Thinkling

But the sceptics who might denigrate the Nobel committee decision as reflecting much politics and little genuine literary worth had better read well before dismissing the fresh laureate. In his work, Pamuk addresses from various angles a crucial issue of the day, the problem of culturally conditioned identities, especially those along the dividing lines of East and West, Islam and Christianity, tradition and modernity, avoiding any formulaic dichotomies there. He does so with a degree of complexity which can probably only assume the form of a story, because no sort of documentary journalism or anthropological and sociological analysis may possibly do it justice. And he does so from the perspective of a man firmly rooted in the past and present of his country, or perhaps his city (as his loving autobiography–cum-cityguide "Istanbul" shows). Beside that, Pamuk frequently resorts to interesting formal experiment in building up his story; and the language in the translations of his works has a strange and unfamiliar, almost disturbing quality which (excluding the possibility that they are merely bad translations) presumably reflects something powerfully original in his usage of Turkish. All that safely adds up to highly intriguing literature in its own right, regardless of any added value of political correctness and fashionable curiosity about the world of Islam.

Much of the above is exemplified in the recent novel Snow (first published in 2002), a story of tensions of shaken identities at the crossroads played out against the background of a small eastern provincial town of Kars. Another important novel, My Name is Red (1998), digs deeper into Turkey's past and portrays, in a postmodern detective story, the world of Ottoman miniaturists in 16th century Istanbul, but in terms of structure also displays an unusual set of narrators, a different one for each chapter, including such curious voices as that of a dead corpse, or of the colour red. However, while both Snow and My Name is Red have now been translated into Japanese, the translation in this country of another crucial book, The White Castle (originally out in 1985 and the first to reach international stage through Pamuk's first ever translation into English in 1990) is still waiting for publication as this review is written.

On the face of it, The White Castle is a rather straightforward story set in 17th century Istanbul and told by a young educated Venetian who falls into the hands of Turkish enemy on the sea to become slave and assistant to an Ottoman scholar (designated only as Hoja, i.e., 'Master') of approximately same age and presumably striking physical resemblance. The not too numerous pages of the slim novel proceed to describe the relationship of the two as they explore not only bases of science and technology, but increasingly also what makes them each what they are, or what makes the 'fools' around who they are. But the straightforwardness is deceptive. The story unfolds from the first technological achievement of the two, a major public fireworks show over Bosporus, through their sanitary and logistic measures undertaken to curb the epidemic of plague raging in Istanbul, and further to the growing intimacy of the two with the Sultan. But the actual events recede into background and the stage is fully taken by the disquieting amalgamation of the two main characters with their respective universes of individual experience and religious and cultural background. There is little attention to the particulars of the setting of the story, there is minimum of description of the scenery, characters or circumstances, and the language seems to effectively increase the claustrophobia of being caught, as it were, inside the mental world of the two partners.

Just like in Snow, where the main character is a journalist, and in My Name is Red, which revolves around old books playing crucial part in new events, The White Castle uses centrally the theme of writing and text. Hoja, increasingly nervous and keen on his obsessive question of ‘what makes me who I am’, first forces his counterpart to make a written record of his own introspection. Tracing long-forgotten memories and real or invented mischiefs and sins, this project ultimately drags them both on the path of months and years of tortuous self-revelation and self-discovery by means of writing. This development as well as its depiction has a distinctly pathologic feeling to it. And the story which previously spanned years in the space of a few pages suddenly appears stuck in one place and claustrophobically closed into itself. The claustrophobia reaches its zenith in the scene in front of a mirror, almost precisely halfway through the length of the book, where fear of the plague death appears to work as a catalyst to the completion of a metamorphosis of the two originally separate identities. Beyond this point, the borderline between the two characters becomes increasingly blurred even while the contours of the world of actual objects and events grow hazier and things appear onstage ever more as symbols, like the ultimate weapon Hoja is commissioned to construct for the Sultan, or the indomitable white castle of Doppio at the feet of the Carpathian mountains during the last military campaign which brings the story to its climax.

Yet, even as the end approaches, the reader finds himself left with more questions than answers. The last chapter in a way undermines the whole preceding story. Here, the narrator claims to reveal the real purpose and authorship of the text. But which of the two was it that told the tale then? And whose voice is it that narrates this afterword? Did the two men entirely exchange each other’s places in their respective worlds? Or even, had there ever been two distinct individualities to start with? Where did fiction become reality and where did reality melt into fiction? Pamuk’s journey through the labyrinthine tangle of east-western identities is certainly worth exploring.