111
the journey. In its quest to its ultimate end meeting with the Divine or the true- Self each stage of the quest will reveal that conflicts and tensions will always
arise in the journey; and the union that he seeks is both cultural and political where tension will always be there and the quest will not always come to a closure
since it is an endless journey that is complex in nature.
1. The Initial Union of the Old and the New Cultural ‘Costume’
He must abandon his past totally if he was to become a totally new being. So he cut off all relations with his father and his family . . . But it
was not easy to become free of them. Orhan Pamuk- The New Life
Pamuk “narrates his country into being”
196
by weaving his novels with a backdrop of Ottoman history and Turkish culture. Hence his texts mix the East
and the West, and “address the short of timeless, universal issues that make superb
literary fiction”.
197
He portrays the motherland as being divided between the “ghostly presence of a lost great empire and the constraint imposed by the
construction of a secular nation.”
198
His tales are constantly engaged with the oscillation between East and West, a
never ending ‘dance’ or identity confusion carried by the conflict between European and Islamic values. He loves adopting
traditional Ottoman and Islamic culture in his writing and discussing Turkish’s
fractured sense of identity. As Göknar argues, Pamuk’s adaptation to make use of
196
Margaret Atwood, “Headscarf to Die For,” New York Times, August 15, 2004.
197
Eric J. Ianne li, “My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk” Rain Taxi Online Edition Rain Taxi Inc
2001: 1-3.
198
Adriana Alves De Paula Martins, “Orhan Pamuk and the Construction of Turkey’s National
Memory in Istanbul. Memories of a City, ” Mathesis 19 2010: 169-180.
112
Ottoman past is to be able “to scrutinize identity subversion or new understanding of selfhood”.
199
The primordial union of Turkey’s past and new costume is depicted in his
early novel The Silent House. In this family saga novel, Pamuk shows us the effect of secularization agenda on the life of each character. Atatü
rk’s earlier transformations to exclude Islamic legacies were clearly depicted in this novel,
which has five different characters narrating their own story. The Hat Law or Hat Revolution that requires all Turkish male to wear Western hat instead of their fez,
the policy to stop using Arabic script and switch into the Latin alphabet, and the surname adoption
200
for all Turkish citizens are mainly discussed in this novel. Darvinoğlu, the family name in this novel, means the son of Darwin, revealing the
character’s fascination towards the promising Western’s knowledge and sciences. The three novels in the present study, The Black Book, Snow, and The
Museum of Innocence also deal in one way or another with the agenda of Westernization-modernization brought by Turkish Republic, an agenda that brings
a predicament of identity formation amongts Turkish people. The three novels in this study breathe similar melancholy in a way that each novel presents
multilayered plotlines that open as a love story but develop as a quest of finding the true self. The three male protagonists in this study, Galip, Ka, and Kemal start
their journey with a “prosaic physical search” for their beloved women. Yet, the
199
Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk: Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politic of Turkish Novel, ed. Erdağ Göknar London: Rouledge, 2013, 19.
200
Ataturk ordered all Turkish citizens to adopt surname from the first day of 1935. The parliament circulated a list of approved-surname for the citizen to adopt. It was on November 24
Mustafa Kemal gave himself the surname Atatürk. See Soner Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey who is Turk? New York: Rouledge, 2006, 64.
113
journey turns into a metaphysical quest in which the characters search for the meaning of their selves. The love story in the three novels in this study apparently
is a framework in which the protagonist seeks their authentic self. The three female protagonists in the three novels can be seen as symbol of
Sufi Beloved whom the entire three helpless male protagonists set their quest to search for.
Female is the “mystical imagery that poets in classical Persian Sufi epic c
onfigure as the Divine Beloved.”
201
In Sufi tradition, the “highest conceivable dignity-
Divine manifestation is ascribed to the female principle”.
202
As examined in the preceding chapter, Galip, Kemal, and Ka start their journey upon loosing the women they are desperately in love with.
As their quasy- mystical journey to seek their female beloved unfolds
, Rüya, Füsun, and İpek are no longer important as eventually Galip, Kemal, and Ka discover that what they
are looking for is their selves. They eventually transform to a profoundly different person from the one at the beginning of their journey. Their missing beloved turns
out to be a symbol that leads them to discover their true-Self. This double journey is also de
picted in Pamuk’s early novel The New Life. In this novel Osman, the protagonist, embarks a physical journey to pursue a new
life upon reading a book with its oft- quoted “I read a book one day and my whole
life had changed”. As he becomes consumed with the book, eventually he stops attending his classes and obsessed to read the book closely and he ultimately set
on a bus journey to meet the author of the book and Janan, the girl whom he is in
201
Michael Barry, “The Allegory of Drunkenness and the Theophany of the Beloved in Sixteenth- Century Illustration of Hafiz,” in Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, ed.
Leonard Lewisohn London: I.B. Tauris 2010: 213-226, 225.
202
Ibid. 225.
114
love with and who inspires him to read this quasi- scriptural book. During his journey to discover Nahit, the writer of the book, and Janan, Osman at the same
time also searches for his true self. In his random bus travels looking for Nahit and Janan, Osman is eventually redefined and re-explored his own identity. He
keeps stealing identity cards from the passenger of every bus accident he encounters. By doing so, Osman shifts from one identity into another; by living as
different person. It is a metaphor Pamuk uses to symbolize the quest of Turkey identity’s contruction that living completely by imitating other’s culture and
abandoning its own culture. Thus the protagonist in these four novels shares similar fate; they are in love
with a woman and they start a physical quest for the sake of the woman and end up in a deeper metaphysical pilgrimage to question their true selves. The identity
quest by the protagonists in the afore-mentioned novels can be compared to Turkey’s identity predicament which was constantly put into question ever since
the new-state nation rejected all their parental cultures of the Ottoman Empire. An act that in Tanpinar
’s
203
words is identified as a cultural neurosis: “If I may be so
203
Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar 1901-1962 was one of prominent Turkish novelists who is categorized in the era of Turkish social nationalism 1922-1949, an era in which literary works
revealed “the proliferation of ideological novels; that is, historically grounded representations of new ‘men’ and new societies. Tanpinar authored five novels during his writing career. His novels
explore the Ottoman legacy of Turkish modernity. They chronicle the dramatic cultural change that accompanied the transformation of the Islamic Ottoman Empire into the secular Republic of
Turkey and resulted in instability of identities.
Although Pamuk refused to be regarded as Tanpinar’s heir but in his memoir Istanbul: Memories of a City 2005 he expressed a warm approval of Tanpinar in it. In this book, Pamuk describes
Tanpınar as the writer with whom he “feels the closest bond” 99 and praises him as “Turkey’s greatest twentieth century novelist” 225. See, Çimen Günay-Erkol. “Sleepwalking in Istanbul: A
Man in Anguish
in A.H Tanpinar’s A Mind at Peace” Symposium Summer 2009: 85-106; Erdağ Göknar, “The Novel in Turkish: Narrative Tradition to Nobel Price” in The Cambridge
History of Turkey, ed. Kemal H. Karpat Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008: 472-503.
115
rash, I would say that we are all living in a kind of Oedipus complex since Tanzimat; we feel, in a sense, that we have unintentionally murdered our father.
204
The Black Book is known as Pamuk’s magnum opus for the richness of its
content that combines Turkey’s cultural literary tradition range from Sufism, hurufism, mathnavi and Tukey’s history blanketed within the complexities of its
plots- related to modernization that kills the Eastern value of Ottoman legacy. Pamuk’s favor on the ‘sacred’ meeting of East-West takes the form in The Black
Book. He then masterfully develops the rich concept of identity quest in all his following novels as the development of The Black Book. Each novel deals with
different feature in portraying the predicament of Turkey’s identity construction. One prominent trait of his oeuvres is that through his novels he brings “at least
two opposing texts together to shatter prejudices and existing beliefs”.
205
The Black Book recounts a story about a dreamy lawyer Galip in search for his missing wife and his cousin in law Celâl. This story takes place in Istanbul in
1980 which is also the year of the latest military coup in Turkey. Galip’s quest for
Rüya and Celâl into the labyrinthine of Istanbul is laden with references to cultural change as a result of Atatürk’s Westernization agenda. At the heart of
this novel lies a search within a search, a similar quest for the Beloved as well as the cultural shift in Turkey depicted in The Museum of Innocence.
The Museum of Innocence 2008 is Pamuk’s latest novel following his
Nobel laureate winning in 2006. Similar to The Black Book and Snow, Pamuk
204
Qtd in Çimen Günay- Erkol. “Sleepwalking in Istanbul: A Man in Anguish in A.H Tanpinar’s A
Mind at Peace ” Symposium Summer 2009:85-106, 86.
205
Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors, trans Maureen Freely London: Faber and Faber, 2007, 103.
116
consistently presents Turkey identity contestation within the dichotomy of East and West. The Museum of Innocence draws small gap with The Black Book in
term of specific issues addressed in this novel. If The Black Book laments over the loosing of Turkish identity in the early Republic Turkey, The Museum of
Innocence whistles similar agony on the banishment of Turkish’s cultural identity
in a more contemporary issue specifically on the life style and woman ’s body as
the contested identity as depicted in Snow. In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk takes the reader back to the Istanbul of
his youth, and this novel belies the common belief that once a writer has become a Nobel laureate, his or her best work is in the past. It is a long obsessive love story
of Istanbul elite Kemal Basmaci, an elite West- obsessed bourgeois whose life is impeccably fortunate beyond rationalization for his engagement to Sibel, another
member of a well-off Istanbulite bourgeois who is widely believed to be Kemal’s
ideal wie due to her Western education and beauty.As his father told him “Sibel is
very special, a very charming girl. A woman, a rare flower like her- you must make sure you never break her heart. You must care for her always, and treat her
with the utmost tenderness” MoI, 89. Snow, on the other hand, covers a wide range of issues that previously
examined in The Black Book. It discusses the ambivalence of the nation in adjusting their self to be the member of new ’world’. Snow presents a grander
scope of issues in identity quest. This quest is carried by its characters’ personal
experiences and in one way or another reflects the country’s experience as a
whole. The story opens with the arrival of Kerim Alakuşoğlu, later known as Ka,
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after he discards his given name because he “doesn’t like it…even if it meant
conflict with teachers and government officials” Snow, 5, in the once cosmopolitan city of Kars on Turkey’s eastern-most border, “ a place that the
whole world had forgotten” Snow, 10. Ka’s arrival in Kars is upon the request of his friend Taner. Taner asked
him to write an article “about the municipal elections coming up and how- just in the city of Batman- an extraordinary
number of girls in Kars had succumbed to suicide epidemic” Snow, 8. Ka, tempted by the tempting news Taner provides that their once beautiful old
classmate İpek Hanim whom he wishes to marry is now living in Kars with his father and sister, cannot but accept the offer. Kars impeccably suits the story of
this doubling journey. It has shifted from one state to another in the course of history embodying doubleness. For many years between 1877 and 1918 it was
part of the Russian Empire and becoming part of the new born Turkish Republic in 1921 Snow, 27.
Unlike Pamuk’s other tales which setting is Istanbul, Pamuk chooses Kars, the peripheral city in north-eastern Turkey, bordering with Armenia as his
attempt to bring back the intricacies of the Ottoman-Turkish history. Kars, a shortened name for the Turkish Kar-
su “Snow Water”, was “annexed by Russia during the Russo-Turkish War in 1877-1878, and then briefly formed a part of the
Democratic Republic of Armenia after World War I until Turkish general Kazim Karabekir re-conquered it in November
1920”.
206
206
Michael McGaha, Autobographies of Ohan Pamuk: The Writer in His Novels Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2008, 157.
118
Snow which takes place in the northeastern Anatolian city of Kars, accentuates the controversial Armenian question, which began in the 1920s and
lasts to this day. Toward the end of the Ottoman Empire, when nationalist uprisings among different ethnic groups began to increase, the relations between
the Armenian community- which formed an important part of the Ottoman population around 10 of the population in Ottoman Anatolia- and Muslims,
especially the Kurds, intensified. In this period, Ottoman Interior Minister Tâlât Pasha ordered the relocation of the entire Armenian population of the war zone to
Zor in the Syrian desert, and that the relocation, carried out in 1915-16, resulted in many deaths. The Turkish-Armenian border remains closed to this day, as the
accounts regarding what happened almost a century ago are still to be settled.
207
The way Pamuk rhapsodizing European’s influence by the feeling of nostalgia on its old decaying building once the home of Armenians and Russians
is to cover Kars’ divided spirit which is relevant to the spirit of Snow. When Ka first arrives in the city, the narrator reiterates that the decrepit Russian buildings,
shanty towns and empty, snow- covered squares “spoke of a strange and powerful
loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were sn
owing at the end of the world” Snow, 10. Snow covers identity crisis that befell the characters as a result of two
different souls that embodies the nation. The way they cut off from their origin, which is the ‘traditional’ Ottoman culture brings a certain kind of melancholy that
bewildered the Turk as portrayed in The Black Book. This bewilderment leads to
207
See Melİz Ergİn. East-West’s Entanglements: Pamuk, Özdamar, Derrida, Unpublished Dissertation Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2009: 21-22.
119
conflict and disputes within the country among its citizens as they struggle to define and construct their true self. Snow is an amalgam of the longing to the
traditional Islamic values as well as the prospect for individualization and modernity as the features that distinguish the characteristics of Western and
Eastern society. All of these issues are the expansion in The Black Book, The Silent House, and My Name is Red. In Snow, Pamuk intermixes all these
fragments with more contemporary issues, including the headscarf banning for university students that causes these girls to commit suicide, the question of God
existence that first springs in The Silence House
208
Pamuk examines these issues in a more distinctive way in Snow and the polarity between Islam and secularism
that tears the characters and modern Turkey’s soul. Snow also tackles an issue
on identity formation in the midst of identity crisis. The three novels in this study share similar issues upon the Westernization
project. The project literally compelled Turkey to oscillate between two-selves; the authentic self and the imposed other. The former refers to the original self- the
cultural Islamic Eastern identity, the latter refers to secular identity that the nation-state tries to set on. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the
hands of the Allies in World War I and the subsequent plans for its separation, Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalist cadres started to lead the Turkish War of
Independence in 1919 that they had won. Atatürk’s victory initiated the
208
In The Silence House, the part of being atheist is portrayed in Dr Selahattin who as scientist will only believe what science and experience can prove.
120
establishment of the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923, a modern, secular, and Western nation-state.
209
Unlike the Ottomans that expressed their victory and ultimate authority over the formerly Byzantine Empire in 1453 by simply taking over the central
symbol of the State, Hagia- Sophia Church and converted it into a mosque, the new-born Turkish Republic took a radical leap that completely cuts its bond with
the Ottoman’s past. Mustafa Kemal re-adjusted the entire social framework, passing a number of reforms that outlawed all practices and authority of Islam,
banned religious lodges tekkes and Sufi orders tarikat, expatriated the Ottomans dynasty, removed the article that defined the
Turkish state as ‘Islamic’ from the constitution, replaced the Arabic alphabet with Roman script, abolished
the wearing of fez and other religious symbols and encouraged Western clothing for men and women.
210
All of these reforms annulled the Ottoman culture that had been Turkey’s
cultural roots for thousands of years. As a result, the new cultural identity that eliminates its rival through dictatorial means encourages certain sadness and
confusion amongst the society’s members.
211
Pamuk’s The Black Book, The Museum of Innocence, and Snow intelligently captured this melancholy and
209
Soner Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey Who is Turk?
London: Rouledge, 2006, 11-13
210
See Alev Çivnar. Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey Minnesota: Minnesota UP, 2005, 111.
211
See Alev Çivnar. Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey Minnesota: Minnesota UP, 2005, 15.
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present the nature of identity’s oscillation as a result of the ruthless detachment from their cultural native land.
In The Black Book, this oscillation portrayed in the characters who live as other people in order to live in the sentiments of insecurity and hopelessness
which are rooted from the need of positioning oneself in the mist of fractured identity. Belkis, once Galip and Rü
ya’s classmate, suffers from the idea of imitating others in their life. Belkis and her husband, Nihat, live their life as Rüya
and Galip. If Belkis is the imitation of Rüya, Nihat, as Belkis recounts : “had to be
an imitation of you [Galip], because there were a few evenings when the cognac get better of me and I couldn’t stop myself from speaking about you and Rüya”
BB, 202. Belkis confesses that it must be hard for a person to be himself. She concludes that people want to be someone else out of jealousy and this obsession
pierces their heart into an agony. However, she still wishes to be someone else: I so longed to be that other person, I thought I could slip off my own skin as
easily as a glove; my desire was so fierce that I thought it would ease me into this other person’s skin and let me begin a new life
212
…and my longing to become this person, to live her life, became so intense, and the pain I felt
was so overwhelming, that tears would slip from my eyes. Even after all these years, I still can’t understand why someone would want to live
someone else’s life and not their own. My life was not real life but an imitation, and like all imitations I thought of myself as a wretched and
pitiful creature, doomed to be forgotten BB, 202-3.
212
The New Life 1994 with its widely quoted line “I read a book one day and my whole life was
changed” is Pamuk’s novel written after The Black Book 1990. The quest to find missing ‘something’ in The Black Book continuess in The New Life. While Galip in The Black Book
searches for his missing wife in the street of Istanbul, Osman in The New Life sets out on a quest on bus journey for the meaning of life upon reading a quasi scriptural mysterious book The New
Life. This book promises a new life for those read it. Osman stops attending classes and devotes himself on reading the book. Here Osman starts his quest by looking for Nahit and Dr. Mehmet
because they are also influenced by the book. Osman’s quest toward self-recognition and new life is examined in The New Life along with the modernization that takes over the life of Turkish
society. If in The Black Book the Westernization means imitating the West French and Europe, in The New Life the Westernization focuses on the imitation of America.
122
Rüya’s ex-husband also confesses that back on the days when he still together with Rüya, they both also long to live as someone else: “They’d devoted
their lives to the propagation of ideas; this had meant taking manifestos from a distant country they’d never visited […] all they’d wanted all along was to be
someone other than the people they were” BB, 128. Celâl also shares similar predicament with Belkis
and Rüya’s ex-husband in his effort to secure his lost- authentic self in the world of imitation. He follows the
track of the Ottoman sultans who used to wander the streets in Istanbul in disguise. Celâl does this because he wishes to escape from his self and to become
another BB, 331, an effort described as pitiful by one of his old columnist friends. This old
columnist believes that only “those who know that they themselves are the universe whose mystery they are seeking, and that the universe
is he who seeking the mystery? Only those who have achieved this enlightenment have the right to disguise themselves and become someone else
” BB,332. In The New Life Celâl is also remembered as a pathetic columnist who could not manage
to be his self: “it’s all nothing but misadventure. […] There is no way that we can be ourselves any longer, a fact that even the well-known columnist Celâl Salik
realized, which led to his suicide; it’s someone else who’s writing under his name’.
213
This imitation depicted as well by the Turkish’s movie stars and
Turkish people who imitate these movie stars. The old columnist reiterates:”I pity
those poor films stars of ours who can be neither themselves or nor someone else.
213
Orhan Pamuk, The New Life, trans. Güneli Gün London: Faber and Faber, 1998: 94-5.
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I feel even greater pity for those compatriots of ours who see themselves in those film stars” BB, 332.
In The Museum of Innocence, the question of identity formation brings certain melancholy that occupies on the question of women
’s life. The analysis in this sub heading however, will be focused on the identity formation in Turkey
over its complex negotiation between East and West which address a particular issue on the negotiation of modernity over women body or sexuality. The
modernity pursued in Turkey’s agenda toward joining Western world sacrifices
their women more than they do to their men.
214
Woman is considered as a site of negotiation or a symbol of a nation. In
Pamuk’s novels, the marginalization of women as a result of the dark patriarchal practice reserved exclusively in his two
novels Snow and The Museum of Innocence. The issue of the headscarf banning and the sexuality of women become the contested identity in
Pamuk’s Snow and The Museum of Innocence respectively.
The central issue in The Museum of Innocence as a result of the denial of the parental culture- the Ottoman heritage, led the individuals in Turkey to suffer
from a “part- culture”
215
syndrome. They may be looking outwardly Western
214
Turkey’s history shows that not only female’s body which was sacrificed on the altar of modernization, male’s body also became a bargaining site on Turkey’s journey towards
modernization. Atatürk wanted his countrymen to dress like ‘civilized’ people, therefore he
believed that they needed to give up their Ottoman’s attires. He first wanted his men to get rid of their fez and introduced Western hat which he believed more proper for those who wanted to be
civilized. Atatürk then passed The Hat Law in November 25, 1925 to formally banned the fez, which resulted a number of protest throughout Anatolia. See Arus Yumul. “Fashioning the Turkish
Body
Politic” in Turkey’s Engagement with Modernity, eds. Celia Kerslake, Kerem Öktem, and Philip Robins London: Palgrave Macmilan, 2010, 349-69: 350-1
215
Homi K. Bhabha. “Culture In- Between.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Pal Du Gay London: Sage Publication, 2003: 53-60.
124
while inside they are mentally stuck in the liminoid space. The society’s response to unveiling women that becomes an icon of modernity in Kemalist-
modernization agenda reveals how their native mentality is hunted between their cultural past and their modern lifestyle. The Turkish modernization that imposed
new costume cultural identity for women in the case of Western outfit to replace their
‘backward’- headscarf, inevitably brings female and virginity to the forefront. Pamuk brings up the issue of women sexuality in Snow and The
Museum of Innocence to show another site of contested identity in Turkey as a result of the
modernists’ denial of the Ottoman cultural legacy. In Snow,
the imposed ‘other’ is to unveil their woman in order to ‘liberate’ them from the ‘barbarism’ and ‘backwardness’ inherited from their imperial
background. A headscarf-wearing woman is the representation of the Ottomans as conditioned by western Orientalists. As the new secularist Turkish’s agenda is
to break from the Ottomans, the best means for them to distance itself from the Ottoman is by presenting women in public sphere wearing Western clothing.
216
As one of secularist people, Sunay Zaim, emphasizes that headscarf is a manifestation of coercive religious practice. Believing himself as the herder of
Atatürk’s Westernization agenda, he wants to liberate women since women’s liberation is a primary goal of Republicans.
“I staged this revolution precisely so you women could be as independent as women in Europe. That’s why I’m asking
you to remove that scarf” Snow, 401. Sunay staged a revolution with the help of military support. His aim is to forestall of the winning of a Muslim political party
216
Alev Çivnar, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey Minnesota: Minnesota UP, 2005, 60.
125
in the upcoming election. The actual Welfare party was led by Necmettin Erbakan. His rising to the position of prime minister was forced to resign by the
military coup in 1997. In 1998, the constitutional court outlawed the Welfare party for being anti-secular.
217
In The Museum of Innocence however, the issue of women body is no longer focused on the headscarf, but rather on the issue of virginity. Nonetheless,
women still serve as a site of bargaining in modern Turkish patriarchal society. Although the response of unveiling women in The Museum of Innocence is pretty
mild, Turkish women are the object of male gaze along with their new cultural costume. Füsun, the protagonist in The Museum of Innocence also shares the fate
of other Turkish women, her beauty intensifies male gaze to which she is subjected. From her early puberty, Füsun has learned to live with constant male
insistent gaze in her neighborhood and even from Kemal. This gaze will be defined in the future as harassment
by modern people. As Kemal states: “Modern generations may well consider what I was doing as a form of harassment”. MoI,
347. The narrator states that in Turkey, women share similar predicament as being the object of male insistent gaze. They are, however powerless to do
anything to freed themselves from this predicament, but “pretend not even to have
noticed that a man was sitting across from her with menace in his eyes, and she
217
See Erdağ Göknar. “Melodramas of Conspiracy, Burlesques of Coup: Snow 2002” in Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politic of Turkish Novel
, ed. Erdağ Göknar London: Rouledge, 2013:183-204, 184.
126
would give [them] not so much as a glance in response ” MoI, 348. The
provincial-elite men who come to Istanbul make women ’s visibility even worse.
Sibel once tells Kemal about the way men from the provinces harassed women “If
they saw a beautiful woman wearing lipstick and without scarf on her head, they would just stand and stare in vicious amazement
” MoI, 348. The issue of modernizing unveiled-women is promoted through beauty
contest in the early of the Republic during Atatürk’s reign. This contest is a means for the Republican to show that they had such ultimate power over Islam and
symbolized their radical break from the Ottoman- Islamic ways to take off toward the Western modernity. One of the campaigns from the Kemalist modernization to
‘liberate’ Turkish women is by encouraging women to enter beauty pageant contest. During the 1920s and 1930s the image of Westernized Turkish women
were growing in local and global public sphere. European journals and magazines were depicting images of modern Turkish women, portraying the dramatic
transformations happening in Turkey. One of the most compelling images has been the image of women in bathing suit. This image has destroyed the Islamic
norms of publicness and privacy. The image of women in bathing suit is a full symbol of the abolishment of Ottoman Islam authority over female bodies and
puts in its place the authority of secularism. During the early years of the Republic, the images of women in bathing suit were widely used in cartoons,
photographs, and illustrations. In 1929, the state sponsored the first beauty pageant in Turkey and the secularist newspaper of the state Cumhuriyet
Republic encouraged Turkish women to enter the beauty pageant in order to get
127
a passpo rt to be Turkey’s ambassador in the international world through
competition of beauty pageant. In fact in 1932, Turkish beauty, Keriman Halis, was the first Turkish beauty queen who became Miss World.
218
In the period of Atatürk,
When the girls walked down the catwalk in black swimsuits, they were both manifesting their interest in Turkish history and culture, and also the entire
world how modern they were, which was all the good. By the seventies, the contest had become the province of girls with no culture or manner and
coarse hopes of becoming singers and models, so the significance of beauty contest became something else altogether MoI, 301.
The modern society, no matter how modern and Western their external appearances are, consider that participation in the beauty pageant as a degrading
morality. Füsun is depicted entering the beauty pageant once held in Istanbul and the society
’s response upset his father who permits her to join the contest “when he heard what people said about her, he would regret tolerating the disgrace”
MoI, 300. Even Kemal’s mother, as a distant family of hers feels that Füsun’s
stunt to take part in the beauty contest is sort of public disgrace. As she learns that Fü
sun’s mother supports her involvement in the beauty contest, she addresses her disappointment toward her and distances herself from Füs
un’s family. Kemal narrates “my mother learning that aunt Nesibe had in fact encouraged her
daughter, even taking a pride in this stunt that should have caused her to feel only shame, my mother had hardened her heart toward aunt Nesibe” MoI, 8.
As a citizen of a country that suddenly designed its profile in an entirely different way, Turkish’s people become a traveler who stays neither here or there.
218
See Alev Çivnar. Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, Minnesota: Minnesota UP, 2005: 63-71.
128
They stand on the threshold between two different worlds that brought them confusion and perplexity in the transition of their old and new cultural costume. In
this case, Turkish women are apparently suffering more from the oscillation of these two selves the cultural origin- the Eastern Ottoman identity and the
imposed other- a secular Western identity. In addition to society’s response to
their new outlook which somehow leads to harassments either in verbal or nonverbal way, the society is again trapped in the ambivalence of being modern
and traditional resulting in bewilderment on the issue of lifestyle promoted by the state secularist. Besides the constant harassments’ from the male gaze relating to
the headscarf, which becomes more profound issue in this novel, female sexuality and virginity deserve more discussion in The Museum of Innocence.
Turkish modernization has brought this issue to the forefront. Pamuk dedicates one
chapter to examine this issue in the section en titled “A Few Unpalatable
Anthropological Truths” where the narrator outlines some serious consequences for women who were
“going all the way” even from the most modernist elite in society. The society narrates this fact to favor the later generation sometimes after
2100 with historical fact concerning society’s view on female virginity: One thousand nine hundred and seventy- five solar year after the birth of
Christ, in the Balkan, the Middle East, and the western and southern shores of Mediterranean, as in Istanbul, the city that was the capital of the region,
virginity was still regarded s a treasure that young girls should protect until the day they married. Following the drive to Westernize and modernize,
[…] the practical value of this treasure began to decline in certain parts of Istanbul. […] But in those days, even in Istanbul’s most affluent
Westernized circles, a young girl who surrendered her chastity before marriage could still expect to be judged in certain ways MoI, 61.
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The “urban legend of Istanbul women who are willing to sleep with a man just for the fun of it,” MoI, 63 is just a myth shared by sexually dissatisfied men.
The upper class elite may enjoy certain sexual freedom, yet their sexual adventures are only tolerated “if they had proven themselves “serious”, either by
formal engagement or another show that they were “destined for marriage” MoI,
62. Kemal has already slept with his fiancée, who trusts him enough to give in her virginity out of love and is in no doubt that eventually there would be a
wedding to close their love story. Wihout the confident of marriage at the end, women will not dare to surrender herself to their couple. Even though some
people think that: If we insist virginity is still so important how we can pretend we’re modern
and European? […] but it goes without saying that in this country a young woman’s virginity is of the utmost importance to her, no matter how modern
and European she is MoI, 417.
In Istanbul in 1975, a woman who commits this courageous transgression is either rewarded with a ring or condemned to disgrace. In Snow, the issue of
oscillation between East and West is portrayed on the life of several characters. The first character is the male protagonist Ka who constantly oscillates between
religious and secular life. Ka is presented as one who has an identity crisis and is in a dilemma as to whether he is an atheist or a believer. At the beginning of the
novel Ka sees himself as an educated Westerner secularist and views fundamentalist Islam as backward and anti-modern.
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His arrival at Kars in some
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Pamuk’ s Ka evokes the bittersweet condition that Pamuk encounters as a result of his fame and his theme that is centered around the oscillation between East and West- between Islam and
Secularism. Ka who nestles in liminoid space as a result of being pariah either in Frankfurt or Turkey shares similar fate with Pamuk who earns no home neither in religious nor secularist circle.
It becomes public top- secret that Pamuk has been widely attacked by some conservative religious
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point in the mid-1990s is to write a local suicide epidemic among headscarf- wearing girls. His
investigation of the “headscarves girls’ creates an opportunity to encounter Turkish ‘Others’ dignified rural people, former Communists, devout
high school boys, Kemalists, secularists, holy men and even Blue, the underground leader of the political Islam with whom he shares common ground.
Ka however starts to worry that his interaction with these fellow Turks will banish the “Westernized world he had known from a childhood” Snow, 26.
In Frankfurt, Ka is a solitary individual who chooses to withdraw himself from other Turkish refugee and from native Frankfurt who do not even take him
into account. Uniquely, Ka favors his rootless condition as his strength, depending on the situation that will be beneficial to him. When he thinks that his
solitude in Frankfurt will give him a benefit, he proudly reiterates that he is all right to be excluded from Western society: “The thing that saved me was not
learning German,” said Ka. “My body rejected the language, so I was able to preserve my purity and my soul.” Snow, 33. In contrast, when he believes that
his privilege as a poet that earns him a place as one of Western intelligentsia, he withdraws himself from being involved as one of Turkish citizen.
Ka, is himself torn apart between the polarity of Europe and traditional Turkish society, secularist and Islam. His travel to Kars following his mother’s
funeral is blanketed in his own motif to marry the divorced Turkish beauty, Ĭpek,
and secular sectors of the Turkish society due to the perspective from which he reflects on national identity and on the country‘s present world position. The polemic results, among other aspects,
from his insistence on discussing Turkish fractured sense of identity, since he portrays the nation as being divided between the ghostly presence of a lost great empire and the constraints imposed
by the construction of a secular nation. See. Maureen Freely, A Conversation with Orhan Pamuk Web. March 13. 2013.
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and to resolve an identity crisis that has left him isolated in Frankfurt, unable to write. He hides his loneliness as well as his unhappiness from everyone else
including himself. Only to the Sheikh that he is able to reveal what lays in the bottom of his heart that
he seeks for happiness. ‘I came here to find happiness’ Snow, 95.
However, Ka believes that the God he is searching for is somewhere else and not there amongst people in Kars. He sinks deeper into the well of
bewilderment as he knows that he starts to feel happy in Kars yet he believes his Western part tells him that he is not one of people in Kars or to be part of them,
and even believes the same God with them. “I want to believe in the God you
believe in and be like you, but because there’s Westerner inside me, my mind is confused” Snow, 98. Ka’s oscillating nature regarding his faith started since his
early life: When I was a child
, our maid used to take us to ‘Teşvikiye Mosque’, said Ka.”[…] and I would roll around on the carpets with other children. At
school, I memorized all the prayers to ingratiate with the teacher- he helped us memorize fatiha
by hitting us. […] I learned everything they taught us about Islam, but then I forgot it Snow, 93.
Ka also confesses that he does not need any religion because he is already very happy. He tells İpek his inclination towards secularism: “I’m very happy
right now; I have no need for relig ion” Snow, 91, a totally different feeling from
one he encounters when he embarks upon his first solitary walk through the city of Kar. He expresses how he moved with heartbreaking determination to the
poorest neighborhoods where “the desolation and remoteness of the place hit him
with such force that he felt God inside him ” Snow, 19.
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Ka and other characters in Snow believe that one cannot be a Westerner and a believer at once as each of these polarities conflict one another and they believe
there is no way out but to choose one out of the two. This perspective is Pamuk’s
meta
phor of the Islamist and secularist in Turkey who insist to transform Turkey’s cultural identity based on one fixated self. Therefore for the young Islamist
school boys, Ka is an embodiment of the West and an individual. Necip, a young boy whom he makes friends with as he discovers resemblance of his youth in this
devoted religious boy, does not believe when Ka says that God and heaven do exist. In Necip’s opinion, it is impossible for a Westerner to believe in God.
“Because you belong to the intelligentsia. People in the intelligentsia never believe in God. They believe in what Europeans do, and they think they are better
than ordinary people” Snow, 103. Interestingly, Necip is another character in
Snow depicted to suffer from the oscillation between religion and secularism. In the case of Necip
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, the young Islamic High School fundamentalist, who is madly in love with Kadife and eventually dies in the night of revolution, the fear
of doubting God’s existence is slowly eating his soul. He is agonized by his fear and he feels that his faith is weakening:
There is another voice inside me that tells me, ‘Don’t believe in God.’ Because when you devote so much of your heart to believing something
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Pamuk names two of his characters, Necip and Fazil after an important Turkish poet, novelist, banker, and playwright, Necip Fazil Kisakürek 1904-83, whose career reflects the mixture of
Eastern and Western influences. He published a magazine Büyük Doğu Great East as his campaign for Islam a
nd the East. He built his “revival on a combination of religion, national culture and modernity.” See Elizabeth Özdalga “Transformation of Sufi-Based Communities in
Modern Turkey” 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: 69-91, 75- 76. Pamuk’s characters Necip and Fazil in Snow are religious High school
students who aspire to write Islamic science fiction, combining Islam content in the form of Western.
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exists, you can’t help having a little, a little voice that asks, ‘What if it doesn’t? You understand, don’t you? Just at those time when I realize my
belief in my beautiful God sustained me, I would sometimes ask myself, just as a child would wonder what would happen if his parents died,
‘What if God didn’t exist, what would happen then? Snow, 135.
Necip shares his agony of becoming an atheist
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to Ka as the one he looks up to. Necip’s agony grows stronger and his fear slowly consuming the
peacefulness of his mind as he can discover a miserable landscape in which the God does not exist:
[…] The road where God does not exist is as snowy and muddy as the roads
in Kars, but it’s all purple There’s something in the middle of the road that tells me ‘Stop’ but I still can’t keep myself from looking right down to the
end of the road, to the
place where this world ends. Right at the end of this world, I can see a tree, one last
tree, and it’s bare and leafless. Then, because I’m looking at it, it turns bright red and bursts into flame. It’s at this point
that I begin to feel very guilty for being so curious about the land where God does not exist Snow, 142.
Necip also breaks the stereotype of Islamist young boys as he dreams to write a science fiction on the Western form. He wants to mix the Eastern Islamic
values with modernity and present it in the form of the Western novel to prove that Islamic tradition and its followers are able to get along well with modernity.
Ka, on the other hands starts to acknowledge the love of God “I must have
started believing in God years ago. This happened so slowly; it wasn’t until I
arrived in Kars that I noticed it” Snow, 141. Ka feels at Kars as the writing block
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John von Heyking notes that Necip’s concern on becoming an atheist shows the “inability to sustain individual personalities and agency. Necip’s anxiety expresses an absence of freewill and
personal agency characteristic of mass man”. See Jon von Heyking, “Mysticism in Contemporary
Islamic Political Thought: Orhan Pamuk and Abdolkarim Soroush” Humanitas XIX. 12 2006:
71-96, 76. In Snow Pamuk continues to contrast the Eastern and Western’s distintive traits he once
examines in My Name is Red. If in My Name is Red Pamuk presents the lack of individuality in the Ottoman artists compared to Venetian artists trough their painting, in Snow the so called
individuality is presented by the belief and disbelief in God.
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he undergoes in Frankfurt that makes him unable to write for years has gone.
“But after coming to Kars, all the roads on which poetry travels has reopened. I attribute this to the love of God I’ve felt herein Kars” Snow, 327. Unfortunately
when he reveals his feeling, Blue, the Islamist, shares similar point as Necip: I don’t want to destroy your illusion, but your love for God comes out of
Western romantic novels. In a place like this, if you worship God as a European, you’re bound to be laughingstock. Then you cannot even believe
what you believe. You don’t belong to this country; you’re not even a Turk anymore. First try to be like everyone else. Then try to believe in God
Snow, 327.
That is the why Ka keeps being trapped on the oscillation of East and West tradition. Similar issue occurs in Kadife’s life. Kadife, the so called leader of
head scarf girls and Blue’s mistress is another central figure on the oscillation between Eastern and Western cultural tradition. She is a woman raised in a
secular family in Istanbul. His father is leftish who does not believe in God, and she herself in the beginning is an atheist as well. She is once a model in Istanbul
and comes to Kars “to do a shampoo commercial shooting for television” Snow, 108. Kadife is secretly admired by some of the headscarf girls at Kars. They
invite Kadife for tea one day, in which Kadife who feel embarrassed to say Islam as their religion,
ask them “If your religion requires you to hide your hair, and the state forbids you to wear headscarf, why don’t you be like so and so?... Then the
whole world would stand up and take notice” Snow, 108. Kadife confesses that as a secular person she starts to be curious about the
headscarf girls that defy the state ’s demand to unveil their head. She further
reiterates that her visit to these headscarf- wearing girls is a visit “out of devilish
curiosity” and “to make fun of them” Snow, 113, but it turns out that she grows
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sympathetic towards these girls and she decides to veil herself for one day and staging a campaign against this headscarf banning. Kadife decided to veil herself
out of her own free-will and to fight for their right shows that headscarf is not all about being traditional or submissive to the tradition. Veiling is no longer
backward, but political. As Muzaffer Bey, the old mayor of Kars tells Ka: “Now
the streets of Kars are filled with young wome n in head scarves of every kind.”
Muzaff Bey added, “And because they’ve been barred from their classes for
flaunting this symbol of political Islam, they’ve begun committing suicide” Snow, 21. However, when the police arrest her and her friends, she cannot take
her headscarf off. “[...]
I f I had said, ‘Forget the scarf; I never really meant it
anyway,’ the whole of Kars would have spat in my face. Now I’ve come to see that God put me through all this suffering to help me find the path of truth Snow,
114. Kadife
’s conversion from an atheist to a veiled-girl shows that veil is not the symbol of submission as the West and secularists claim. She proves that
headscarf is a symbol of subjectivity as she chooses to put it on based on her free will in order “to make a political statement” Snow, 113.
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Kadife, an atheist
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Following the headscarf banning in 1987 that was obviously uncompromised and promoted coercion toward the headscarf-wearing students, they refused to take off their headscarf and leave
it at home. Rather they wanted to explicitly bear their Islamic identity and pursue freedom to attain education. Being rebellious to the state’s policy they were either turned away at the gate or refused
to enter the classroom. In May 1987, fifty- eight theology students at Ankara University had received disciplinary suspensions for going to the class without leaving behind their headscarf at
home. Such response only encouraged the resolve of those young women who shocked the secularist since these girls are not resorting on Quranic references in defense of their choice to
wear their headscarf, instead they evoke liberal democratic values for what they called freedom of choice as the most basic human rights: individual right to choose their forms of dress. See Alev
Çivnar, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, 82.
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once, turns out to be “one of the saints who’ll help turns the head scarf into the flag of Anatolia’s oppressed Muslim women” Snow, 109.
Kadife’s first reason for putting on a headscarf is to “make a political statement” without any oppression neither from the state nor her parents.
Although she “intended to wear it only for one day”, but she” could scarcely think of it as a joke anymore.” Her decision leads to her transformation to
spiritual development regardless of her motif to cover herself in the first place ”Now I’ve come to see that God put me through all this suffering to help me find
the path of truth. Once I was atheist like you” Snow, 114. This subchapter has addressed the issue of the initial union the meeting
between the old and the new cultural ‘costume’. The old cultural costume is the Otoman Islam cultural legacy, whereas the new cultural costume is the new way
of life brought by Atatü rk’s reformation. In their initial union with new way of
life means that Turkish people depicted in the three novels under study, undergo a shift in their whole life. The Islamic cultural tradition that has become their
‘textbook’ of life for generations replaced with new way of life promoted by Atatü
rk’s cultural reformation. As a result, Turkish people have to adjust their way of life, which leads them into the state of confusion. Towards supporting the
discussion of this subchapter, attention will be drawn into the next subchapter to further discuss the following state in T
urkey’s identity construction.
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2. The Replacement of Ottoman Heritage with Secular Western Identity
