The Turks Are Coming: Deciphering Orhan Pamuk`s Black Book

Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
University of Oklahoma
The Turks Are Coming: Deciphering Orhan Pamuk's Black Book
Author(s): Güneli Gün
Reviewed work(s):
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Winter, 1992), pp. 59-63
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40147858 .
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COMMENTARIES
The Turks Are Coming: Deciphering Orhan Pamuk's Black
Book
By GUNELIGUN Orhan Pamuk takes his own
portraitof the artistvery seriously indeed- as he well
should. After all, he's being touted as Turkey's
new literaryprodigy, putting in a timely appearance on the world literaturescene. Turkishliterature buffs ask one another: how come? After all,
there are other Turkishwriters who are as good or
betterbut to whom the world pays scant attention.
So, why Orhan Pamuk?
Well, for starters, not only does Pamuk's work
sell quite briskly at home; it also translates into
English like a dream. Educated at the prestigious
RobertCollege (an extension of the American Ivy
League in Istanbul),Pamuk can hear his work fall
into place abroad.Besides, he has his finger on the
pulse of world literature. While his compatriots
are still tinkeringwith the secrets of the well-made
modern novel, Pamuk has already graduatedinto
might be
postmodernism. He is part of what
termed the New InternationalVoice- like Isabel
Allende, for example, who too must not be the
only good writer in Chile, although she's the one
we buy and read, in translation.
Pamuk'sachievementis indeed considerable.At
thirty-nine, he has four major novels under his
belt. The first, CevdetBey ve Oglulan (Cevdet Bey
and His Sons; unavailable in translation), is a
bildungsroman which tells the three-generation
saga of an upper-class Istanbul family. The second, Sezsiz Ev (The Quiet House; also not translated), a modernist novel told from five different
perspectives, deals with a week spent by four
siblings, who represent four distinct generations,
at their dying grandmother'scountry house during a dark period in Turkish political history
(1981), when the different generations of Turks
were actually at one another's throats. The third,
which is enjoying a good run in the West, is the
recently translatedBeyazKale(Eng. TheWhiteCastle), an intriguing postmodernist novel ostensibly
about a seventeenth-century Venetian slave and
his Ottoman master, who resemble each other so
much that they end up swapping identities.
In his fourth and most complex postmodernist
novel, KaraKitap(BlackBook), Pamuk capitalizes
on the contemporarypsychologicalinsight that all
we can know of others are the projections of
ourselves. With this insight carriedinto the novel,
it stands to reason that all the charactersare figments of the basic enigma which is the mind of the
author, as enigmatic to the author himself as it is
to the readerwho is trying to decipher the text. In
an effort to clue in (or to psych out) the reader, the
novelist/narratorquotes Sheikh Galip, the eighteenth-centuryOttoman mystic poet (who, as well
as sharing his name with the protagonist, Galip,
provides the book with its literaryunderpinnings),
admonishing his readers:"Enigmais sovereign, so
treat it carefully." We will try.
The novel takes the rudimentary form of the
detective novel. Being sophisticatedreaders, however, we know that a detective story is only a
setup to lead us through a maze where the entrance and the exit are preordained, strewn with
clues and red herrings along the way, its arbitrary
coincidences faked by the clever author to beguile,
frustrate, and misguide us through a reality that
turns out to have been illusion posing as realityin other words, the fictive world. Of all the novel
forms, the detective novel must be the most contrived. The novelist knows at the outset whodunit.
With "BlackBook" the convention is nevertheless
turned on its ear: whodunit is an enigma. He is a
voice on the telephone, perhaps.
Pamuk is not going to provide us with something so cheap as a solution. His protagonist remembers telling his lost wife once that the only
kind of detective fiction he might find interesting
is a story wherein the author does not know the
identity of the murderer.
The plot of "BlackBook" is deliberatelysimple:
a guy is looking for his missing girl. He suspects
that she is off with another fellow. He finds her by
causing her demise as well as the other fellow's.
What is complex about the work is the structure:a
chimericalnarrative(polyphonic, polyvalent, allusive, obscurantist,unreliable)in which chaptersof
the story are interspersedwith chaptersthat are in
the form of newspaper columns. No less complex
is the content: a labyrinthinequest through Istanbul which encompasses an encyclopedia of Turkish life, past and present, with its culturaldelights
as well as its public shames.
60
WORLDLITERATURE
TODAY
Galip, an Istanbul lawyer, is abandoned by his
wife, who also happens to be his first cousin. He
guesses that, although she has vanished, she cannot have gone too far. She must be hiding out with
her half-brother(and therefore another first cousin) Celal, a newspaper columnist. And where
could they be hiding? Well, at the family compound, of course, the old apartment building
where the family intellectual, the newspaper columnist, lives (where else?) on the top floor. Not
finding the missing pair there, Galip moves into
the flat, sort of, and begins to lead a double life as
himself and also as Cousin Celal, the columnist.
The protagonist suffers from a case of deep
hero-worship for his columnist boy-cousin as well
as from unrequited love for his girl-cousin wife,
who is his Beauty Incarnate.This is the stuff of a
heavy-duty family romance, with incestuous implications strewn about like herrings that are
strictly of the red variety. The wife's name, Rtiya,
inasmuch as it means "dream," clues us that we
have here a persona who is not only a Platonic
Ideal but an identity closely related to the protagonist's as an Idealized Self: a narcissisticand incestuous anima (or the female double).
Wife-cousin-sisterRiiya is a consumer of cheap
fiction, especially detective novels, which she devours as she swings her long legs. Galip keeps her
craving well supplied with sleazy reading material, but apparently she has other appetites that
have gone unsatisfied. Why else would she have
absconded? Well, irony of ironies, the heroine as
an addict of detective fiction provides this "detective novel" with its mystery.
As the author has named Galip after the Ottoman poet who wrote the long mystical poem in
which Love searches for Beauty (Husn-ii Ashk),
Cousin Celal's appellationobviously alludes to the
great Sufi mystic teacher Mevlana, whose name
was Celal-ed-din Rumi. If the English-speaking
reader gets the names of the two charactersmixed
up, not to worry; so does your Turkish-speaking
literary sleuth. The state of confused identities
seems to be a deliberate ploy on the part of the
author.
The protagonist, the lawyer called Galip, having
sneaked into and taken possession of his cousin's
flat, clothes, files, and phone calls, takes on the
columnist's function as well as his form. He goes
through his cousin's mental and physical furniture, producing columns which he passes off as
the work of the missing journalist. However, our
lawyer-sleuth, unlike Perry Mason, bungles his
quest and manages to get both his idols killed
(unintentionally?)by an enigmatic assassin whose
identity he never discovers.
The key to finding his wife-sister-cousin Riiya
(Dream) seems to be not only to be like Cousin
Celal but to be Celal. Remember, this kind of
impersonation is exactly what every novelist,
working in the interests of "realism," wishes to
accomplish successfully so that the reader will be
fooled into thinking the person he has come to
know so intimately is Emma Bovarywhen in fact
he knows only an aspect of Gustave Flaubert
("Mme Bovary, c'est moi"). Rememberalso, collaterally, in the language of mystical enlightenment, that to become oneself is to be another- a
notion that will be explained presently.
There are a couple of threads in "BlackBook"
(of the many that are dangled, abandoned, or
used as false leads) which wind together into a
kind of yarn to take us through the labyrinth,the
enigma, or the black hole which will not reflect.
Though tongue-in-cheekfor the most part, Pamuk
drags into his novel Gnostic and mystical texts
which, to use his own words, are "all the more
convincing because [he himself is] a nonbeliever."
The first involves Mevlana and his passion for a
flimflamman called Shams. When Mevlanafell for
his dubious love object, he was alreadythe greatest Sufi master ever;but his passion served only to
embarrassfamily, friends, and students, thereby
putting Mevlana (one assumes) into a bad light
vis-a-vis the expectations of proper behavior from
him as the dean of a famous theologicalseminary.
Mevlana had already achieved "enlightenment,"
yet, having turned into the Big Cheese, there was
nothing else for him to do but dry up. So, he
surpassed himself by doing something really
cheesy. His most famous catchphrasewith which
he regaled his students was, "If you wish to
increase your perception, then increase your necessity."
Falling in love inappropriatelywas one way of
increasinghis own necessity. He unabashedlytold
the world that he, the Great Mevlana, wanted
"not to be likeShams, but to be Shams." He could
surpass himself only by totally submitting his
identity to his lover's. (This is the heart of the
mysterious paradox, by the way, that Pamuk lifts
from Sheikh Galip:"Mysteryis to be Oneself and
to be Another"- the same mystery that we are
admonished to treat carefully.) Well, Mevlana's
submission of his exalted identity, under the identity of the town creep's, must have confused and
frustrated his friends, relatives, and adherents.
Being Oneself and also Another, indeed! It must
have stuck in everybody's's craw, and so it was
not surprising that, eventually, Shams was
thrown down a black well by assassins and killed.
Who had the motive and the opportunity to
murder Shams? ponders the postmodern police
detective Orhan Pamuk. Who stood most to gain
from Shams's death? Mevlana's adherents and
sons? Or Mevlana himself ? Did Mevlana contrive
to get Shams killed? After all, it was Mevlana
whose necessity was in fact increasedby the death
of his lover, thereby increasinghis perception.We
shall, of course, never know.
61
GUN
Coincidentally, did our lawyer also arrange to
get his cousins-idols bumped off (inadvertentlyon
purpose) so that their deaths would illuminate his
perceptions?This is the question that Pamuk never seems to tire of begging, obliquely behind his
"Black Book," but which he never answers. He
misses no opportunity to posit another concentric
equation: he himself (as the author) fulfills his
dream(Riiya) to become the writer(Celal) by submitting his alter selves to the mystery of art
(death). In terms of the mystery in "BlackBook,"
who stood the most to gain, after all, by his love
objects'(alteregos) deaths? The Author, of course!
Did not Dante gain as a poet by Beatrice'sdeath?
Petrarchof Laura's?Orpheus of Eurydice's? One
is reminded of a line by Margaret Atwood involving power politics between lovers in which
the poet wants the upper hand: "Please die I said /
so I can write about it."
Another fascinating bit of mystic lore Pamuk
digs up concerns a sect called Hurufi. At first
glance one might even think the author invented
the Hurufi Book of Onomancy in the interests of
postmodernist high jinks. But no, Hurufism is for
real and subject to serious scholarship, even today, involving divination by the letters "written"
in faces. Fazlallah of Astarabad (b. 1339) was the
founder of the sect, which drew meaning and
conclusions from a combination of the letters of
the Arabic alphabet. In "Black Book" we learn
that, accordingto Fazlallah,sound was the demarcation line between Being and Nothingness, since
everything that crossed over from nothingness
into the world of materiality produced a sound.
The acme of sound was, of course, the "word,"
the exalted thing called "speech," the magic
known as "words," which were made up of Letters. The origin of Being, its Meaning, and the
material Aspect of God were distinguishable in
Letters that were clearly written in the faces of
men. We all had native-borncharacteristicsof two
brow lines, four eyelash lines, and one hairlineseven strokes in all. At puberty this figure increased to fourteen, with the late-blooming nose
dividing our faces, and with its poetic doubling
(reflection)we reached the number twenty-eight,
the number of letters in the Arabic alphabet,
which brought the Koraninto existence. Fazlallah,
in an effort to bring the count up to thirty-two, the
number of letters in the Persian alphabet (he was,
after all, Persian himself), perused the line under
the chin and found two, which he then doubled,
reaching thirty-two.
Crackpotstuff ? Well, you will find references to
what is "written" in the rose, for example- or in
the spots of the tiger- in the fiction of the Great
Borges himself, as well as in that of many other
great Gnostic poets, past and present. Fazlallah,
who startedit all, proclaimedhimself Messiah (the
twelfth Imam returned to purify Islam)with seven
apostles to help him proselytize in Isphahan on
the hidden aspect of the Koran. Accused of heresy, he was tried and executed. The belief passed
from Iran to Turkey, thanks to Nesimi, a poet and
one of Fazlallah'ssuccessors, who put all his writings in a green trunk and went around Anatolia,
finding followers for his sect. Nesimi himself was
later captured in Aleppo, tried endlessly, and
flayed; his body was subsequently exhibitedin the
city, then cut into seven pieces and buried in
seven cities where he had adherents. Hurufism
spread quickly among Anatolian Bektashis, who
talked about kanz-imahfi,the secret treasuryof the
universe, which is God's's TrueQuality. The problem was to decipher the clues in the world in order
to achieve the treasury. They set themselves up to
decipher this mystery in every thing, every place,
every person.
It is all just too much fun for one postmodernist
novelist to have by himself, but Pamuk does. He
has Galiprifle through his columnist-cousin'streasury of arcane publications to find a weird little
book by one F. M. Uguncu (I still do not know if
this Uguncu is a legitimate commentator), who
presumably says in his book Esrar-iHurufve Esrann Kaybi(The Mystery of Huruf and the Loss of
Mystery) that Fazlallah was a true Easterner. To
think of him as part of any platonistic,pantheistic,
cabalistic thought was wrong. According to Pamuk's protagonist, Uguncii postulates that East
and West occupied separate halves of the world
and that never the twain shall meet. At times one
of the two halves was victorious over the other,
making it the master and the other the slave. The
historic junctures in the seesaw of ascendancy
were not coincidental but logical. Whichever half
was at any given time successful in viewing the
world as a mysterious, double, and magical place
2
u
I
Orhan Pamuk
62
TODAY
WORLD LITERATURE
was the half that was the ascendant. Those who
saw the world as a simple, single-meaninged,
unmysterious place were doomed to fail and to
end up as slaves.
The second part of Ugiincu's book (as the
lawyer-protagonist registers it) is devoted to a
detailed discussion of how Mystery was lost. The
loss of Mystery was a loss of "center," thereforea
loss of order. In the Age of Happiness all of us had
"meaning" in our faces, but with the loss of Mystery, our faces lost that "meaning." The fact that
faces looked so much like one another was because of the "emptiness" they all showed.
Galip, like the author himself, is also engaged in
looking for clues to put together a meaning. None
is forthcoming, however. All the clues are red
herrings, coincidences that he contrives himself.
The object of the search (Platonic Ideal, Beauty,
Reality, Identity) is Dead on Arrival- in other
words, a setup, the dead duck the author props
up in order to shoot several hundred pages later.
Art is all illusion, sleight-of-hand, trickery,impersonation, ventriloquism, the creating of mannequins or wax dummies by a master craftsman
(which abound in "Black Book" in the subterranean passages of Istanbul).Art is a dark mirror,a*
black mirror:art does not reflect Life. So what's
new?
Well, "Black Book" is very engaging. When it
first fell into my hands, I read it with a quivering
excitement, filled with both envy and recognition,
much like Anton Salieri taking down Mozart's
dictation of the Requiemat the end of the movie
Amadeus:"Yes! Of course, yes! Ahh, yes!" I
stopped friends on the street to narratefor them
whole sections of the novel. No other book had
spoken to me so completely, hitting my concerns
on the head, grabbing the themes I myself pursued, beating me to the punch line. Granted,
Pamuk and I share backgrounds, yet why all the
excitement?
I had a hunch, as a watcher of the world literary
scene, that here was a Turkish writer who was
going to Make It. The Nobel, for example: for
years the names of Yashar Kemal and Nazim
Hikmet have been submitted, only to be turned
down, as the Nobel Committee, one suspects,
scratched its illustrious collective head and wondered what Turks see in those two writers; but
here was Orhan Pamuk, a kid who was doing the
right thing at the right time. I could already hear
"Black Book" in English. All it needed was the
right translator.
To speak more generally, "BlackBook" is made
of the stuff that grabs us all. Aside from being
pertinent to our times, there is something appealing in Pamuk's unrequited quest for meaning, an
innocence in his sophistication, and truth in his
trickery. Here is a wide-eyed devourer of books,
Pamuk himself, who is heartbroken at the fact
that, seductive as literatureis, it cannot deliver on
its promises, let alone guarantee a good time in
bed.
Pamuk, in his fourth and most ambitiousnovel,
seems determined to reposit in this book a revolving index of a culture, high and low, that produces
a Turkishintellectual:everything that delights and
instructsthe Turkishheart, including an obsession
with history, beauty, mystical philosophy. The
book derives from the world of the Haves (as
opposed to the Have-Nots). Not only is Pamukthe
bookish son of a well-heeled family who has inherited the pursuit of happiness as a naturalright;
he is also an obsessive researcherinto odd historical quirks, which come out of the past in recognizable embroidered satin tatters that he works into
the crazy quilt called the postmodernist novel.
The modern trend in Turkish "realism" had
been the so-called Village Novel, in which the
author, more often than not a member of the
middle-class intelligentsia, depicts the trials and
tribulationsof godforsakenpeasants in an effortto
"educate" the reading public (also composed of
the middle class) and to produce a national conscience as well as consciousness:the Writerposing
as Teacher, as Pamuk never tires of pointing out.
It is perhaps this educator's mask worn by the
Turkish novelist that has turned off New York
Publishing, which has no taste for teachers. And
we all know that what doesn't play in New York
doesn't get to play on the rest of the world's
playgrounds.
Pamuk, who has deliberatelyset out to become
a world-class writer, has borrowed the attitudes
and strategies of Third World authors writing for
the consumption of the FirstWorld. Not only does
he know all the tricks;he never misses one. His
work translateslike a charmprecisely for the same
reason Isabel Allende's work travels easily into
English: English is, in fact, the common language
behindthe various languages out of which the new
world-voice is being created- like world rock music- the destination of which is also the United
States.
As John Updike somewhat biliously points out
in his New Yorkeressay on Pamuk and the Czech
Ivan Klima (2 September 1991), it might be the
Iowa InternationalWriting Programthat fosters a
global voice. True, Pamuk has put in an almost
obligatory stint at Iowa; but the global voice is
more likely to be tied to world economics, I suspect, than to Midwestern schools playing host to
world writers. Updike, as a master of the modern
novel, justifiably feels left out of the fun and
games perpetrated by the slew of international
writers and foisted on him to review. "Fantasy
and cleverness," he says; "exotic visions," he
says; "effortless gymnastics," he says. He is not
entirely sure if the new kids on the block are For
Real. How does one know if they are any good if
KADIR
one does not have the proper critical tools with
which to measure them against the likes of himself, John Updike, or (heaven forbid) Master
Hemingway?
True, fantasy and cleverness have taken the
place of the restraintand symmetry of the modern
novel, apparently because that is the form in
which the materialfrom the ThirdWorldsells over
63
here. And why not? Vis-a-vis Turkish literature,
the English-speakingworld has been looking high
and low for a Turkishwriter with whom to identify. If fantasy or cleverness is the only vehicle on
which Turkishliteraturecan arriveupon the world
scene, well then, all the more power to Orhan
Pamuk.
Oberlin, Oh.
Turkish Family Romance
Kurbanolamkalemtutan ellere....
Pir Sultan Abdal
Don't say, "It has been said," when I really hear you
saying, "Aga listen to me."
Giineli Gun, Book of Trances
Shahrazad's presence might yet make things come out
all right.
Giineli Gun, On the Road to Baghdad
By DJELALKADIR John Barthhas called Giineli
Gun "a shrewd and magical
Turkish-American storyteller, sired by GarciaMarquezupon Scheherazade."
The wily American writer and teacher of writers,
who himself has amply suckled from Shahrazad's
breast (see his recent novel The Last Voyageof
the Sailor,1991), might have also admitSomebody
ted that he served as midwife in Giineli's delivery
upon our writing scene. He does make his appearance, in fact, in Giineli's novel On the Road to
Baghdad(London, Virago, 1991),where, under the
code name of Jann Baath, he engages Giineli's
Shahrazadin conversationon the topic of her taletelling, enjoining her to write "as if you already
have a gentle heart" (243) that would redeem
Shahriyar, her husband and would-be executioner. No doubt, the pedagogicalinjunctionthat I
have heard Barth reiterate in conversation must
have been delivered also to his students, of whom
Giineli was one, at the Johns Hopkins Writing
Seminars:"Writeas who you are." Barthis crafty
enough to know that since a version of that injunction, "Know thyself," was delivered by Socrates,
the primal teacher of crafty teaching, his students
have been trying to comply for some two and a
half millennia with mixed success. If knowing
oneself is a sinuous path and a circuitous enterprise, writing as oneself or, as Jann Baath would
have it, as if, is treacherousindeed. "The intricate
evasions of as" may well be the best characterization of the writer's vocation in this regard, as
summed by Wallace Stevens in this pithy verse
from one of his better-known poems ("An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"). Evasion and pur-
suit are, of course, sides of the same coin, a coin
whose faces a writer cannot countenance without
some trepidation. A common recourse in the face
of such peril is the assumption of evasion as tactic
when one means to pursue and a course of pursuit
when one intends evasion. In the mirroredreversals which inevitably haunt writers and writing's
realm, one hopes to stay on course.
The Turkish literary tradition has wrought this
strategy to elaborateextremes. Orhan Pamuk and
Giineli Giin make their respective ways through
the stations of this venerable itinerary. Pamuk's
KaraKitap,discussed in the accompanying essay
by Giineli, who is in the throes of delivering the
novel into English for Farrar,Straus & Giroux, is
an exemplaryspecimen of hide-and-seek, whereas
Giineli's own Bookof Trances(1979) and her more
recent On theRoadto Baghdadbend this strategy to
exquisite ends. Her foregoing commentary on
Pamuk'snovel, then, becomes most revealing, not
only with regard to Pamuk's latest opus, but, just
as significantly,with regard to her own novel and
its intricate way stations along the path of writing's picaresques. This last word is meant, obviously, to rhyme with arabesques, since the spirit
of Shahrazad and of the thousand-and-one-night
tales hovers playfully in the intricateplots of this
writing's family romance, as Giineli points out
with regard to Pamuk's novel and as she engagingly dramatizes in her own latest work.
The epigraphs I have placed at the head of these
lines may be instructive in how this latter-day
Shahrazad demurs in the tradition of pursuit by
evasion and evasion through pursuit. The first is
from a sixteenth-century Turkish bard who met