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in chapter three, separation or disconnectedness from the Beloved is a precondition that will lead to transformation.
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A lthough the state of separation is regarded as a ‘fall’ or disconnectedness,
it is also an essential and dynamic process. In the perspective of metaphysical realities whose nature is cyclic, descent is a requisite for the possibility of ascent
to the perfect state.
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Thus, separation does not solely involve fragmentation, but it also bears unity. The discussion in the following sub-heading will show how the
state of separation leading to transformation or constituting the dynamic and the possibility of ascent mentioned.
3. A Dynamic Self: an Amalgam of Re-Union between the Old and New Cultural Identity.
Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other time, that we fall between two stools . . .
Salman Rushdie Prior to embark to the last analysis of the final stage, it is worth to recall that
in Sufi tradition everything is always coming in pairs. As it has explained in chapter one and chapter three,
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in the state of re- union the self has transformed into the state of intellectual penetration from the state of innocence. Although
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For a detailed review of the state separation that will lead to transformation, see Chapter 3, subheading 2.1 The Pain of Separation, 75-77.
245
Lalita Sinha, Unveiling the Garden of Love. Mystical Symbolism in Layla Majnun Gita Govinda Indiana: World Wisdom, 2008, 115.
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Please refers to chapter one page 25-26 and chapter three page 88-89 for more discussion on this issue.
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tension still exists in this state, yet it is not causing similar distress as the Self has undergone transformation. It is also worth noting here that the union does not
always reach its ultimate end since the Self is always in a constant flux of complex change and transformation.
Turkey’s identity quest started to take shape ever since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, where Atatürk re- built new nation- state that used Westernizing
reforms as the basis of the new regime.
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Atatürk considered Westernization as a prerequisite to join the big family of the Western world. As discussed in the
preceding analysis, Atatürk put into practice several measurements to make the country modern and Western- meant he created fixated new ego to form an
authentic self. As a result of the rejection of their entire cultural heritage, the characters of
Pamuk’s novels in this study are suffering from separation of their motherland. They long for their lost origin and wail day by day from the separation of it. Their
loss of cultural origin, which is replaced by a new form of cultural identity, leads them to yearn for their motherland that occupies the state of exile. The characters
in the three novels of this study are suffering from the problem of a liminal identity crisis, which mainly emanates from a series of negative experiences as a
result of the transition from empire to republic in the post-World War I period. In the Black Book, the separation of the motherland caused the characters
wandering in completely new and strange world that leads them longing even more for their lost origin. Living in a country where they no longer recognized
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Meliz Ergin, East West Entanglements: Pamuk , Özdamar, Derrida, Unpublished Dissertation Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2009, 17.
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their ‘essence’ brings darkness in their life. It is also influencing the way they
interpret the meaning of life around them. The characters do not have other choice but to live in confusion over the lost meaning and memory of their life that
come out of imitating other people ’s life.
The radical changes aimed at reforming the life style, the forced banishment of the indigenous culture and the influences of all these elements on the
contemporary identity problem of Turkey make the life of the characters unbearably perplexed. Belkis, Rüya and Galip
’s classmate, have to suffer greatly as she continues living
by copying other’s life until the day her husband’s die: “I continued to suffer from this illness until my husband’s death. I still suffer from it
though I no longer see it as an illness” BB, 203. However, after all agony of losing her true self and replacing it with other’s people’s self, Belkis eventually
manages the ‘fate’ that to be oneself in the world is not possible:
I finally accepted that no one in this world can ever hope to be themselves. The overwhelming regret I felt was but another variation of the same
disease, and so was my new passion: to relieve the life I had shared with Nihat, relive it exactly but now as myself. One dark midnight, as I warned
myself that regret could ruin what time has left for me. […] the terror and
misery I had thought to be my past and my future became a fate I shared with everyone, and a fate I had no need to dwell on. For by now I knew
beyond the shadow of a doubt that none of us can ever hope to be ourselves BB, 203-4.
Unlike Belkis who bitterly embraces the fact that she cannot be herself, Galip succeeds to discover his new potential and to be himself after he
successfully lives as Celâl. In his predicament of losing Rüya and Celâl, Galip reads all Celâl’s columns as the key to locate Rüya and Celâl’s hideout. When he
read all of Celâl’s columns he convinces himself that he can write the way Celâl
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does. Eventually, when Galip manages to write as Celâl he discovers that he becomes Celâl through reading and writing his columns.
“Yes, yes, I am myself Yes, I’m myself” BB, 438.
Different fate is written for the Crown Prince Osman Selahattin who is described as a bookworm who reading all sorts of books from Eastern and
Western literatures. Unlike Galip who finally reunited with what he seek and born as new persona, the prince rejecting all external influences from the entire books
he has read. The Prince believes that to become himself, he should get rid of all the voices, egos and extensions of himself. To be a real leader, he wishes to purify
himself: As I wished to be a real sultan, and not a shadow, it was now clear to me
that I should resolve to be myself and not someone else; where upon I decided to free my mind of books- not just the ones I had read over the
previous six years but everything I’d ever read in my life. To be myself and not someone else, it was incumbent on me to free myself from all those
books, all those writers, all those stories, all those voices BB, 425.
After spending approximately twenty three years of solitude in his hunting lodge; cutting himself off from the outside influences; burning all the books he
has read; and “had his lodge cleansed of all smells and rid of all familiar objects and articles of clothing…cutting off all links with his never- played white piano,
and having the walls of the lodge painted white” BBi 436, the prince’s struggles to
“liberate millions” of his people from their spiritual crisis comes to no avail. All his attempts to save his people from the pain of identity crisis do not bear its
fruit but ends in his demise. Similar melancholy is experienced by Saim, Rü
ya’s ex- husband. He tells Galip that the more he shifts from one imitation to another the more he feels
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miserably painful. He cannot purse the happiness he used to have “after becoming a new person, and then another and another and another, there were less hope of
returning to the happiness they had known as the people they had at the beginning” BB, 129. He realized that he cannot manage to become another
person solely through distributing the leftist manifestos of unknown lands; “hemmed in by signs they’d never managed to decipher- the letters, manifestos,
pictures, faces, and guns- this man and his wife had been forced to admit that they had lost their way” BB, 129.
In the three novels in this study, Pamuk examines the so called identity construction in favor of his credo that identity is not a fixed agenda. Pamuk
presents his characters’ quest by showing that they have more than one fixed- soul. In their search for their true self, Pamuk’s characters are examined to have
more than one single heart. Their soul is forever developing and oscillating within the dynamic of the old and the new self as well as a totally different pole. This
current takes place as a result of the soul’s interaction with others and external factor that makes up one’s life. The result upon the separation from their root and
the meeting with the new cultural identity bring such ambiguous identity that neither belongs to the East nor to the West. As shown in the discussion, the
identity will keep unfolding along with its interaction with other and external influences.
As Galip says “I’m both myself and the other” therefore the result of the new cultural costume that replaces the cultural origin leading to the state of
confusions and helplessness. The characters suffer from losing their fundamental
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self and live a lonely and empty life by imitating others. Upon their separation with all dear things they had in the past the characters in The Black Book conform
to the loss of their origin. They finally realize that they will not get their ‘old’ self
by living as other ‘imposed’ self. Galip is eventually living as Celâl and launching himself into a
literary career by writing under Celâl’s name. Whereas Belkis who fears that having spent half her life trying to be someone else, she is
now co ndemned to spend the next half “being someone who regretted all those
years she had not spent being herself” BB, 204, she conforms to the bittersweet
collective melancholy she shares with everyone. As painful as it tastes for her, she relieves herself because she realizes that she shares similar fate with the men
who “are haunted day and night by the ghosts of the ‘true selves’ they longed to become BB, 204.
In Snow, the characters still oscillate between their old and new cultural identity, but in this novel the concept of fixity that Pamuk tries to confront in is
the rise of Ottoman Islam in the life and identity of Turkish people. This fixity including women
’s clothing and the removal of Islam that is consider as the biggest obstacle to climb the altar of modernity.
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Snow offers a wide range of possibility and the dynamics of identity construction in Turkey’s identity quest. It
shows the richness of motives and the complexities of identity searching.
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The problem is that Turkey had been governed under Islamic principle cultural heritance for six centuries therefore total rejection of religion was almost impossible. This is the reason why
“Turkish modernity could not have been a purely imitative and cosmic appropriation from the West” but rather it had to be “an innovative, hybrid adaptation tailored to the particularities of
local sociopolitical practices and Islamic frames of references”. See Alex Çivnar, Modernity,
Islam, and Secularities in Turkey Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, 16.
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Just like himself who started his adult life studying architecture in Istanbul Technical University i
n order to fill his family’s expectation and dropped out in second year and started a
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From the presentation of every character in this novel, Pamuk reminds us that fixity in identity formation is absurd. Identity is a result of endless interaction
with others and it “incorporates profound changes, together with contribution from elsewhere”.
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The government or any other power does not have authority to fixate, impose, and control the identity quest as the internal and external factors
that make up indentify is inevitably uncontrollable. Imposing one fix identity and banishing cultural origin will lead the nation to nowhere but a clash between
themselves. Kadife’s decision to veil herself and the headscarf-wearing girl who choose
to remove their own life are a form of protest against political authority and familial or social pressures. This protest suggests that even enthusiastically
Islamic women in Snow are individuated moderns. The issues that Pamuk covers in Snow suggest that Islam
promise a space for discussion and logic. Kadife’s argument on the dilemmatic position on the issue on headscarf-wearing girls that
commit suicide proves that the stereotyping of Islam as backward and anti-
new life as writer, Pamuk presents his characters live through the dynamics of identity construction where the Self is in a constant flux of changing. Pamuk comes from a family of
engineers, officers, historian, and businessmen. His father sent him to American college in Istanbul hoping that oneday he would make a man of positive science. He dreamt to be a painter therefore
he studied architecture in Istanbul Technical University but decided to leave as he felt an urge to be a writer.
His own identity searching influences the characterization in his novels. He inserts some personal details of himself in the characters he invented. He presented his characters’ search on the meaning
of their life and sometimes they change their profession to fill their longing finding their true self. This changing is examined in details journey of Osman, his hero in The new Life. In this novel
Osman abandons his school to pursue a new life as the promise of the book he currently reads. Or Galip in The Black Book who discovers his true self by switching his profession from a lawyer to a
writer. See
Emre GÖKALP, “Pride and Anger: Orhan Pamuk’S Nobel Prize and Discourse of Nationalism” Anadolu University Journal of Social Sciences 10. 3 2010, 19.
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Amin Maalouf, In The Name of Identity New York: Penguin, 2003, 23.
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mode rn is challenged. She argues, “It’s certainly true that the Nisa verse of the
glorious Quran proclaims that we shouldn’t kill ourselves. But this does not prevent God in his greatness from finding in his heart to pardon the suicide girls
and spare them from going to hell ” Snow, 402. Kadife demonstrates her
individual understanding
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of religion based on the complex encounters on the headscarf- banning in Kars and also proves that space for reasoning is a feasible
thing to attain in Islam: “In other words, you’ve found a way to twist the Quran to suit your
purposes.” “In fact, the contrary is true,” said Kadife. “It happens that a few young
women in Kars killed themselves because they were forbidden to cover their heads as they wished. A surely as the world is God’s creation, he can see
their suffering. So long as I feel the love of God in my heart, there’s no place for me in Kars, so I’m going to do as they did and end my life” Snow,
402.
Kadife herself before transforming into the leader of headscarf girl is also an atheist and an Istanbul model who ‘flaunt her leg and hair’. Kadife’s true reason to
get involved with the headscarf girls and veil herself is the ‘handsome hero with
midnight blue eyes’ Blue. Kadife very true reason to cover herself is Blue, Islamist fundamentalist who has an affair with her sister İpek. As İpek says, “her
only real motivation to associating with the headscarf was to get closer to Blue”
Snow, 361. At the same time, for Kadife, putting on her headscarf is her way to construct her identity. Her veil is an emergence of her subjectivity and it says that
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Islam recognizes the role of interpretation to derive principles and rules of law from evidence found in the sacred text which becomes central issue in Islam. Leila Ahmed writes “that the role
of interpretation of Islam is precisely what orthodoxy is most concerned to conceal and erase from the consciousness of Muslim.” See Leila Akhmed, Women and Gender in Islam New Haven and
London: Yale UP, 1992, 94.
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veiling is not a symbol of Islamic oppression, but rather as a means to celebrate women’s individuality and free choice.
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Similar tone of the fluid identity of Pamuk’s character in Snow is Blue. This
handsome casanova with “midnight blue eyes” is depicted against ‘imitating the
West’ and distancing himself from Western culture. In fact, Blue is the sole creature in the secret meeting in Hotel Asia who ever visits Europe. On his youth
Blue was an atheist and it was the speech of Ayatollah Khomeini that influenced him deeply and brought him back to Islam. As he confesses in his execution:
In my youth I rebelled against him by becoming a godless leftist, and when I was at university I tagged along with other young militants and stoned the
sailor coming off the American aircraft carriers. […] Because of the hated I
felt for the West, I admired the revolution in Iran. I returned to Islam. When Ayatollah Khomeini said, ‘The most important thing today is no pray but to
protect Islamic faith,’ I believed him. I took inspiration from Frantz Fanon’s work on violence, from the pilgrimages Seyyeid Kutub made in
protest against oppression, from the same m
an’s ideas on changing places Snow, 321.
The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence are apparently not dealing with social and political issues as much as Snow. In Snow, The above issues of
identity construction presented in the ‘clash’ between the Ottoman legacy and the
imposed modernization shows that Snow covers the past nostalgia of Turkey’s
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A novel that recounts the emergence of headscarf as an antithetical to the West’s reading on it a
s a symbol of women’s subservience to men can be found in The Butterfly Mosque. A memoir written by Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, once an American atheist, converts into Islam upon the
remedy of her severe illness. Somehow, she manages to hide her conversion for year as she scared of her family’s response.
Taking a job offering to teach English in Egypt following her graduation at Boston University, she started to acknowledge her conversion and perform a prayer as a Muslim. However, she still found
that telli ng ‘the world’ she is a Muslim was a little bit complicated for her, and then she decided to
put on a headscarf. “I ran up the flag, so to speak, by putting on hijab”. The way I wore my scarf, and the colors I chose, made it clear I was not crying out for help or seeking support Wilson:106-
108. She took refuge on headscarf to save her from the society her Muslim and non-Muslim friends response toward her conversion. See Gwendolyn. W. Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque New
York: Group West, 2010.
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fundamental identity in its contemporary identity issues. Snow offers complex issues on Turkey’s contemporary identity’s construction in its struggle between
Islam and modernization. The meeting at Hotel Asia upon Blue’s request to send news for the West about the coup in Kars shows how the Turks struggle and
construct their identity by defining their distinctive self on its contrary to Western identity. Blue is de
picted as the one against ‘imitating the West’. He hopes that their joint statement will be published in German Frankfurter Rundschau by the
help of Hans Hansen, an imaginary journalist that Ka created who in fact is a salesperson in Frankfurt from whom Ka bought his grey winter coat.
The representatives from members of societies in Kars gather at a secret meeting to draft a collective statement to the West denouncing the revolution and
military coup in Kars. This political meeting is attended by Fazil, a young religious school boy, as the representative of Kurdish nationalism, a liberal ex-
Communists represented by Turgut Bey, Islam fundamentalist with Blue, Kemalist Republicanism by Serday Bey, and even an Islamic feminist by Kadife.
At the meeting, these diverse groups whose political and ideological perspectives are different start to warmly engage in an argument over the wording of their
collective statement. Blue extremely opposes when a tittle of the first draft of their joint statement is selected as
“Announcement to the people of Europe about the Events in Kars” Snow, 270. Blue shows his strong resistance of this title:
“We’re not speaking to Europe,” he said,”we‘re speaking to all humanity. Our friends should not be surprised to learn we have been unable to publish
our statement —not just in Kars and Istanbul but also in Frankfurt.The
people of Europe are not our friends, they’re our enemies. And it’s not
because we’re their enemies, it’s because they instinctively despise us” Snow, 271.
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Turget Bey, İpek’s and Kadife’s father, responds Blue’s: “But we all know what Europe has come to mean. Europe is our future and the future of our
humanity” Snow, 271. Blue, who does not want the West to be the master of all and despises how the West always pokes their nose on the affairs of others,
adama ntly discards Turgut Bey’s view. He reacts: “Europe’s not my future,” said
Blue with a smile. “As long as I live I shall never imitate them or hate myself for
being unlike them ” Snow, 271.
As the debate over the wording leads to violence, Turgut Bey challenges the audiences to speak their mind if
they are provided with “two lines of space” from German newspaper.
”If a German newspaper gave you personally two lines of space, what would you sa
y to the West?” Snow, 273. The challenge invites each person to speak up resulting in a mix of thoughts and opinions over the meaning
of Turkey, Europe, the West, and humanity, as well as the “concept of nation and
identity ”. A young boy from the Kurdish association argues: “I’ve always
dreamed of the day when I’d have a chance to share my ideas with the world-and so has everyone else in this room. We’re not stupid, we’re just poor And we have
a right to want to insist on th is distinction”; “All I want is to step out of their
shadow. But the truth is, we all live under a shadow”; We will never be the Europeans...They may try to roll over us with their tanks and spray us with
bullets and kills us all, but they can’t change our souls”; You can take possession of my body but not my souls.”; Nomatter how hard our friends here try to draw a
line between themselves and the lowlifes who ape the ways of the West, I still sense a certain note of apology ”I’m sorry I’m not a Westerner.”; If the European
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are right and our only future and only hope is to be more like them, it’s foolish to waste time talking about what makes us who we are”; “I’m proud of the things in
me that the Europeans find childish, cruel, and primitive. If the Europeans are beautiful, I want to be ugly; if they are intelligent, I prefer to be stupid; if they are
modern, let me stay pure” Snow, 274-279. These statements to gain a collective purpose to be sent to the Western
which are created based on each person ’s personal experience provide the meeting
with “the atmosphere festive and intimate” Snow, 277. A feeling of intimacy that later Fazil describes to Ka: “It was as if we were all brothers suddenly, as if
we were closer to one another than we’d ever been before” Snow, 274. In The Museum of Innocence,
Kemal’s life life is distressed upon losing Füsun. He is
desolated from the rest of the world just like ‘nightingale departed from the rose’.
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He begins to collect mementos of the affair following his separation from Fusun, holes up
in his mother’s apartment where his affair takes place, and he surrounds himself with things Füsun has touched
–and caresses himself with them like a “nurse salving a wound”.
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Kemal’s collections also embody what Pamuk calls hüzün in his memoirs Istanbul Memory of the Cities.
Hüzün, that defined as melancholy carries a theological understanding of the place of loss and grief, it sustains notes of elegy and nostalgia:
hüzün rises out of the pain they feel for all that which has been lost, but it is also what compels them to invent new defeats and new ways to express their
impoverishment [...]. Hüzün does not just paralyse the inhabitants of
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Attar, The Conference of the Birds, trans.Afham Darbandi and Dick Davis London: Penguin, 1994, 14.
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For the discussion on how Kemal squirrels the objects that related to Füsun, see page 46-47.
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Istanbul; it also gives them poetic licence to be paralysed Pamuk, 2005, 92- 3.
The state of melancholy where Kemal snuggles provides him with a creative spark for a poetic act. Istanbul with all its objects and moment of beauty becomes
‘galaxy of sign’ that reminds Kemal of Füsun. Thus Kemal fetishistic collection not solely of the objects that Füsun has come in contact with, or that remind him
of the times he has spent with her. These chronicles of objects included cigarette butts that had touched Füsun lips and were stubbed in different styles, earrings
that were once on her ears, theatre tickets and restaurant menus, where she had accompanied him and thousands of such small and unimportant objects but life
giving things for him. Once Füsun has died, Kemal’s obsession with collecting
objects intensified. He then amasses an enormous collection related to his dead beloved and to the era in which his love affair takes place. All these objects
become his talisman and curative ailment to endure his suffering from losing Füsun and the guilt he feels for not having appreciated her the way she deserves.
“Anthropologist of his own experience” MoI, 30, Kemal creates the Museum of Innocence as discussed in Chapter 3 page 93-94, as the repository of
that experience with each display conveying not just memories, but also emotions: “Because so many languages describe the condition I was in as “heartbreak,” let
the broken porcelain heart I display here suffice to convey my plight at the moment to all who visit my museum” MoI, 53; “Here I display Füsun’s white
panties with her childish white socks and her dirty white sneakers, without comment, to evoke our spells of sad silence”MoI, 100.
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White panties, white socks and dir ty sneakers, the pieces he has “broken
off” of her, reveal an objectified Füsun who never appears as a subject in the book.
Like most of Pamuk’s female characters, Füsun never appears as a subject, she is one- dimensional
that comes into existence through Kemal’s description. Only when she maneuvers her unhappy ending, she speaks and acts as herself. In
most of the novel, Kemal is the sole person who can see Füsun, yet does not understand her at all; he only depits Füsun in the way he wants to see her. He
himself acknowledges this when he states that “like most Turkish men of my world who entered into this predicament, I never paused to wonder what might be
going on in the mind of the woman with whom I was madly in love, and what her dreams might be; I o
nly fantasized about her” MoI, 253. Kemal who immortalizes the melancholy of his ruin and painful love story
into a museum
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is not merely display his love for Füsun, but also all the objects in the era that orchestrating their love affair. Kemal is obviously the new version
of Majnun
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in Pamuk’s works. The extreme suffering Kemal endures as a result
of his separation from Füsun transforms him from a lovesick into an
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In a reality Pamuk established Museum of Innocence on April 28. 2012, based on the museum described in the book. The museum is located exactly as stated in the novel, in
Çukurcuma neighbourhood of Beyoğlu, Istanbul. It displays a collection, indicative of everyday life and culture of Turkish life during the period of 1975 to 2000, in which the novel is set. The
museum hosts 83 exhibits to correspond to the 83 chapters in the novel which are installed at the second floor of the museum. In the first floor, the visitors will find a display of 4213 cigarette butts
that Füsun smoked for eight years in the novel. These cigarette butts are completed with the date of retrieval. In addition, the catalog titled The Innocence of Things is published in Turkish and it
was released in English in autumn 2012. See www.orhanpamuk.net.
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Majnun is the prime example of the travellers who discovers his true Self upon a devastating separation from his Beloved, Layla. Majnun is
Nizami’s twelfth-century Persian romance hero who becomes unhinged when separated from his beloved Layla. He gains the nickname Majnun
his real name is Qays literally means madman as his common sense is entire consumed by the Beloved and he cares nothing but re-union with the Beloved. His hopeless love purged him of
egotism and worldly desires and transformed him into a great poet and ascetic. See Nizami, The Story of Layla and Majnun, transed. Rudolf Gelpke New York: Omega Publication, 1997.
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“ethnographer of his own life and society.” He then builds a mausoleum dedicated to his Beloved. The museum he installs is not solely narrating the journey of his
love story, but it is also picturing Istanbul in the era where his elegy takes place. Hence, Kemal turns to be a collector of objects upon his separation and re-
union with Füsun. At the beginning he collects itemss that function as curative objects to heal his wounded heart. He collects the stuffs that belong to Füsun or
everything that reminds him of every single moment he spends on his effort to win Füsun. His efforts including spurns the trendy restaurants and cafes of his
elite peers, going instead to Füsun family’s shabby home to sit, night after night
for approximately eight years of his visit. Kemal explains that “According to my
notes, during the 409 weeks that my story will now describe, I went there for supper 1,593 times” MoI, 393.
He dwells and experiences the life of middle class neighborhood that never takes him as one of its family members, but a stranger who has a psychological
problem: “everyone in the neighborhood had been aware of Kemal’s Bey comings
and goings- they knew he was rich, and not quite right in the head” MoI, 522. He
isolates himself from his old friends and family because as Zaim tells him “Society has written [him] off” MoI, 411. A conversation that makes Kemal
feels estranged from his own circle- from the world he once knew “Suddenly I felt
as if Zaim was regarding me from a great distance. […] Suddenly I, too, was se
eing Zaim, and my entire past, from a point very far away. Yes, I’d cut myself off from my entire crowd, and all my friends” MoI, 418-9. Kemal, an elite
Westernized class, educated abroad but estranged from his neighborhoods like
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Beyoğlu, Şişli and Nişantaşi, choosing instead to prowl the streets of poor neighborhoods like Vefa, Seyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafapaşa: “I felt as if I could
see the very essence of life in these poor neighborhoods, with their empty lots, their muddy cobblestone streets, their cars, rubbish bins, and sidewalks, and the
children playing with a half- inflated football under the streetlamps” MoI, 212.
As a pariah in both worlds, his old bourgeois friends, Füsun middle’s class milieu, all ridicule his obsessive love for Füsun: “From [Zaim] words it was clear
that already Istanbul society- or at least the people in our own circle- had begun to make jokes about my obsession. But I had already guessed this” MoI, 216. In the
end of his wander, Kemal’s museum is not merely a mausoleum to immortalize Füsun, but also a museum that:
not bad imitations of Western art but their own life. Instead of displaying the Occidentalist fantasies of our rich, our museum should show us our own
lives. […] As visitors admire the objects of Füsun and Kemal, with due
reverence, they will understand that, like the tales of Leyla and Mecnun or Hüsn and Aşk, this is not simply a story of lovers, but of the entire realm,
that is, of Istanbul MoI, 524.
The foregoing discussion over the meaning of Europe for the Turkish people shows
Pamuk’s examination on the tension between sameness and difference in the relation between Turkish and European identities. Turkey is divided into an
ambiguous position; on the one hand they desire to mimic the West on the other hand they fear of becoming an inauthentic copy of the West.
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As Konuk puts it,
257
Meliz Ergin. East-West Entanglements: Pamuk, Özdamar, Derrida, Unpublished Dissertation Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2009, 24.
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“the modernization reforms promoted sameness and difference with Western Europe but simultaneously maintained a notion of n
ational particularity.”
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Turkey’s in-between place is particularly can be seen in Snow and The Museum of Innocence. Ka is an exile either in Frankfurt amongst the European
that considers him as a Turk or in Kars between his fellow Turks who take him as a Western intelligentsia as he belongs to an upper class family and grows up in an
elite neighborhood in Nişantaş, Istanbul.
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Kemal has lost his upper bourgeois friends since
his entry to Füsun’s world separates him from the rest of his elite community. And yet he never acquires
a place in Füsun’s middle class. Ka and Kemal’s position is like the position of Turkey following its radical
Westernization underwent in the early twentieth century. The exilic life of the characters represented by Ka and Kemal, who are pariahs in the two different
realms, is a metaphor of Turkey’s difficulty to situate themselves in a distinct
Eastern identity or Western identity. For Middle Eastern countries, Turkey is
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Konuk, Kader. “Erich Auerbach and the Humanist Reform to the Turkish Education System.” Comparative Literature Studies 45. 1 2008: 74-89.
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Ka who is literally thorn between Frankfurt and Turkey can be read as an allusion of Pamuk’s
own position in Turkey. His social status background as a member of wealthy Westernized family from Nişantaş is taken to accuse him as a secular by the religious group in Turkey. This religious
group turns a blind eye on his observation on the Muslim’s world. Yet, in his surrounding he is
accused of taking side with the religious group for the way he critiques the military. Even the Nobel Prize for literature he won in 2006 turned him into an object of love and hate in Turkey.
Many Turkish people believe that Pamuk won the award due to his belittlement of the Turkish nation. Pamuk
was prosecuted in 2006 for ‘insulting Turkishness’ on his comments regarding the mass killings of Armenians in the first decades of 20th century and Kurds during the 1990’s. This
was the cause why Pamuk was blamed for stoking an international campaign against Turkey in return for an international award like the Nobel Prize. Therefore, despite the fact that he is the
first-ever Turkish citizen winning the Nobel Price, Turkish people and general media responded with a mix feeling of pride, cynicism, and anger. See Emre Gökalp, “Pride and Anger: Orhan
Pamuk’s Nobel Price and Disccourses of Nationalism.” Anadolu University Journal of Social Sciences 10.3 2010:171-189, 172.
176
considered to be part of Western culture, whereas for European nations, Turkey is in Europe when they define their geographical terms, but when the European
countries define their cultural identity, Turkey cultural heritage prevent her for being accepted as European but it does not prevent her to be part of European.
260
However, “since its emergence into power in the 14
th
Century, Turkey expanded in the exepense of Europe. It controlled and administrated one-fourth to one-third
European continent from the 14-19C. ”
261
Therefore, Turkey was in Europe when the modern state of Europ
e is “conventionally said to have emerged from the fi
thteen century onwards.”
262
In the late 16C Queen Elizabeth I established relations with the Ottoman Empire to expand the trade and the Sultan could
balance the Hapsburg in the east so Spain’s pressure upon England could be
relieved. In addition, Ottoman Empire’s role within European balance system was acknowledged by British parliament and Catherine the Great of Russia in the late
18C. Hence, Turkey and Europe have always been in mutual contact and they are never being isolated from one another.
263
Nonetheless, Turkey’s wish to be one of the full members of the European
Union apparently is not as simple as how Hoja exchanges his place with his Venetian slave simply by writing an autobiographical story about them. By doing
so, they learn about each other lives and eventually swaps places.
264
In the real
260
See Nuri Yurdusev, “Turkey’s Engagement with Europe” Turkey’s Engagement with Modernity Conflict and Change in the Twentieth Century, eds. Celia Kerslake, Kerem Öktem, and
Philip Robins New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010: 277-299, 286-287.
261
Ibid. 278.
262
Ibid. 278
263
Ibid. 78
264
See Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, trans.Victoria Holbrook New York: Vintage International, 1990.
177
world, there is always an upside down of whether Turkey deserves the EU membership regardless of her physical presence in European continent and her
long engagement with Europe. The tension over the meaning of Europe for Turkey will be one of the other self that will forever encourage them to redefine
and reconstruct their identity.
4. Conclusion
