The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

 

The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk - Right at the outset we're given an Arabian Nights story within a story: a Faruk Darvinoglu finds a manuscript in 1982, in a forgotten archive attached to a governor's office in Gebze, a city thirty miles southeast of Istanbul.

The manuscript carries the title The Quilter's Stepson and the margins and blank pages are filled with drawings in a childish hand of men and women with tiny heads dressed in costumes with buttons. Faruk tells us some events described in the manuscript (for example, a plague) bear little resemblance to fact. However, Faruk also informs us our knowledge of history generally verifies the happenings in the manuscript.

In his capacity as a professional encyclopedist, Faruk is inclined to include an entry on the manuscript's author in the encyclopedia's history section although he's not able to verify the author in other sources. Following his assessment of the found document, Faruk alerts us to his own rendering, "My readers will see that I nourished no pretensions to style while revising the book into contemporary Turkish."

And herein we have yet again another story within a story - author Orhan Pamuk publishing a novel in modern Turkish in 1985, a novel written in highly stylized language about Faruk Darvinoglu nourishing no pretension in style in his own revision of that manuscript.

So, Faruk's statement becomes the Preface in Pamuk's The White Castle. And the novel's chapters, eleven in number, comprise the account compiled by an unnamed 17th century narrator, a Venetian scholar captured by the Turks during a navel engagement and taken to Istanbul.

The narrator is reduced to the status of slave and given over to Hoja, a Turkish courtier, a man set on reestablishing the Ottoman Empire's dominance over the West via a mastery of their science. Hoja insists the narrator teach him everything he knows.

To add even more spice to this spicy Turkish tale, the narrator and Hoja could pass for nearly identical twins.

Turning to the narrator's tale itself, in the first several chapters we're treated to, among many other things, an account of his capture, his prior life as scholar in Italy with plans of marriage, his first days and weeks, months and years with Hoja, teaching Hoja Ptolemaic astronomy, he and Hoja creating a spectacular fireworks display for a pasha's wedding, devising a geared mechanism for a clock...but then it happens: after living with his double for eleven years, Hoja becomes obsessed with a specific question: 'Why am I what I am?'

Hoja's obsession with this question reaches a point where he insists the narrator provide him with an answer. And by a very specific method - for as the narrator relates: "I must work out who I was and write it down; he would see how it was done, see how much courage I had."

Hoja's question throbs as the heartbeat of this short novel. For The White Castle is, above all else, about the nature of identity. Who is Hoja? Who is he in isolation; who is he in relation to his society; who is he in relation to his scholarly, creative, imaginative double? And who is the narrator himself? At what point does he possibly merge or switch identities with Hoja?

Hoja's question of identity becomes more pressing, more dramatic when plague infests the city. There's also Hoja's preoccupation with developing an ultimate weapon to destroy the infidels.

Orhan Pamuk is a storyteller with pizzazz, a kind of modern day Scheherazade. However, a point should be underscored and underscored again: as much as the sequence of events in The White Castle will propel a reader to keep turning those pages, it is the HOW the story is told, employing precise, lively, elegant, arabesque language, that lifts the novel to the status of modern classic. A trio of direct quotes to serve as examples:

On creating fireworks over a river for all in Istanbul to see:
"Then, one by one, we released our dragons; flames spurted from their huge nostrils, their gaping mouths and pointed ears. We had them fight one another; as planned, none could defeat the other at first. We reddened the sky even more with rockets fired from shore, and after the sky had darkened a bit, our men on the caiques turned the winches and the dragons began to ascend very slowly into the sky; now everyone was screaming in fear and awe; as the rockets on the caiques were fired at once; the wicks we had placed in the bodies of the creatures must have caught fire at just the right moment, for the whole scene, exactly as we desired, was transformed into a burning inferno."

On facing execution for his refusal to convert to Islam:
"They seized me suddenly, pushing me to my knees. Just before I laid my head on the stump I was bewildered to see someone moving through the trees, as if flying; it was me, but with a long beard, walking silently on the air. I wanted to call out to the apparition of myself in the trees, but I could not speak with my head pressed against the stump. It will be no different from sleep, I thought, and let myself go, waiting: I felt a chill at my back and the nape of my neck, i didn't want to think, but the cold at my neck made me go on."

On writing at the same desk as Hoja:
"The bright symmetry of the analogy excited me as well. We sat down immediately at the table. This time I too, though half ironically, wrote 'Why I Am What I Am' across the top of the page. Right away, since it came to mind as something characteristic of my personality, I began to write down a childhood memory of my shyness. Then, when I read what Hoja was writing about the wickedness of others, I had no idea which at that moment I believed to be important, and spoke up. Hoja should write about his own faults too."


Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, born 1952