580) But even after taking several turns, the entrance to the mansion eludes him. The disjunction between desire and reality is again hammered home. However, Mevlut derives solace thinking that he would "make it to heaven" once he dies; the palatial house where Rayiha waits for him is probably in the Elysium and not anywhere in this world. (582) The novel ends abrnptly but on a positive note. Mevlut is back on the streets at night to sell boza. Despite all the setbacks he suffers, including the strange behaviour of the street dogs that growl at him menacingly, and the steep fall in the demand for boza, he feels a surge of optimism. To kindle it, a man from the third floor of an apartment calls out to him and invites him into their house. It is a large family with numerous kids, grandfathers and grandmothers. They are delighted to see a boza seller still plying his trade. They buy five kilos of boza and pay him generously, refusing to accept the balance he owes them. The family is in a mood of anticipation as the Feast of Sacrifice is looming. This encounter is symbolic as it points to the invincibility of tradition in a rapidly westernizing Istanbul. The large extended family, their love for the traditional drink, and their appreciation of the hawker point to the ability of the tradition to claw its way back from the debris of old shacks and demolished schools. That night Mevlut also has another reassuring experience. The dogs that are in the habit of growling menacingly at him move past him without baring their teeth or displaying their ugly demeanour. As he walks down the street towards Golden Hom, he feels like "descending into oblivion." Suddenly a realization strikes him with scalding, epiphanic clarity. He wants to scrawl the message all across the skies and walls of Istanbul. He declares to himself: "I have loved Rayiha more than anything in this world." (584)

The City as a Symbol Like Black, Strangeness is a novel pivoted around a central symbol­ the city. In both novels, it is the geography of Istanbul that animates the poetry of the prose. In Strangeness, the city embodies several thematic ramifications. They can be broadly summarized as: a) alienation; b) the

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lure and allure of glory and achievement; c) flux and uncertainty; d) the dualities of life and death; e) the dialectics of consciousness and the unconscIOUS. Alienation : As discussed earlier, the most important aspect of the city that Strangeness stresses is its alienating quality. The title, drawn from Wordsworth's The Prelude, suggests the strangeness to which urban men are prone. Like the psychotic Esther Greenwood in Plath's The Bell Jar suffering from a feeling of being cut off, the city dwellers feel invisible glass screens separating them from their immediate environment. This is stressed via the recurring use of the word "strangeness." This feeling of strangeness that has been gnawing away at Mevlut's soul ever since the elopement gradually intensifies to a degree that he becomes a stranger even to himself:

That night, Mev1ut was roaming around Ferikoy like a sleepwalker, crying "Bozaa," when his feet led to a cemetery. The moon was out; the cypress trees and gravestones alternated between a silver gleam and a thick blackness. Mev1ut took a paved road through the middle of the cemetery, feeling as ifhe had picked a path in a dream. But the person walking in the cemetery wasn't him, and it was as if his life too, were happening to someone else. (258)

There is a time when Mevlut thinks that he has been able to forge strong bonds with the city. But the mature realization he develops is of insuperable alienation; of being a perpetual stranger in the city where he has lived since his early teenage years: For the first thirty-five, every year that went by seemed to strengthen his bond with the city. Lately, however, he'd begun to feel increasingly alienated from it. Was it because of that unstoppable, swelling flood, the millions of new people coming to Istanbul and bringing new houses, skyscrapers and shopping malls with them. (573)

After Rayiha' s death, the city's alienating character strikes him with renewed ferocity. Rayiha' s presence had a soothing maternal quality about it. Her death, together with the demolition of his old school building-the symbolic alma mater or bounteous mother-makes him a typical orphan in the metropolis. Things come to a head on the night of 3 0th March 1 994 : Mevlut is robbed at knife-point and attacked by a pack of dogs. The insistence on the date marks the definitive rnpture. In order to assuage his fear, he approaches a religious man known for spiritual healing. But the visit compounds his worries. The Holy Guide

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speaks o f the long history o f battle between men and dogs in Istanbul, of Mahmud-ll' s writ to either annihilate or exile the street dogs to the Wretched Island, and of the canine massacre that followed the First World War. With such a "wealth of experience in their blood," the dogs in Istanbul have a keen sense of their friends and enemies. And the dogs, the Holy Guide warns him, can sense the people who do not "belong" to us. (458) For Mevlut, this is a revelation, a reassertion of his unconscious realization that, despite living in Istanbul for most of his life and having the bones of his dear ones interred there, he still remains an outsider. Like Abdurrahman Effendi, another villager and Mevlut' s father-in-law, the city now appears to him like a giant "monstrous creature." (327) The depiction of economic migrants as a ghostly and threatening presence in cities in the modem political taxonomy becomes relevant in this instance. (Blanco and Peeren, X) However, this alienation has to do not only with the fact of his being an outsider in Istanbul but also with the internal dynamics of the city. The cityscape undergoes such changes which render even the seasoned inhabitants strangers. For Pamuk, the dynamics of the city deprive its denizens of their organic dynamism. The demolition drives that saw the pulling down of the gecekondu where he lived with his dad for years is another telling blow, like the tearing down of the old school building. When the time came for his own one-room house, Mev1ut felt his heart breaking. He observed his whole childhood, the food he'd eaten, the homework he had done, the way things had smelled, the sound of his father grunting in his sleep, hundreds of thousands of memories all smashed to pieces in a single swipe of the bulldozer shovel. (559)

In fact, there is much of the author Orhan in his "Orphan" character. The anxiety that Mevlut feels in the fast metamorphosing metropolis reflects Pamuk' s own anxieties about Istanbul' s transformations. These are the anxieties that Pamuk sketches in Istanbul through the portrait of the young author wandering the streets in search of obscure obj ects that serve to remind him of its past. (1 3 1 8-20) Just as Mevlut has tied his identity and self to the gecekondu he shared with his father, Pamuk too considers his childhood home as the "centre for the world," and having to leave the same is for him an ordeal that he tries to resist with all the childhood resources of intransigence. (1 79)

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A fast-changing city that bears the burden of history inspires nostalgic feelings in its inhabitants. Pamuk' s art invests heavily in this nostalgia. But while it fuels his imagination and proves to be a positive strength for his art, it does not fail to exact an emotional toll on his characters. The perpetual aura of melancholy that shrouds the city-which Pamuk calls Huzun in Turkish-is triggered by this nostalgia. It imbues the landscape with a ghostly and spectral quality. In this sense, the alienation that the denizens of Istanbul feel has a collective dimension to it. Pamuk compares it to the Tristesse described by Levi Strauss: "Tristesse is not a pain that affects a solitary individual; huzun and Tristesse both suggest a communal feeling, an atmosphere, and a culture shared by millions." (1 90)

Lure and allure The city in Pamuk stands for the allure of temptations. Mevlut's dad Mustafa and uncle Hasan reach Istanbul lured by the temptations of prosperity. Mustafa ends up in desperate straits thanks to his brother's betrayal and skulduggery. Hasan, though he succeeds financially, ends up as a sad and disheartened man in his apartment in a twelve-storey building. He cannot come to terms with the apartment culture and grows even "sick of [the] doctors" who want to cure him. (574) Though the city has given him much, it eviscerates him of vital emotional ingredients. In the case of Mevlut, the city tempts him as a teenager and youth with its many-fangled charms but leaves him emotionally drained. In a sense, the allure of the city is best captured in the novel through the figure of Neriman. This section is appropriately subtitled "What Makes the City a City." Neriman is a tall attractive woman towards whom Mevlut develops a fancy during his initial years in Istanbul. For days on end, he stalks her from her house all the way to the British Airways office where she is employed. Mevlut doesn't know her name, nor does the young woman ever get to know that she is being stalked by the teenager. Mevlut, in his secret fantasy, calls her Neriman after the woman in a TV film who fights bravely to defend her chastity. He fantasises more glamorous feats while tagging her, like some lousy guys pouncing on her, and he rushing to help, leading to an unbreakable life-long bond. These fantasies never materialize, as each time Mevlut senses some opportunity, for instance, when she is accosted by a pair of young men or menacingly canvassed by a hawker of contraband cigarettes, things fizzle-out before hitting the climax warranting

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his intervention. Mevlut' s affair with Neriman ends without making any headway. Neriman can be seen as an archetypal representative of the allure of the city. The city is an eternal temptress, a veritable and at times fatal Fata Morgana. It draws people into its vortex through several false promises and eventually leaves them in the lurch like desert travellers chasing mIrages. In the city-village dualism that the novel initially builds but doesn't carry to any logical conclusion, Pamuk posits the guile of the city against the gullibility of the village. While Neriman symbolizes urban guile, Mevlut and Rayiha represent rnral gullibility. The Aktas family, consisting of Mevlut's uncle and cousins, who migrate to the city as a family, are able to internalize the values and moralities of the city; hence they also embody its vices and avarice, unlike Mevlut and his father who remain partial migrants thanks to his mother' s refusal to leave the village. (436)

Flux and transitoriness The novel depicts the city as a site of flux and transitoriness. This is fully captured in the epigraph by Baudelaire in Part-vii: The form of a city Changes faster, alas ! than the human heart. (56 1 )

The changes that take place in Istanbul once Mevlut reaches there are mindboggling. It makes him feel like an eternal stranger. The earthquake that shakes the city in 1 999 shatters all illusion of permanence. Mevlut reflects on the fate of people living in constant fear of bigger quakes: The new tall buildings that were replacing his generation's gecekondu homes would also disappear one day, along with all the people who lived inside them. He would sometimes have a vision of the day when all the people and all the buildings were to vanish, and he would feel then as if it wasn't really worth doing anything at all, that he might as well give up any expectations he may have had of life. (555-6)

In Mevlut's anxieties we have Pamuk' s own cogitations on the ephemerality and transitoriness of existence, and the premonition of an imminent catastrophe. Mevlut's doubts as to whether it is worth doing anything in such a transitory world have the familiar resonance of the

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existential questions that have haunted artists since antiquity, 1.e. the relevance of artistic endeavour against the ephemerality of life. The city which changes its colors and contours all through the day and night impresses upon people this inevitability: What faced him now was a vast wall of windows . . .They stared out dark in the morning and changed colour throughout the day; at night, they shone with a glow that seemed to turn the night overhanging the city into a sort of daytime. As a child, he had always liked looking at the city lights from afar. There was something magical about them. But he had never seen Istanbul from so far up. It was dreadful and dazzling at once. Istanbul could still make him flinch, but even now at fifty five years of age, he still felt the urge to leap right into this forest of staring buildings. (578)

The above passage captures the ephemeral nature of the city-scape, its deceptiveness and magical charm. The urge that Mevlut feels to leap into its lap suggests the longings of a child for the Jungian maternal presence.

Life and Death Just as he does in Black, Pamuk uses the city as a symbol of life, death, and the unconscious in Strangeness. For Mevlut, the teeming metropolis incarnates the very essence of life and death. The initial years that he spends in the village in the company of Kamil, his dog, is presented as a foetal stage in his life. It is Istanbul that represents true life for him. Later in life when he returns to the village as a widower in the company of his daughters, he does not feel at home in the rnral surroundings. The rnral life makes little sense to him, and he realizes that it is the pulse of Istanbul that now throbs inside him: The village was a dead end, and they could no longer be anything more than guests there. He did want to go back to the city. His life, his fury, his happiness, Rayiha---everything revolved around Istanbul. (435)

Though the city thus signifies life for Mevlut, it also embodies death as suggested by the ubiquitous and eerie presence of graveyards. Pamuk' s fictional landscape i s universally filled with death and graveyards, but in Strangeness there are more references to the graveyard than in other novels. For Mevlut, the poster of the graveyard that first decorates the wall of his shop, and later transposed to his house, is an object of fetishistic obsession. His wanderings while selling boza on the city streets involuntarily lead him to graveyards. The obsession becomes fiercer after Rayiha' s

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death. He makes frequent visits to her grave and derives comfort thinking that his prayers would aid his wife's eternal deliverance. This obsession with graveyards reaches a climactic point towards the end as he begins to conceive of the whole city, with its towering skyscrapers, as a huge necropolis: The idea that Rayiha was waiting for him in a wooden mansion somewhere along these streets could be a figment of his imagination, but equally it could be true .. .It might just be his imagination that the distant skyscrapers he'd seen from Suleyman's balcony looked like the gravestones in the picture from the Righteous Path just as he had given to feel that time had started running faster. .. (58 1 ) -

The images o f the dead wife aWaItmg him, and the city itself metamorphosing into a graveyard become intricately interwoven motifs here.

The Unconscious Strangeness makes use of the city symbol to suggest the unconscious in a less pronounced manner compared with Black, where there is symmetry between the conscious and the unconscious worlds, despite the latter' s preponderance over the former. In Strangeness this has been reversed and it is the consciousness that gains greater relief. It is in the latter part of the novel, when Mevlut becomes a loner following his wife's death and is prone to a paranoid fear of dogs, that the unconscious gains a substantial acknowledgement in the novel. In the initial chapters, describing Mevlut's school and military experiences, the unconscious is conspicuous by its absence. After Rayiha' s death, Mevlut trudges along the Istanbul streets like a spectre. He feels like the streets are getting "longer" and the city itself metamorphizing into a "bottomless black well." (508) The image of the black well recalls the same image in Black (BB 3 52, 3 82) where it is used to symbolize the unconscious and its hidden spectral terrors. In both these instances, the spectral and the unconscious are deeply intertwined and this entwinement is buttressed through the twinning of the city with the unconscIOUS. The chaos and confusion haunting the city are associated with the fear and threat lurking in the unconscious; the ogres, Cyclops and other monsters lurking at the bottom of the "bottomless" wells of the

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unconscious. The ubiquitousness of the menacing dogs that populate the Istanbul streets and graveyards symbolize the lurking fears that the city/unconscious hides within it. During one of his wanderings, Mevlut wonders how the Istanbul streets at night have been "ruled" by the "same pack of stray dogs" since Ottoman times. (345) The dogs taking over the city at night represent the taking over of the conscious by the unconscious once the night descends. Unlike the kindly dog that guides us to our destination, as we have in the Jungian archetype, the dogs in Strangeness are a menacmg presence: Whenever they heard Mevlut's footsteps and his voice crying "Boza," they would get up from where they were napping, or cease rifling through people's rubbish, and assemble together like soldiers in battle formation to watch his every move and maybe even bare their teeth in a grow1...(346)

The dogs here incarnate the worst fears of ordinary Turkish citizens. Their martial instincts and the fact that they are descendants of the same packs that have ruled over Istanbul streets since Ottoman times point to the weight of the past and contemporary history that looms large in the un/consciousness of the average Istanbulite. For the denizens living under the constant threat of authoritarian regimes and military coups, the dogs with their threatening teeth appear like soldiers armed with firearms and evil aims. Like the unconscious, the city's ways are mysterious. Having lived in Istanbul for many years and acquainted himself with its nooks and crannies, Mevlet realizes how "behind every drama and in every battle there was always someone else pulling the strings." (3 7 1 ) In the city one is often forced to hide things from everyone, sometimes even from oneself, like the unconscious that is prone to self-deception. As Ferhat boldly puts it: "WHAT MAKES CITY LIFE MEANINGFUL IS THE THINGS WE HIDE (47 1)." [emphasis in the original] The city forces its residents to hide things even from their own selves which render them strangers to themselves: That night, Mevlut was roaming around Ferikoy like a sleepwalker, crying "Bozaaa," when his feet led him to a cemetery, feeling as if he'd picked a path in a dream. But the person walking in the cemetery wasn't him, and it was as ifhis life, too were happening to someone else. (258)

Like the unconscious, the city is infinite and "never ends." (252) The winding, labyrinthine streets housing "gray ghosts" and "spectres" reaffirm the city's affinity with the unconscious. Again, like the unconscious, the city

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is cacophonous and filled with an "incessant litany of scream and squabble." (372)

Social Criticism Strangeness gains a strong political dimension through its criticism of the ills, exploitation, and economic inequalities prevailing in Istanbul. For Pamuk, just as the city is a source of life, it is equally a site of corruption and immorality. It is through the figure of Hadji Hamit Vural that he sketches the avarice and corruption that plagues the city. Vural has started as grocer in his native Rize. In Istanbul he becomes a baker cum constructor by illegally grabbing vacant lands and building high-rises. He becomes a huge business magnate with a battalion of hoodlums and musclemen to mobilize his resources and protect his empire. Mevlut's cousins attach themselves to Vural and claim a share of the spoils. Though depicted in the mould of an underworld don, pulling the strings of what happens in the over-world through devious means, Vural exhibits deep religiosity with a dash of generosity to boot. He gifts a watch to Mevlut on his wedding and is instrumental in building the mosque at Dupatte. These tokenisms may be interpreted as cleverly calculated measures by a shrewd businessman to hide his avarice and evil designs. However, it should be noted that the author does not depict Vural as out and out evil despite his egoism and shenanigans. For Pamuk, people belong to several intermediate shades between wholly evil and fully virtuous, and Vural is no exception. But Pamuk is unsparing about the environmental degradation that the likes of Vurals cause. The novel can be treated as a long-drawn elegy for the Istanbul that once had an assortment of green spots and pastoral landscapes. Dupatte and Kultuppe were two such hills that fell victim to the avarice of the Vurals, and Pamuk waxes nostalgic about their fate. What he finds more condemnable about such developers, however, is not the environmental degradation they trigger but their involvement in aggravating social tensions. The Vurals, in order to further their business schemes, stoke ethnic and religious tensions by inflaming hatred towards the Kurds and the Alevis. By instigating riots against the Alevis, Vural' s men drive them out o f their settlements and seize their lands. Pamuk's criticisms on this score remind uS of his attack of the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Snow. In both instances, Pamuk directs his criticism at the official machinery that colludes with the aggressors.

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Militarization Strangeness contains vehement criticisms of the military establishment and the militarization of citizens through its ultra-nationalistic schooling system. For Pamuk, the military is a giant combustion engine that crushes individuality and forces conformity. Throughout, the novel enacts a conflict between what have been termed as the private and public views of the individuals. For the novelist, Turkey bears the hallmarks of a dystopian republic where people are forced to accommodate their private views to that of the public view force-fed by the government. The military and the compulsory military training are a means of achieving this. The very recrnitment process is calibrated to dehumanize and deindividualize the conscripts. Mevlut blushes when he is asked to undress for physical examination. But he is assured by an elderly physician that "we are all men here." To Mevlut's chagrin, he has to wait in the queue for hours in such a state of undress. He soon realizes that the army is determined to masculinize him in the most inhuman way. By the time he goes to serve in the military barracks in Kars, his language and mannerisms undergo such change that his old school-mate Mohini finds it hard to comprehend the transformation that the military has wreaked on his character. He remarks that the army has "fouled" both Mevlut's mouth and soul. ( 1 88) But despite its unhuman aspect, the military does not remain immune to the vices of racism or classism. The privileged people with money and power manage to dodge compulsory military training. Even among the recruited, those with power and pelf are treated more humanely than those from disadvantaged sections; and one who finds himself on the wrong side of the religious/ethnic divide suffers the worst brutality. Thus the Alevis and the Kurds bear the brunt of the officers' fury. The deleterious effect that military training has on the individual psyche is what Ahmet, a fellow trainee, meant when he expresses his bewilderment about whether people in the army become dumb because of the thrashing they receive or whether it is because they are dumb that they receive so much thrashing. According to Mevlut, Ahmet and his friend Emre are emboldened to make such sarcastic comments because one owns a haberdashery and the other a real shop. One at least has to own a shop to make such sweeping remarks he tells himself. Pamuk here gives vent to the unspoken voice and fury of the subaltern who has been deprived of all agency and dignity because of his dispossessed state. But Mevlut is lucky; though he owns neither a shop nor a haberdashery, he is better treated than his fellow Kurds and Alevis. A

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Kurd trainee is treated so maliciously by his captain that the young man commits suicide by hanging himself with his belt. ( 1 82) The army is also a hub of corruption as Mevlut realizes during his post-training placement in Kars. In Kars, the military officials treat the recruits with unconcealed superciliousness and disdain. They have to cater not only to the officers' whims but also to their wives' fancies, and steering clear of the back-biting in which the uniformed men and their wives indulge in calls for tact and tacituruity. Mevlut navigates the minefield thanks to his friend Mohini. Mohini's skill at hair dyeing helps him gain proximity to the military officers' wives. However, it is no easy task; he has to be scrupulous about dividing his attention to the wives of the officers as it suits their ranks. Through Mohini, Mevlut worms his way into the inner circles of the army top brass and comes to be known as someone close to officers' wives. From then onwards none of his superiors dare flick his ear or shout at him. Satire might not be Pamuk' s forte, but in Strangeness he comes up with a few Orwellian flourishes. The army and its henpecked officers form the butt of his ridicule. Of course, this is not the first instance in Pamuk where he pokes fun at Turkey' s dreaded military establishment. In Black, we have an instance of this in the caricatured portrait of the army officers whose craving for well-made pavements is prompted by a sincere desire to walk their dogs like Europeans and watch them shit. ( 1 88) Mevlut's school life forms another section where the author is genially satirical. For Pamuk, the school, like the military, is a dehumanizing institution, force-feeding patriotism and ensuring mechanical complicity. The dreaded vice-principal "Skull" epitomizes this authoritarianism. Like the military, the school forces children into believing in the greatness of being a Turk; it teaches them to revere Ataturk, and sing the national anthem in unison. For the teachers at the school, "being Turkish was the best thing in the world." (90) But the fault lines in the society rear their ugly heads in the school too. Children from less privileged groups are derisively treated by the teachers who prefer not to hide their alarm at the rising number of immigrant students they have to teach. Mevlut's father desires a prosperous future for his son and dreams of him becoming a "professor," the first one from their village. But the teachers weren't kind to the immigrant child and seldom encouraged his scholastic ambitions. For them, an immigrant child who did street hawking at night was not destined for big things in life and was at the most to be a hospital attendant or male nurse.

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The school section in Strangeness, despite its attack on pedagogical infantilism and nationalistic jingoism, smacks of pedestrianism The brief sections describing Galip ' s and Ruya' s schooling in Black scintillate with dark energy, whereas Mevlut's school life appears like pencil sketches etched on bathroom walls, lacking the depth and multidimensionality of vintage Pamuk.

Cracks in Craft? This chapter was meant to be the last. But before I could complete it Pamuk has come up with another novel, necessitating an additional epilogue on The Red-Haired Woman. What this, so far the last novel of Pamuk, has torpedoed are my plans of a "fitting" conclusion about Pamuk' s Wordsworthian decline in creative genius. Many sections in Strangeness mark a descent from the heights of Red and Black, two novels where craft and content combine to create incandescent effects. Their prose is sublime poetry bereft of the prosaicness of the mundane. However, in Strangeness where Pamuk leaves his home terrain of upper­ class Istanbul society and lends his ear to the subaltern voices of the gecucondus, the language-probably befitting the lack of artifice and grandeur that characterizes proletarian lives-fails to soar to the heights of his earlier works. One of the themes that the novel should have developed is the village­ city dualism that it hints at while describing the migration of Mevlut or, earlier, that of his father-uncle duo. But the village scenes are too few and the theme fizzles out without maturating. This debilitates the plot and makes the narrative lopsided. Pamuk has indeed tried to use the same techniques like refrains, verbal echoes, and color motifs, as in Red and Black, to hold together the sprawling narrative. However, the pervasive use of the color symbolisms that mark the two is marginal in this bildungsroman where a blackish greyness seeks to replace the seductive redness and the ominous blackness of its predecessors. But the symbolism is largely muted and less effective thanks to its shallow and sporadic nature. As in the other novels, the greyness is visible from the cover and invoked with reference to graveyards and the sky, but is not sustained with the same consistency. The black and white photograph given after the last chapter, a not so usual practice in novels, augments this aura of greyness.

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The references to dogs, graveyards and the sky largely dispense with strong color motifs and their greyness and reddish brownness are more suggestive of vacuity and blankness that haunt the life of the protagonist. As an orphan in a city who carried in his head a childish innocence, Mevlut's life is one sans couleur and the eeriness of the landscape seems to empathize with this mood. This absence of strong colors is evident in the two pictures that make a powerful impact on him, unlike the multiple miniatures in Red awash with cacophonous colors and elaborate illuminations. One is the picture of the graveyard that appears in the Righteous Path, the other the one he comes across in an old magazine in the school library. It is the picture of a reddish brown dog, one resembling the innumerable strays populating the Turkish streets. The article is titled "Can Dogs Read People's Minds?" (87) Mevlut's cynophobic response to the sight of canines can be traced to this article that has a profound impact on him. The fact that his encounters with dogs often occur at graveyards adds to the threatening aspect of the dogs and invests them with a spectral motif. However, these colors are seldom done with the same symbolic intensity or artistic strength as in Black or Red. Unlike Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses or even Black, all of which use a compressed time-frame to weave their epic city narratives, Pamuk uses an expansive temporal canvas to uuravel the plot of Strangeness. This strategy has a debilitating effect on the centripetal energy of the work. In a sense this must have been a deliberate strategy. The temporality of the hardworking proletariat is bound to the rigors and uncertainties of daily life, unlike that of the upper-class people ensconced in their comfort zones, like Mrs Dalloway or Gallip. For Mevlut, time moves slowly as he navigates his way on foot along the crime and fear-infested streets of the city, negotiating a precipitous existence. For him, each step counts and he must have covered thousands of miles on foot selling boza. For him, the contours of life were determined by these long and solitary walks. They define his very ontology. To give it a Derridean twist we can even say this ontology is constantly marked by a hauntology, given the ubiquitousness of the spectral ruins, graveyards and threatening canines that litter his path. In this sense, the use of the Wordsworthian phrase "A Strangeness in my Mind" as the title has an added inter-textual resonance. While walking is a means for earuing a livelihood for Mevlut, it was a form of therapy and stimulant for the English poet. De Quincey Writes: [Wordsworth's] legs were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs; not that they were bad in any way which would force itself upon your notice-there was no absolute deformity about them; and undoubtedly

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Chapter Seven they had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard of human requisition; for I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 1 75,000 to 1 80,000 English miles-a mode of exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and other stimulants whatsoever to animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is most excellent in his writings. (De Quincey, 242)19

Though neither a poet nor a philosopher, walking inspires Mevlut to cogitate on the intricacies of life and the mysteries of time; In fact, it is this tendency to think over such issues that engenders the "strangeness" in his mind; this renders him an alter-ego of the author-philosopher and the intellectual kin of the English poet: But he liked old things: the feeling of walking into one of those cemeteries he discovered while selling boza in distant neighbourhoods, the sight of a mosque wall covered in moss, and the unintelligible Ottoman writing on a broken fountain with its brass taps long dried up . . .And once in a great while, he noticed the storks flying overhead and realized that the seasons were passing, another winter was over, and he was slowly getting older. (3 1 9)

The nostalgia in these lines has an unmistakable Wordsworthian ring. This, together with the sense of alienation, makes Strangeness a work imbued with the romantic ethos that catalyzed the poetry of Wordsworth and other English romanticists. The long winding passages of the novel, often tedious, are probably part of the attempt to recreate the tedium of Mevlut's own life. In this sense, there is method in this ploy of making the narrative less racy and more slow-paced compared with Red or Black. We have precedents in modem European fiction for such a clever manipulation of narrative time to synchronize it with actual time, with isochronic novels representing the apogee of this tendency. For a lesser example, we have Toni Morrison altering the pace of her narrative in Tar Baby as the locale changes from Isle De Chevaliers to New York. While she devotes several passages to describe a few days ' happenings on the island she unfolds the action in New York in a few quick strokes to suggest the hectic pace of New York life. As she moves to Eloe, a remote mral area, the narrative pace again slackens in tune with the unhurried tempo of mral life.

19 https:llwww.cairn.infolrevue-etudes-anglaises-2010-l -page-1 8.htm

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Deliberate or not, this strategy deprives Strangeness o f the density of Red and Black. Another reason for this lack is the absence of the rich intertextnality and allusiveness of its precursors. Again, this probably has to do with the differing psychological and cultural locale-like Bourdieu's habitus-that the characters of the novel inhabit more than a weakening of O authorial genius akin to what Hazlitt and others detected in Wordsworth? At least this is what Pamuk has demonstrated through his latest novel, The Red-Haired Woman where his trademark color symbolisms, spectral haunting, and postmodern playfulness and intertextuality are summoned to pull off a spectacular aesthetic feat. Before I move on to discuss this latest novel, it will be appropriate to offer a brief commentary on the political vision Pamuk presents in Strangeness which seems to be in full consonance with the views presented in Snow, his avowedly "political" novel. Though the novelist as a thorough-going artist is reluctant to spell it out in as many words, it is not hard to decipher the message to be one of inclusivity and symbiosis against exclusivity and xenophobia. This idea pits itself by default against over-ambitious development plans that threaten the environment, and aggravate religious and ethnic fault-lines in a social formation. This is the reason for the sympathetic rendering of Kurds and Alevis in Strangeness and the righteous anger expressed against the Armenian massacre in Snow. This shows the humanistic concerns of Pamuk which elevates him from a pure aesthete to a writer with social commitment aspiring for a more egalitarian world.

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https://www.newyorker.comlmagazine/200 5/1 2/05/strange-fits-of-

CHAPTER EIGHT EPILOGUE : THE INEXHAUSTIBLE WELL OF STORIES

Pamuk presents his third novel The White Castle as a document that is perchance discovered by Faruk Darvinoglu, a character in his second novel Silent House, at the archive attached to the Goveruor' s office in Gebze; one of the books that Alaadin in Black stocks in his shop is titled "Redheaded Woman"; in The New Life the book that Osman reads is titled "The New Life" itself. Museum describes how Kemal' s choice of Orhan Pamuk as the author of his love story was motivated by the high esteem he had of the latter after reading Snow. These are some of the instances that leave one wondering whether Pamuk does have his final oeuvre and wares ready before him in an archetypal form before he actually comes up with the definitive works. The Red Haired Woman is certainly a book that a savvy shopkeeper like Aliiadin would keep on his shelves. It has all the ingredients to titillate and tantalize, but certainly it is not mere fun and frolic as the image of the radiantly resplendent red-haired woman on the cover might suggest. The book contains deep philosophical cogitations on the nature of existence, maturation and individuation, the role of stories and story- telling in making sense of the chaos that surrounds our being, and grave speculation on the environmental threats facing the metropolitan man. The novel also marks Pamuk's returu from the "pedestrian world" of the subalteru boza sellers to his default territory: upper class Istanbul. Pamuk is certainly more at home on this terrain, redolent as it is with history, fables and gossip. Unlike Mevlut's world, shot through with anxieties of the daily struggle against hunger, this zone is marked by strife of a different order, one the author is familiar with. Not surprisingly, unlike Strangeness the novel contains many autobiographical fragments. If Strangeness, as I argued in the previous chapter, might suggest a Wordsworthian regression in creative talent, Red Haired suggests its rejuvenation.

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The story is a dexterous reworking of two ancient legends that have to do with filial tension and patricide. In this sense, it exemplifies John Barth's postulations on the "Literature of Replenishment." As his examples for "replenishment" Barth quotes Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Calvino' s status as "replenisher," according to Barth, owes to his ability to negotiate between the ancient story telling traditions of his country (derived from the likes of Boccaccio) and modem narrative techniques. (Barth, 1 984 : 204) Pamuk displays this ability in equal measure and the Red-Haired is a testimony to the feat. However, Pamuk draws his inspiration not only from the story telling traditions of the orient but in equal measure from that of the occident. The fusion of the myth of Oedipus with that of Sohrab and Rustum, the two fables that form the frame of the Red-Haired, attests to this. This strategy is reminiscent of My Name is Red. Like the earlier novel, the red motif dominates the novel' s canvas, pushing other key motifs like the well, water and stars into lesser prominence. The "red," in this instance, is more suggestive of "lust" than "love," and "female guile" and "male gullibility." As I argued in my discussion of Pamuk' s treatment of love, the male in this instance becomes a tool in the hands of the better-equipped female who manipulates him to her advantage. Besides these two stories, the novel blends Quranic and Biblical stories of Jacob and Joseph and Abraham and Ishmael to highlight the complex nature of the father-son relationship. For Pamuk, this relationship is one marked by deeply ambivalent feelings of mutual admiration, affection and antipathy. Its complex nature owes as much to Oedipal feelings as to genetic proclivities and cultural conditioning. In order to uuravel this complexity, Pamuk has recourse to two myths, one featuring patricide (Oedipus Rex) and the other filicide (Sohrab and Rustum). In Red-Haired, there is both patricide and filicide. The novel combines these with the theme of ecocide, and with vague echoes of matricide. By combining these various strands the novel becomes a tour de force in which the mundane merges with the mysterious and the epochal with the epical. Cern, the protagonist of the novel is an amalgam of various mythical characters transplanted into a modem setting. He is Oedipus and Sohrab, and Joseph and Ishmael rolled into one. Like Oedipus, he is guilty or presumed to be guilty of patricide and, like Sohrab; he is a victim of filicide. He is abandoned by his dad a la Ishmael and finds himself in a desperate situation deep inside the well, not unlike the young Joseph. Just as it happens in Joseph' s myth, the novel enacts the allure of sin and the higher aspiration towards the heavenly realm. This is illustrated through

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repeated references to the stars in the novel that evokes the memory of Joseph' s dream.

Cern's Encounter with the Depths Before dwelling on the mythological resonances mentioned above, another point needs to be mentioned regarding the organic connection of Red-Haired with the previous works by Pamuk. Like other novels (e.g. New Life, Red and Black), Red-Haired contains strong autobiographical elements. The presence of the mysteriously vanishing paternal figure (a la Pamuk' s own father in Istanbul and Uncle Melih in Black) underlines the autobiographical element. Like the author, the projected narrator protagonist Cern (pronounced Jem in Turkish) is an avid reader and a connoisseur of artworks ? ! He is well-versed in ancient classics and modem western literature. However, these correlations should not be stretched too far. Unlike the author, young Cern belongs to a middle-class family with moderate means. Cern does not have the benefit of a battalion of uncles and aunts and a strong and quarrelsome brother to cushion him from the impact of this sudden orphancy, the way young Orhan had (taking my cue from Gurses, I am using the maiden name Orhan to demarcate the character Orhan from the author, as he appears in the works of Pamuk- Gurses, 48). As a young man, Cern's ambition is to be a writer, but fate' s ways prove mysterious and his family falls on bad times. His drnggist father, being a left sympathizer, is on the police watch-list. On a fine day he vanishes, throwing Cern and his mom into penury. Cern is forced to work as a guard in his uncle's orchard. Beside the orchard he encounters a well­ digger who shares a remarkable physical resemblance with his father. The man, known as Master Mahmut, is the most famed well-digger in the whole of Istanbul with a reputation for discovering water in the most forbidding places. Master Mahmut agrees to appoint Cern as his assistant in the forthcoming proj ect at Ongoren. Cern's mother is apprehensive. Being a middle-class woman, not used to the hardships of life, she fears for her son's safety. However, her straitened circumstances force her to give in. But she relents only after extracting a promise from master Mahmut that Cern will never have to work inside the well, his job being limited to removing the excavated soil. 21 I am using 'projected narrator protagonist' because the author towards the end reveals the true narrator to be not Cern but Enver.

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The dig in the distant Ongoren proves arduous. The spot chosen by Master Mahmut, against the advice of the proprietor, is stubborn. But Master Mahmut persists determinedly. At sundown, after a long day's toil, the master and apprentice duo spend their night exploring the delights of Ongoren. During one of these trips, Cern encounters the Red-Haired woman, who is part of a troupe of artists performing in the town. She smiles at him mysteriously. After a few such brief encounters, she lures him into bed. The event coincides with another that has deep symbolic resonances. One day after several days of futile digging, Master Mahmut commands Cern to enter the well and do some digging, in contravention of the promise given to his mother. This is the first time he enters the well. For Cern, the experience, together with his loss of virginity that happens almost simultaneously, marks his initiation into the world of experience. The two experiences leave him utterly transformed: That night, I slept with a woman for the first time in my life. It was momentous, and it was miraculous. My perception of life, of women, and of myself changed instantaneously. The Red-Haired Woman showed me who I was, and what happiness meant. (91)

He is no longer the innocent boy that he once was. Entering the well is a similar encounter for him with his own "lower self' and curiously enough with his "higher self': .. .I could sense that in his [Mahmut' sJ mind, the underworld, the realm of the dead, and the farthest depths of the earth each corresponded to particular and recognizable parts of heaven and hell. According to Master Mahmut, the deeper we dug, the closer we got to the sphere of God and his angels-although the cool breeze that blew at midnight reminded us that the blue dome of the sky and the thousands of trembling stars that clung to it were to be found in the opposite direction. (3 1 ) A s long a s I could see Master up there, I didn't feel alone underground. Every time he moved aside to empty the bucket, a small disk of the sky was revealed. How perfectly blue it was! It was remote, like the world at the wrong end of a telescope, but it was beautiful. Until Master Mahmut reappeared, I stood immobile, staring up at the sky at the end of the concrete telescope . . . Would he want to punish me if he knew about my night with the Red-Haired Woman? ( 1 02)

The experience parallels Joseph' s story in the Quran. Just as in the Quranic story, the well and stars are used as dominant motifs in the novel. The role of the seductresses in both stories accentuates the connection.

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However, unlike Joseph, Cern i s not able to resist the advances o f the guileful woman. His encounter with the Red-Haired Woman replicates the primeval motif of the fruit of knowledge which leads to the loss of innocence and the symbolic fall. Here the multiple imports of the well symbol and its connection with the vagina, fertility and procreation are ingeniously suggested. As I described in the chapter on Black, the well is a powerful symbol for Pamuk. Like Jung, for whom every circular obj ect evokes Mandala with archetypal associations, Pamuk considers wells to be the repository of an individual' s, as well as a society's unconscious dreams, desires and anxieties. In Black, the image of a bottomless well, inhabited by ogres and Cyclopes, is used as an obj ective correlative of the deep fears and anxieties haunting Galip. In Red it is to the wellJor the unconscious realm to which Olive consigns his homicidal crime. But like the unconscious which shows a fierce tendency to resurface and strike back, the ghost of his crime rises up from under the bottom and earus him his nemesis. This well connects itself with the well in Black into which Shams of Tabriz' s body is dumped. Jalaluddin Rumi, accused by some of being complicit in the murder, refuses to look into the well and scours the streets of Damascus purportedly looking for his missing friend. Pamuk thus constructs the well as the symbol of the bottomless unconscious into which all our repressed memories are stowed away, and from which all "the stories spring." In Red-Haired, this symbolism of the well is evoked along with its traditional associations with the vagina and fertility. As it later emerges, Cern learus that the Red-Haired Woman with whom he has sex is the same woman with whom his biological father had a long and intense affair. His surrogate father Master Mahmut too has had a liaison with her. The suggestions here are multiple : the wellJvagina he enters is the same as that which has been earlier explored by his paterual figures; i.e., the unconscious that (mis)guides or controls us as a species is a common inheritance handed down from generation to generation. It stands for the collective unconscious of which Jung spoke. For him going down "the deep well" is necessarily part of encountering one ' s deeper self (Jung, 2 1). In the depths what awaits the self is a chaotic mass of images and symbols-a dark theatre of warring shadows. Pamuk grafts the Oedipal themes of incest and patricide as Cern ends up "killing" his surrogate father. Throughout the digging operation, Master Mahmut instructs Cern on the nature of the bond that should exist between a well-digger and his assistant. If the assistant fails to be alert he would

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end up killing his master, Mahmut warns. After his experience in the well, which follows close on the heels of his first experience in bed with the red-haired woman, Cern informs Master Mahmut of his decision never to "go down" again. This decision to say "no" to Mahmut shows his graduation to maturity; he now represents the pole of experience and no longer that of innocence. After his refusal to go down the well, Master Mahmut once again descends and starts digging, putting Cern in charge of the windlass. The bucket in which he is pulling the rocks from the bottom comes off the hook and lands with a thud on Master Mahmut. Thus, the apprentice ' s carelessness leads to the Master' s undoing. Whether there is an element of unconscious intention behind Cern's action is debatable. Is he trying to settle scores with the Master for sending him down against the earlier promise? Is he so fed up with well-digging with no hope of discovering water and the attendant surrogate filiality it entails that he decides to do the undoable? Is it unconsciously motivated by the knowledge that the Master has had sex with the same woman with whom he sleeps? These questions cannot be answered conclusively. Immediately after the incident, Cern rnshes to Ongoren in search of the Red-Haired Woman. To his dismay, he discovers her troupe has left the town. He goes back to Istanbul and joins a crash course. However, a pereunial sense of guilt continues to gnaw away at his heart: For a long time, I would have nothing to do with anyone. I withdrew, distancing myself from the world. The world was beautiful, and I wanted my inner world to be beautiful, too. If I ignored the guilt, the darkness inside me, I thought. I would eventually forget it was there. So I began to pretend that everything was fine. If you act as if nothing has happened, and if nothing comes of it, you will indeed find that nothing has happened after all. (1 1 3-14) When I was alone, I couldn't get Master Mahmut and the well out of my mind. So I made a point of rekindling friendships with my oId neighbourhood and school in Besiktas, and we all went to the cinema together. ( 1 1 6) But was it possible to pretend nothing had happened? Inside my head, there was a well where, pickaxe in hand, Master Mahmut was still hacking away at the earth. That must mean he was still alive, or the police had yet to investigate his murder. (1 1 8)

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The word "nothing" that repeats in the first excerpt, and which keeps repeating in the novel more than a dozen times, has a resonance in English which the Turkish original may not possess. "Nothing" was used as slang for female genitalia during the middle-ages. (Ryan, 50) So, the pretension that "nothing" has happened can be construed to mean simultaneously two things: a) what happened between Cern and the red-haired woman, and b) : the mishap in the well. Like Olive in Red, he grapples with the fact of identifying himself as a murderer. His greatest ambition is to be a writer but his guilty conscience stands in the way of fulfilling that dream: But could someone heartless enough to leave his master to die at the bottom of a well ever aspire to be a writer? Had the bucket fallen entirely by accident? I often told myself that nothing bad had happened at the well. I'd simply been unable to cope with all the exertion, the scolding and the lack of sleep. All I had done was to leave everything behind, take my money, and go home as any normal person would have done-though I wasn't even sure if I liked that term "normal person" any longer. (1 1 6)

Cern boasts to his friends about the escapades he had in Ongoren. It is for him a means of getting over the gnawing sense of guilt. But the trauma of guilt is something that cannot be exorcised. In order to unburden his conscience, he avoids his childhood friends. Here, we have an instance of "rupture," i.e. something which marks a definitive and total break for the subj ect, as described by trauma theorists. The well symbolizes this break for Cern: I was also gradually coming to realize what had happened at the well would always bar me from the joys of an ordinary life. I kept telling myself, the best thing to do is to act as ifnothing happened. ( 1 1 7)

The first time his mom sees him in Istanbul, she remarks that he has finally become "a man." For him, given his experiences at Ongoren, this statement has implications beyond what his mom means. Like the well, the woman too haunts him continually: In my most intent immersions in the work, a vision of the Red-Haired Woman would dawn in my mind out of nowhere like a sultry sun, and I would take a little break to fantasize about the color of her skin, her belly, her breasts, her eyes. When the time came to register for the entrance exams and pick my subjects, my mother naturally wanted me to list medicine first.. .Luckily for

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Chapter Eight her, my dreams of becoming a writer had withered quickly smce abandoned Master Mahmut at the bottom of the well. ( 1 1 9)

The archetypal associations of the well and women with fertility are here brought into relief through the suggestive use of words like immersion, belly, breasts and eyes. The new-found "maturity" following the experience in the well has further Jungian overtones; for Jung, the symbolic entry into the cave marks an encounter with the unconscious or the shadow self. In his scheme, the subject attains a wholesome and healthy sense of self by successfully integrating the shadow self with the actual self. In Cern's case, this process is problematic, since the dark spectre at the bottom of the well, as well as the radiant red one at the bottom of his consciousness, proves to be formidable presences to be wrestled into submission. He becomes obsessed with Freud and the Oedipus myth. At times, he freaks-out thinking of the possibility of the police bursting into his class and arresting him for being responsible for the murder at Ongeron. At other times, he tries to console himself, thinking Master Mahmut has been rescued like the Biblical Joseph and telling himself that "Nothing did happen." (123) Meanwhile, he completes school and joins Istanbul Technical University's faculty of engineering, a college where there is only a sprinkling of female presence. It is into this dryness that another woman enters: Ayse is his relative and has trouble acclimatizing to University life and its crowded girls ' dormitory. Cern has been asked to "show her the ropes." (1 24) Ayse's hair is light brown but her upper lip and dainty cheeks remind Cern of the Red-Haired Woman. His romancing persuades him to momentarily believe that he has finally gotten out of the well that haunts him. However, the task of showing Ayse "the ropes" only takes him back to the well (The symbolic resonances of "ropes" in this instance are self-evident). During the drought that strikes Istanbul that year, Ayse continually talks to him about the need to dig more wells. Her ecological ruminations prick him like a fresh stab in an unhealable wound. Besides, his decision to specialize in geology makes him think repeatedly about the things lying buried beneath the secret layers of the earth. After his graduation and a brief stint as a clerk in the National Mineral Exploration Program, he marries Ayse and is able to find a job as an engineer with a multi-national firm whose operations are spread across Africa and Easteru Europe. During repeated flights to Uzbekistan, his eyes

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always zero-in on the geography of Ongoren in spite of himself, and the thought of the well continues to haunt him. In other words, the flight out of Istanbul often proves for him to be a flight/fall into the dark abyss of his unconscIOUS : I still thought about Master Mahmut and my crime, most often on plane journeys. Sometimes I even wondered whether my true motive for taking all these trips to Benghazi, Astana, and Baku was for the chance to remember. As I looked out the window of the plane, I would think of him and brood over... (1 29-30)

Like the well in his conscience, there is something else that plagues his mind at this point. He and Ayse are a couple admired by all their friends and relatives, but they remain childless even after years of marriage, which proves to be a cause for concern. The author here attempts another parallelism between the well and the female vagina. Like Master Mahmut' s well Ayse proves barren and, as years elapse, this failure begins to take its toll on the couple' s life. After a few years with the firm, Cern sets up his own company and names it Sohrab after the legendary Persian hero, killed by his own father in a case of mistaken identity. It can be inferred that this choice has to do with an attempt at extrojecting the deeply ingrained sense of guilt. For years Cern has been nursing the guilt of having murdered his surrogate father and sleeping with a woman who slept with him. By naming his brainchild "Sohrab," his attempt is to supplant the story of guilt he internalizes with a story that casts him as a victim of parental impetuousness and misjudgment. This is the process that psychotherapy terms "extrojection." (Hoyt, 1 1 4) The firm makes rapid growth in fortune and shoots Cern and his wife to celebrity status. He frequently travels to Iran. On one such journey, looking down from the plane he notices how Istanbul has grown so large and has effectively swallowed Ongoren. In Iran he encounters various paintings and murals depicting scenes from Shahnama-these ancient paintings pierce his heart with fresh stings of his old guilt. He becomes obsessed with the theme of tension involving father and son and embarks on fully-fledged research into the thematics governing filial ties. Here he resembles the typical trauma victim who finds it impossible to shake off guilt feelings. Cern develops a fascination for artworks depicting the complex nature of the father-son relationship scattered in the museums across Europe,

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Istanbul and Persia. His condition recalls Kemal' s in Museum who, after his fiancee' s demise, similarly takes to wandering through museums and galleries. The spectral motif and its archival connections are here strongly suggested as the novel veers towards a discussion of paintings a la Red. Once, Cern goes to visit Mrs Fikriye, chief of the Topkapi Manuscript Library. Sensing his preternatural interest in the topic of fathers, she warns how "the search for a father" would have unforeseeable consequences: ( 149) her words prove prophetic as events unfold. But by now he is so immersed in the father-son dialectic that there is no hope of any going back. He sees the subtle resonances of the same tension not only in the elaborately arranged birthday parties of children belonging to their circle but even in the occasional outbursts of a restaurant manager to his assistant. The world for him in effect metamorphoses into a huge well filled with surrogate father-son figures. During the interval, another event takes place. His long-lost father resurfaces with his new wife bringing a stepmother into the picture. The father-stepmother duo contributes little to the growth of the plot but serves to rekindle the embers of guilt in him. Soon after, the old man dies, leaving a fresh vacuum and a sneaking sense of guilt as Cern fails to reach his side at the hour of death. The vacuum left by his dad's death feeds into the widening gap caused by the couple' s inability to produce an heir: I would ask myself, are there any joys in my life other than my wife's companionship and my layman's enthusiasm for some ancient tales? I would think about my father, I would call my wife, and I would try to convince myself that I was at peace in the urban throng. Childlessness had trained me in melancholy and humility. Sometimes I stopped to think that if I'd had a child, he or she would have been twenty by now. (1 60)

Thus, as the company' s fortunes skyrocket, so does the couple' s anxiety over their childlessness. They now pose a s brand ambassadors in the company' s advertisements on television and in magazines. This, we can infer, is a compensatory stratagem to counter the sense of inadequacy on account of their childlessness. When their friends invite them for their children' s birthdays they have to counter such gestures by flaunting the credentials of their own "child," the rapidly growing "Sohrab." The growing visibility brings about its nemesis. Just when he is pining over his unborn child, the fruit of his "unburied sin" pins him down to a ruthless reality. His lawyer Mr Necati (pronounced Nejati in Turkish) informs him of a paternity suit filed against him by a woman from Ongoren. When the DNA test proves positive, he is gripped by the stark

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realization concerning the ineluctability of the ghosts of the past haunting the peace of the present. The paternity suit is filed by the Red-Haired woman. On the fateful day, he sleeps with her, it has happened. Her son is now a young man aspiring to be a writer. This event follows close on the heels of his father's funeral. The internment occasions an uncomfortable disinterment. It is an old skeleton in his family' s cupboard that tumbles out creating a rnpture in his happy but agonized life with Ayse. At the funeral, a man from Ongoren meets him and talks to him of his late father and the affair he once had with the red-haired woman. The revelation that his late father had slept with the same woman strikes him like a harsh epiphany. He begins to see the troublesome Oedipal echoes that punctuate his resplendent existence as a successful business magnate. His firm Sohrab buys the property in Ongoren where he had once worked with Master Mahmut. At the launch of the proj ect, he makes a presentation before a select audience. To his consternation the meeting is attended by, among others, the Red-Haired Woman. After the meeting she talks to him about their son Enver. The meeting sets off an upwelling of emotions. The prospect of meeting his son overwhelms Cem with a sense of eager anticipation and dark premonitions. For years his unconscious has been transformed into a dark theatre where endless scenes of father-son conflict are being played out in its various mythical and contemporary permutations, peopled as it is by ghosts all the way from Oedipus to Sohrab and Ishmael, unwitting and witting; and unwilling and willing victims and victors of "patrifilial" conflicts. After the meeting, Cem is accosted by a young man named Serhat, who introduces himself as a friend of Enver and affiliated to the same theatre company as the latter. The young man promises to take him to the old well site. As events quickly cascade into a denouement, Serhat is revealed to be Enver himself, and due to a confusion that seems to arise more from mutual fear than hostility, the father and son end up wrestling with each other by the well and the father is pushed in. Since Cem has had a premonition about the likely fallout of the meeting he has with him his revolver. But Enver overpowers him and snatches the pistol. Before pushing him into the well, he fires at Cem and blinds him in the eye, once again underlining the connection with the Oedipal myth, in which King Oedipus blinds himself.

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The final part of the story is narrated by the Red-Haired woman, who describes her youthful affairs with Cern's father and later encounter with Cern. In her narration it is Cern who is responsible for seducing her and not the other way. The novel thus presents alternative perspectives on the past, subtly invoking the postmodernist trope of the unreliable narrator. On the last page, we are however in for a greater surprise. Here, the author reveals the trne narrator to be Enver. Enver is now housed in the Silivri Prison for patricide. His name is bandied about in the press and people attribute the mnrder to the illegitimate son's avarice. The malicious newspapers who receive huge advertisements from "Sohrab" spew venom on the mother-son duo. Through this strange chemistry, "Sohrab," the mythical victim of filicide, exacts partial revenge on the Oedipal Enver. Gulcihan, the Red-Haired Woman, periodically visits her son in the prison. She pins hopes on his eventual release and legal recognition as the heir to Cern's properties. Every time she goes to the prison she carries with her a load of books; she wants to help her son fulfil his ambition of being a writer. Her last visit is on the day of the Feast of the Sacrifice, the day commemorating Abraham' s victory in the test of filial sacrifice, as demanded by God. On this visit she gives Enver the pictnre of the Red­ Haired Woman, a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She wants him to use the painting as the cover of his novel, chronicling the life of his father and mother. Delivering the coup de grace, Pamuk suggests that the novel we are clutching in onr hands entitled "The Red- Haired Woman" is the one thus written by Enver in prison. What better strategy can a writer devise to hold his readers prisoner?

The Blinding Red, the Inexhaustible Well and the Infinite Stars The architectonics of Red-Haired bear a striking resemblance to Red's. In both the color red, with its multiple symbolisms of love, lust, death, deception, mnrder, and passion dominates the canvas, pushing all other colors to the background. However, the red in Red-Haired has a more blinding and searing quality compared with its milder version in the earlier novel. This is in keeping with the shift from the mature love of Black in Red towards the more youthful lust of Cern in the latter. Largely, like a repeat of the familiar pattern in Pamuk, the "female of the species" is portrayed to be shrewder and cleverer in this novel too.

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It is Gulcihan who entices Cern to sleep with her through subtle manoeuvring. There are reasons to surmise that through this she is trying to exact vengeance on Cern's father who reneges on his promise to marry her. Similarly, it is she who persuades Enver to file the paternity suit. Following Cern's murder, the press slanders her as a woman of easy virtue citing her "red hair" as proof of their claims. The association of "red" with evil and deviousness thus gets an accentuated relief. If it is the rnddiness of blood and the color oozing from the miniaturists' brnshes that lend the pages of Red its bright tint, it is the resplendent glow of Gulcihan's mane that electrifies the pages of Red-Haired. Another point that links the two novels is the use of the well imagery. Red starts and ends by the well. It starts with the monologue by Elegant Effandi, of his being murdered and dumped into the well, and ends narrating Black' s death by the well. In Red-Haired the well image is more prominent and symbolizes a host of things like the unconscious, fertility and creativity. As seen earlier, the well is used as the symbol of the unconscious and a repository of past guilt and trauma in Red, Red-Haired, and Black. This is the case with Olive, Rumi (haunted by the memories of the body of his friend Shams of Tabriz lying in the well), Galip (who is haunted by the bottomless well peopled by ogres and Cyclopes) and Cern. In Red-Haired, the well symbolizing the unconscious simultaneously acts as the well-spring of creativity and fertility. It is this unconscious that generates stories, and for Pamuk, it is the stories that we craft that define and carve our essence and help us make sense of the world. Unable to grapple with his sense of guilt over the death of Master Mahmut, Cern immerses himself in stories and books: But I also believed that if I kept exploring this boundless sea of stories, I might eventually solve the riddle of my own life and finally land on peaceful shores. (139)

This reflects Pamuk' s stance on stories. For him, literature should be able to solve the riddle of our lives. In Black he emphasizes the role of stories in helping us anchor ourselves with a sense of being and belonging. In his Nobel lecture he underlines the need for literature to address the basic existential questions that have haunted humanity since the dawn of existence: What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities,

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Chapter Eight and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin. (Oe 4 1 3)

Enver is one who suffers this kind of vulnerability and humiliation. The fact of being deprived of a paternal presence and protection drives him to agony and suffering. He expresses it thus : "Fatherhood means a lot to me . . .A father is doting, charismatic figures who will until his dying day accept and watch over the child he sires. He is the origin and the centre of the universe. When you believe that you have a father, you are at peace even when you can't see him, because you know that he is always there, ready to love and protect you. I never had a father like that." (2 1 9)

Pamuk here gives vent to his own fears of orphancy, a recurrent theme in his works. The lack of a father/centre or God would mean a total collapse of all our systems and perceptions, as it happens to Enver. This invocation of the centre also reflects Pamuk's preoccupation with the notion of a strncture with a definitive centre. As a craftsman, he believes that his novels should have a centre and symmetry (N and S 24-5). In this sense, they are like the wells that Master Mahmut digs. The master is very insistent on the perfect circularity and diameter of his wells; for him, the circle is to be drawn "precisely, " since "Any mistakes, any straight edges along the curve" would lead to a total "collapse of the whole thing." ( 1 8) In another sense too, Pamuk sees a comparison between a well-digger and a novelist. For him the novelist' s craft requires long solitary exertion; the novelist, like Master Mahmut, will have to shut himself off from the world and pursue his vocation doggedly and determinedly: The writer's secret is not inspiration-for it is never clear where that comes from-it is his stubboruness, his patience. The lovely Turkish saying "to dig a well with a needle" seems to me to have been framed with writers in mind. (Oe 407)

Like Master Mahmut, the patient well-digger, the novelist keeps on digging for his stories. S/he knows the well will yield stories unendingly. As the story progresses we learn that Master Mahmut, abandoned in the well and taken for dead, has actually been rescued though he sustains a grave injury to his shoulder. After his shoulder heals he returns to the well and resumes his digging until finally, he discovers water. Thanks to this discovery, a factory comes up in Ongoren and the locality flourishes as a thriving commercial centre. The local people regard Mahmut as an icon and he is revered like a saint even after death. He shares a paternal bond

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with Enver and tells him stories of his well-digging experiences with his father. It is from these stories that Enver develops his passion for literatnre and arts which eventnally leads him to write The Red Haired Woman. For Pamuk, like the well-digger, the novelist too is an excavator; while the well-digger digs through solid earth, the novelists digs through old soiled documents (a la Faruk Darvinoglu in Silent) and the human unconscious. In other words, both are engaged in the task of plumbing depths in search of life-giving sustenance. According to Pamuk, this enterprise of plumbing the depths also helps one get closer to the higher realms: I could sense that in his mind, the underworld, the realm of the dead, and the farthest depth of the earth each corresponded to particular and recognizable parts of heaven and hell. According to Master Mahmut, the deeper we dug, the closer we got to the sphere of God and his angels­ although the cool breeze that blew at midnight reminded us that the blue dome of the sky and the thousands of trembling stars that clung to it were to be found in the opposite direction. (3 1 )

Here w e have something typically Jungian, and the novel abounds in many such simultaneous references to the connection between the higher and the deeper realms. For Jung, archetypes are housed in the collective memory in the deeper levels of the unconscious. It is by integrating the unconscious that a person attains individuation or a wholesome sense of self. Master Mahmut' s equanimity and tenaciousness are owed to his successful integration of the unconscious instincts with the sublime. This is what the novelist does too in his own terms. S/he delves deep into the human psyche where s/he encounters a replica of the star-spangled higher domain. For Pamuk, the moderu urban man has lost this ability. It is instrumental rationality that rules his actions. The moderu well-diggers, who rely on machines, symbolize the disjunction between the higher and deeper realms. They wantonly exploit earth's resources, triggering an ecological catastrophe. The Red-Haired gains much of its power from its polemic against this wanton ecocide : After the mid- 1 980s, the ancient traditional methods of well digging with spade and pick-axe, of slow excavation by the bucketful on a wooden windlass, of lining the walls meter by meter with concrete, had all become extinct in Istanbul. During a summer holiday, Ayse and I spent with my mother in Gebze, I witnessed some of the first efforts at drilling artesian wells on various plots surrounding the land. . . The early drill, still operated

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manually, like screw drivers, would later be superseded by more powerful mechanized ones, noisy machines resembling oil derricks, hauled in on the backs of mud-spattered, big-wheeled pick-ups, they could bore fifty meters in a single day, laying pipes that would then pump up from the depth of the earth in no time and at negligible cost, all on the very same land Master Mahmut and two apprentices would previously have toiled on for weeks. From the early 1 990s, these technical advances led for a time to an abundant supply of water in the greener neighbourhoods of Istanbul, but soon the underground lakes and aquifers closest to the surface were depleted by the early 2000s, the only groundwater left in many parts of the city was more than seventy meters below the surface, and it would have been practically impossible to get to it simply by digging with two apprentices in people's gardens, a meter a day, as Master Mahmut used to do. Istanbul and the soil it stood on had been denatured and defiled. (1 3031)

In this instance, the novel combines its main themes o f patricide and filicide with subtle hints of matricide as depicted by the violence wrought upon mother earth. Ayse's concern over this reckless exploitation has a definite maternal echo. Infertile as she is, Ayse dreads the prospect of the earth itself turning barren. Pamuk later invokes the scary scenario of water rationing in Istanbul to underscore the precarious environmental situation.

( 1 63) The success of Pamuk' s art here lies in the seamless melding of environmental concerns with the novelistic plot. In this, Red-Haired trnmps Strangers, where ethnographic descriptions of the lives of boza sellers often elbow out the plot into a comer. Probably, this must have been a willful strategy deployed to describe the life of a community in which precious little happens. In Red-Haired, however, no such rationing has been imposed on the imagination and Pamuk is his signature self. However, it is doubtful whether he has fully followed his adherence to the principle of symmetry to the same degree as in Black or Red. The novel, divided into three parts, is largely narrated in the first person by Cern. We get to hear Gulcihan's version of events only in the last part, where she accuses Cern of having seduced her. Feminist critics might be inclined to argue that the woman's voice has been muted by patriarchal forces since she gets to speak only after the death of her lover. One wonders whether her son, the assumed author of the novel, should not have been fairer in apportioning the speech among the two lead characters. This is what Pamuk does in Red, where Black and Shekure have been given equal weight.

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Despite this imbalance, the novel's conclusion i s neat and consummate. It ends with the prison scene. Again, Pamuk' s preoccupation with the theme of genetic proclivity and the technique of intertextuality are evident in this section which invokes Poe, Verne, and Rossetti. As Gulcihan hugs Enver, she is strnck by his particular smell, which is the same childhood aroma of "plain soap and biscuits." (253) This is reminiscent of the "unique scent of biscuits and floral soap" ( 1 7 1 ) that the young Cern could smell while nestling his head in the crook of his father's neck. However, it is not only the scent of his grandfather that Enver has inherited from his "illegitimate" lineage; according to Gucihan, his passion for books and literature too can be traced to his father. Like Pamuk' s own father, Enver's father always wanted to be a writer.

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INDEX

Abish, Walter, 1 3 Akbar, MJ, 92, 97, 97 Arabi, Ibn', 37, 43, 6 1 , 80, 120, 123 Ataturk, Mustafa Kema1, 33,95-99, 1 1 7, 1 27, 1 49; Kemalism/Kemalist policies 9799, 1 17, Attar, Farid ud-Din, 34,37, 42, Auster, Paul, 2 Aydin, Kami1, 86- 7, 89 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4 Barth, John, 1, 1 4, 1 5 , 1 5 6 Barthe1me, Donald, 3, 2 5 Baudelaire, Charles, 5, 143 Baudrillard, Jean, 2, 99 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 1 26, Bergson, Henri-Louis, 42 Bernal, Martin, 1 03 Bilton, Alan, 1 -2, 1 5 , Blake, William, 6 5 Boccaccio, Giovanui, 1 5 6 Borges, Jorge Luis, 12, 40, 1 24 Boulter, Jonathan, 1 7, 30, 45, 56, 73 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1 5 3 Bu1han, Hussein Abdi1ahi, 85-6, 97, 1 02, 104 Burroughs, William, 12, 1 5 Byron, George Gordon Byron 8687 Ca1vino, Ita1o, 12-14, 22, 40, 80-8 1 , 156 Carrol, Lewis, 1 3 , 42 Caruth, Cathy, 77 Cervantes, Miguel de, 8 Christianity/Christians 92, 99, 103,1 1 4- 1 1 5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 8 , 42 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 99 Dalrymple, William, 1 1 9

Dante, Alighieri, 8, 6 1 , 80 Dante, Gabriel Rossetti, 1 66 Darwin, Charles, 99, 1 27 Davenport, Guy, 1 3 - 1 4 Debord, Guy Louis, 2 1 Decca1/ Antichrist (pronounced Dejja1 in Turkish) 16, 34, 4 1 , 44, 1 09- 1 10 DeLillo, Don, 2 De Quincey, Thomas, 42, 1 5 1 -52 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 56, 73, 1 5 1 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1 0 , 3 1 , 42, 6 1 Dumas, Alexandre, 42 Eagleton, Terry, 24, 105 Ellis, Bret Easton, 1 Eco, Umberto, 12, 40, 66, 90, 124 Eliot, TS, 63, 80 Fanon, Frantz, 86, 88, 1 0 1 Faulkner, William, 7 F1aubert, Gustave, 42 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 2 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 26, 28-30, 37, 57, 6 1 ,64, 68-9, 73, 77, 1 3 1 , 1 62 Galile1, Ga1ileo, 99 Gass, William, 3 Gazzali, Abu Hamid Al-, 1 3, 37, 42, 122-24 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 8-9, 37 Grace, Daphne, 1 0 1 Habermas, Jurgen, 1 0 1 Hawthorn, Nathaniel, 42 Hazlitt, William, 1 5 3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 86, 1 02 Hermon, A1eksander, 5 Higgins, Dick, 1 1 Holland, Tom, 6 Hosseini, Kha1ed, 22

1 80 Islam, (Sexual taboos 1 5), 49, 90, 94,96-1 00, 1 0 1 Is1amists 93, 102, 107, 1 24 Islam and painting 50, 54, 62,1 20-21 Islamic Aesthetics 1 07-30 Islamic ontology 107-08, 1 28 Istanbul, 1 3-4, 1 5 , 1 7, 24, 26-30, 32, 33, 35, 37, 49-50, 52, 55, 60, 6 1 , 63, 65,66, 69, 72, 75, 92 (cosmopolitan ethos), 1 08- 1 0, 123, 1 32, 1 34 (transformations of the city), 1 39, 1 47, 1 50, 1 55, 1 60, 1 62-64, 1 69-70 (environmental situation) Istanbul as a symbol 5-6, 1 391 47 Istanbul's incarnations 6, 8, 1 8, 23, 37 Jameson, Fredric, 1 Jews 53, 55, 75, 88, 92, 98, 123 Joyce, James, 7, 1 1 , 1 3 Jung, Carl Gustav, 26, 29, 37-8, 43, 46, 74-5, 1 44, 1 46, 159, 1 62, 1 69 FCemal, l'ashar, 7 FChomeini, Ayathullah, 107 FCingsley, Charles, 88 FCyd, Thomas, 99 Lacan, Jacques, 4, 46 Lindqvist, Sven, 93 Maalouf, Amin, 84, 92, 98, 1 04-05, 119 Macaulay, Rose, 89 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 1 -3, 1 4, 1 5 , 1 8, 40, 1 5 6 McCarthy, Cormac, 1 5 McHale, Ian, 1 1 - 1 5 Modernism and Postmodernism, 7 , 1 1 - 1 5 , 83 Montagu, Mary, 2, 1 0 1 Morrison, Toni, 2, 1 52 Muhammad, Prophet, 26, 34-5, 102, 1 1 0-1 1 , 122-23 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 80, 126

Index Orton, Joe, 1 5 Ozda1ga, Elisabeth 94 Pamuk, Orhan, (Novels) The White Castle 7,12, 14, 3 1 -2, 63,83-85, 90-3, 1 09, 1 3 1 , 1 5 5 ; The Black Book 3-5, 7,12-13, 16, 1 8, 20- 1 , 23-49, 53, 59, 6 1 , 64,66, 74, 108-09,1 32,1 37, 1 39, 1 4445,149-53,1 55, 1 57, 1 5 9 , 1 67,170; My Name Is Red 3,7, 1 2-6,1 8-20, 24-26, 49-63, 65-6, 73-7, 80, 1 07, 1 1 7, 1 1 9124, 1 29, 1 3 1 -32, 1 37, 1 50-53, 1 5 6-57, 15� 1 6 1 , 1 64, 1 6667, 1 70 The New Life 7, 1 2 , 1 6, 19, 2 1 , 3 1 -2,4 1 ,49, 64,7 1 , 7980, 1 02, 1 07, 1 10-1 1 8, 122,1 32, 155, 1 57; The Silent House 7,17,4 1 ,53, 68, 73, 1 07,127-1 30, 155, 169; The Museum of Innocence 1 ,4, 1 6-7,2 1 , 53, 64, 66-73, 76, 78-9, 155, 1 64; A Strangeness in My Mind 4-6,8 ,14, 1 6,22, 24, 4 1 , 55,66, 1 3 1 53,155; Snow 5,6,8, 20, 23,24,26,32, 63, 65,66, 7 1 ,79, 83,85,90, 93- 1 05, 1 07, 1 09, 124-128, 1 3 1 , 1 32, 147, 1 5 3 , 1 5 5 ; The Red-Haired Woman 108, 1 09, 1 50, 1 53, 155171 Plath, Sylvia, 1 1 2, 1 28, 1 40 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1 7 1 Proust, Marcel, 5, 1 3, 37, 42, 6 1 Quiun, Anthony, 1 02 Quran, 5, 34, 62, 1 09-1 1 , 1 1 4-15, 1 1 7-19, 1 22-23, 126, 1 29-30, 156, 1 5 8 Rasim, Ahmet, 42 Rilke, 1 1 4-15 Robins, FCevin, 83-84, 88, 92, 98 Rose, Gillian, 88 Rose, Macaulay, 89 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 42, 1 3 3 , 1 34 Roy, Arnndhati, 4, 22

Orhan Pamuk and the Poetics of Fiction Rumi, Jalaluddin, 5, 1 3 , 34, 35, 379, 42-3, 45,6 1 , 108,159, 1 67 Russell, Bertrand, 104 Ryan, Michael, 1 6 1 Salinger, J.D., 1 1 2 Sardar, Ziauddin, 6 1 , 87-8, 1 02-03 Sayyid, Bobby S, 85, 979 , 1 0 1 , 1 03,127 Schiller, Johan C. Friedrich von, 8, 9 Sexton, Pulne, 137 Shafak, Elif, 1 5 , 23

181

Shakespeare, William, 8, 37, 65, 69, 86, 87 Sheherzade, 12-3, 4 1 -2, 44 Strauss, Levi, 1 42 Tagore, Rabindranath, 92-3 Tolstoy, Leo, 5, 7 Toynbee, Arnold, 98 Voltaire, 42 Wa Thiong'o, Ngugi, 83, 85, 95 Woolf, Virginia, 7,1 1 , 1 3,77 Wordsworth, William, 140, 1 5 1 53,155