Literary The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

[Bookworm_Girl]

I finished the book last night so I'm still trying to gather my thoughts. I'm really glad we read this book and enjoy the challenge of understanding it. The discussion so far has been very interesting. Thank you, desertblues, for sharing your experiences!

I do think Pamuk was playing a game with us. I chose to read the novel literally as if the Ventian and Hoja were two separate people whose lives intersected and then joined and then diverged again in their swapped identities. I didn't mind the ambiguity and liked the layers of interpretation and trying to distinguish what was real and what was imagined. I also think Pamuk was speaking to his countrymen not to take the identity conflict of Eastern or Western so serious that it becomes too much of a burden.

From The Paris Review interview:

I’m an optimist. Turkey should not worry about having two spirits, belonging to two different cultures, having two souls. Schizophrenia makes you intelligent. You may lose your relation with reality—I’m a fiction writer, so I don’t think that’s such a bad thing—but you shouldn’t worry about your schizophrenia. If you worry too much about one part of you killing the other, you’ll be left with a single spirit. That is worse than having the sickness. This is my theory. I try to propagate it in Turkish politics, among Turkish politicians who demand that the country should have one consistent soul—that it should belong to either the East or the West or be nationalistic. I’m critical of that monistic outlook.

From the traveller in the book:

But we should search for the strange and surprising in the world, not within ourselves! To search within, to think so long and hard about our own selves, would only make us unhappy. This is what had happened to the characters in my story: for this reason heroes could never tolerate being themselves, for this reason they always wanted to be someone else.

Turkey is historically recognized as the bridge between Eastern and Western societies. It has characteristics of both and is something unique unto itself as well. I think Pamuk is saying that's ok and both societies can be learned from and appreciated. I also found it interesting that Pamuk says he used his own relationship with his brother as a model for developing the interaction between the Venetian and Hoja. Sibling relationships encompass a wide range of positive and negative emotions from fits of jealousy to support for one another to mutual love. I think it is important that he frames this Doppelgänger relationship as fraternal brotherhood rather than one side of the identity being positive and the other side being negative as often done in literature.

I believe that those who read my story realize by now that I must have learned as much from Hoja as he learned from me! Maybe I just think this way now because when we are old we all look for more symmetry, even in the stories we read.

Perhaps he was right, perhaps what I felt could be called jealousy, but what he didn’t realize was that this was a fraternal feeling.

I think he is also emphasizing the "oneness of humanity" by the way that the identities of the Venetian and Hoja merge and become shared. As the sultan says, "that basically every life was like another." We all have hopes, fears, dreams. Hoja finds that the sins and confessions of the Christians in the European forests are no different than those of the Turkish janissaries or the Muslim villagers.

always the same, the sovereign would ask thoughtfully: must one be a sultan to understand that men, in the four corners and seven climes of the world, all resembled one another? Afraid, I would say nothing; as if to break my last effort at resistance he would ask once again: was it not the best proof that men everywhere were identical with one another that they could take each other’s place?

These are just a few of my initial thoughts. I'll have to reflect for awhile longer yet!

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by issybird

I consciously chose to read it as if it were imagined by the Venetian once he was captured, to while away his captivity. I have mixed feelings, though, about whether it's a strength or a flaw that their isn't a clearcut solution. I don't mind (that is, I enjoy) misdirection and multiple possibilities as I'm reading, but I also expect the author to have a clearcut solution which the story supports, as in a classic mystery novel. He doesn't have to share it, it can remain nebulous, but I'm left with the feeling that Pamuk hadn't quite made up his mind himself.

I have discovered that there is a 10-page Afterword titled "On White Castle" that was added to the Turkish editions starting a year after the book was first published. This Afterword has not been included in English editions. The following are quotes from Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy by Erdag Groknar. I put them in spoilers in case you don't want to read them. Basically there is an appended section that reads like a "false" afterword to complement the "false" preface! Within this afterword Pamuk says "I myself don't know whether the Italian slave or the Ottoman Hoja wrote the manuscript." He also playfully identifies a few insertions in the book that indicate neither the Venetian nor Hoja could have written the novel alone. Although at this point who knows what is real or fiction and perhaps all we can surmise is that the ambiguity was intentional!

Spoiler:

The afterword is significant for what it reveals about Pamuk's process of writing the novel, but more so because it cleverly treats the novel's metafictional allusions as if they were real, including Darvinoglu's methods of authorship and the ambiguity of narration between Venetian and "Turk".

The "afterword" earnestly describes Darvinoglu's work in the archive as being literary rather than historical, as if Pamuk himself didn't have authorial control over the text: "and just like Cervantes, Faruk will likely have added some things from other books to the hand-written [Ottoman] manuscript as he rendered it into the language of his compatriots [modern Turkish]". This explanation, while constructing Pamuk's authorial absence, supports the notion that Darvinoglu is far from being faithful to an original Ottoman manuscript discovered in an archive, but is rather writing an account that he believes will be more relevant to his contemporary Turkish audience, with supplemental material from other sources(including perhaps his own imagination).

[Bookpossum]

Good find, Bookworm_Girl! Sounds as if issybird nailed it with her comment that you have highlighted.

It doesn't bother me that he left it open - I like the ambiguity.

[desertblues]

Thank you Bookworm_Girl for your insights, and like Bookpossum, I rather like the ambiguity of the book. I do like my books to be a bit though, at times offend me or question my own identity.

One can read it on many levels and I read it twice, as the end of the book was somewhat surprising for me. I felt though, at the end, that 'something was up', as the Venetian was never referred to by his own name –seemed to have no identity or did not exist- and he spoke about ‘us’ and ‘our’ when he meant himself.

As an historic novel it is interesting to get a view in life around pasha’s and sultans in those days. But the ‘negative’ of this book and it’s ambiguity is that one is doubting all presented……. Therefore I am going to read up on the state of science in the East and the West of those days. Their shared scientific past and the Islamic scientific influence upon the West in the Middle Ages is also a thing to take into consideration of course.

The sense I got while reading this book, of listening to an inner dialogue with it’s heartaches and conflicts, is beautifully illustrated by the following quote:
’when suddenly the pasja erupted. 'Be rid of him!’ he’d said. ‘If you like, poison him, if you like, free him. You’ll be more at ease.’ I must have glanced at Hoja with fear and hope for a moment. He said he would not free me until ‘they’ realized.'(37).

Turkey is said to have two identities and these days seem in conflict with both of them. The last year political developments point to a more rigid Islamic one, which is problematic for many of it’s population that is used to a certain standard of personal freedom. For those who have read my post on the history of the Armenian at Ani, I think I found a kind of explanation for the distorted sense of history many Turkish people seem to have, in the book of Caroline Finkel ‘ Osman’s dream. The history of the Ottoman empire’

Spoiler:

16.'The past is truly another country in Turkey, whose citizens have been deprived of easy access to the literary and historical works of previous eras by the change of alphabet in 1928 from Arabic script to the Roman alphabet familiar to most of the western world. At the same time, an ongoing programme to make the vocabulary more Turkish is expunging words of Arabic and Persian derivation – the other two components of the rich amalgam that was the Ottoman tongue, today in danger of becoming as ‘dead’ as Latin. On the other hand, works from the Ottoman centuries are now being published in modern script with simplified language, enabling modern readers to gain some understanding of what went before. The situation would otherwise be dire: imagine an English literary canon which lacked anything written before the 1930s!
It once seemed possible that, with the passing of those generations who had learnt the Ottoman language before the change of alphabet, there would be few who were able to read the voluminous documents and manuscripts which are the basic source-material for Ottoman history. However, students continue to train as historians, and learn Ottoman, and they hold university positions in Turkey[…]'

[fantasyfan]

When the "twin" appeared, I assumed that the novel would be in the form of a dialogue between self and doppelgänger and I so read it. Pamuk was altogether more subtle than that and the "identity theme" could be expanded to include a dialogue between two interior selves on ethical as well as cultural and psychological levels.

I didn't like the ending. It reminded me too much of the type of authorial trick used by Golding in Pincher Martin: The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin.
However, this is a matter of taste (for which there is indeed no accounting )and clearly many would find the ending of The White Castle appropriate and satisfying as throughout Pamuk has made skilful use of literary ambiguity.. Another obstacle for me was the fact that I didn't empathise with the main character{s} nor with the plot, the latter of which i found quite static. Again, I am expressing what is certainly a personal opinion.

On a positive note, I am glad to have read this book because it has a depth of meaning which, for me, more than compensates for aspects I found annoying.

[desertblues]

Today I went to an interesting exhibition of 1001 Islamic inventions. Though I don't agree with the historical accuracy of all the presented historical facts, it is a very good example of how Eastern and Western science intermingled in the Middle Ages. I searched for an English presentation

and the link for the exhibition in Rotterdam, the Netherlands
http://www.1001inventions.com/

Spoiler:

I also visited a great James Bond exhibition today, with many original things like costumes, storyboards, inventions made by Q etc, etc. I just happened to rewatch the James Bond films yesterday, starting with Dr. No. I saw the original bikini of Ursula Andres and James Bond swimming trunks today....yes, I'm a bit of a fan....