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melancholy shared by the whole nation into a personal tale of identity quest enveloped in the bittersweet agony of searching for true love, soul- destroying
separation from the lover, and the ecstatic longing to reunite with the beloved in worldly context that indirectly expresses ideals associated with the Sufi mystical
experience. Accordingly, the issue to be addressed in the present study is the implicit
string between the qu ests of Turkey’s identity in Pamuk’s tales and the identity
formation in Sufi framework.
B. Review of Previous Study
Numerous studies have been done based on Orhan Pamuk’s oeuvres that investigate the intertwined relationship between East and West; the tension
between modernity and the deep loss of separation from the Ottoman legacy; the longing to find the new ideal identity and the parallelism betwee
n Pamuk’s text and other texts.
86
A research article by Ian Almond, entitled Islam, Melancholy and Sad, Concrete Minarets: The Futility of Narrative in Orhan Pamuk’s
“The Back Book”
examines how Islam is involved in the sadness of Pamuk’s works. Almond employs deconstruction theory in his study and discovers three kinds of sadness
86
The other literary studies and inquires carried out on Pamuk’s oeuvres such as Can V. Yeginsu. “Exile, the Turkish Republic, and Orhan Pamuk”,World Literature Today November-December
2006; David J. Gramli ng. “Pamuk’s Dis-orient: Reassembling Kafka’s The Castle in Snow
2002” TRANSIT, 31, 2007; Grant Fared. “To dig a well with a needle”: Orhan Pamuk’s Poems of Comparative Globalization”The Global South 1.2 Fall, 2007: 81-99; Kübra Zeynev Sariaslan.
Pamuk’s Kars and its Others: An Ethnography on Identifications and Boundaries of Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Secularism, Unpublished Master Thesis Turkey: Middle East Technical
University, 2010; Mary Jo Kietzman. “Speaking “to All Humanity”: Renaissance Drama in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow”.Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 52.3 Fall, 2010: 325-352 are not
discussed as these studies do not support the present study.
29
in The Black Book as a result of Islam’s involvement in this novel. The first
sadness results from the death of the mysteryand the second sadness arises from the death of identity. In The Black Book, Islam is implicated on the nostalgia for a
“true” identity in two ways: it helps to establish and it is also used to dismantle the notion of a self. The last melancholy is the grief of our own weakness as a
consequence of our own unhappiness.
87
Nagihan Haliloğlu’s research article’s Re-Thinking Ottoman Empire: East- West Collaboration in Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle discusses the
relationships between the East and West collaboration by employing Bhabha’s
mimicry and Said’s Orientalism. In this study, Nagihan argues that Pamuk identifies orientalism as complicity; the narrative of orientalism is merely an
instrumentimagination of the European in producing exotic stories about the East. As Hoja and the Venetian slave learn about each other’s life through writing that
eventually let them to exchange places. The study revealed that The White Castle chronicle is showing how the East and the West collaborate in remembering
histories and depicting each other, and the East-West collaboration is not going to be brought through technological partnership but through the means of writing in
order to understand each other.
88
Similar research on the notion of East and West dichotomy has done by David N. Cury in his research “Torn County”: Turkey and the West in Orhan
87
Ian Almond, “Islam, Melancholy and Sad, Concrete Minarets: The Futility of Narrative in Orhan Pamuk’s “The Black Book”, New Literary History 34 2003: 75-90.
88
Nagihan Haliloğlu, “Re-Thinking Ottoman Empire: East West Collaboration in Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle
,” Rethinking Europe 55 2008: 111-121.
30
Pamuks Snow. Cury explored Pamuk’s Snow by using Huntington’s thesis The
Clash of Civilization to show the inclination of this novel to Huntington’s notion
of cultural and civilization clash. In his findings Cury states that the novel e
ngages Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilization along fault lines between Islam and the West. In addition, the novel also grapples the issue proposed by
Huntington: the issue of Turkey’s position as a country whose sense of identity
will remain forever torn, and eventually it will fail to identify its cultural values and sense of nationhood.
89
Still lingering on the notion of East and West ’s differences based on
Pamuk’s Snow, Mary Jo Kietzman’s research article entitled “Speaking “to All Humanity”: Renaissance Drama in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow”
90
examined Pamuk’s adaptation on Th
omas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy into his work on contemporary Turkish politics. Kietzman discovers that Pamuk has created “organics
combination of Eastern and Western influences” and suggests “a possible other models of modern, pluralistic nation that are dialogic rather than totalitarian as
was the Kemalist version of modernity.”
91
Aylin Bayrakceken and Don Randall’s research article Meeting East and West: Orhan Pamuk’s Istabulite Perspective also explored identity construction as
a result of East and West meeting. This study tried to inv estigate “a series of
89
David N. Cury, “Torn County”: Turkey and the West in Orhan Pamuks Snow”. Critique 50. 4 Summer 2009:340-349.
90
Mary Jo Kietzman, “Speaking “to All Humanity”: Renaissance Drama in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow
,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 52. 3 Fall 2010: 325-352.
91
Ibid. 342.
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identity exp eriment structures” of Pamuk ‘s The White Castle. In analizing the
constructruction of Pamuk concept of East and West in The White Castle, this study combined Jacques Lacan’s mirroring phase and Bhaba’s concept of
mimicry. The study concludes that The White Castle shows how Pamuk does not see
his country as an “Eastern nation losing its soul to mistaken West- focused aspiration and identification.” Furthermore, the study suggests that the power
sturuggle and identity construction in the novel is “a matter of “we” and “they”. The meeting of these two binary opposition: wethey; EastWest encourages
cultural transformation where these “inhabiting them can and do interact as well as transform e
ach other,” the way Hoja, the master and his Italian slave eventually exchange places due to their uncanny resemblance Hoja secures new life in
Venice, Italy as scholar and writer whereas the Italian slave stays in Istanbul continue Hoja’s life in the Otoman court as the Sultan’s imperial astrologist .The
study reveals that a novel third identity may emerge from the meeting of East and West.
92
Another research focusing on Turkey’s identity construction based on P
amuk’s memoirs has been conducted by Adriana d Alves De Paula Martins entitled
Orhan Pamuk and the Construction of Turkey’s National Memory in Istanbul. Memories of a City.
Adriana’s objective was to examine how Pamuk‘s Istanbul
“revises Turkish cultural memory at a crucial moment of the country‘s history and how this review addresses the issue of national representation and of a
92
Aylin bayrakceken and Don Randall, “Meeting of East and West: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbulite Perspective” CRITIQUE 6 3 2005: 191-204. Web. January 11. 2014.
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complex and labyrinthine identity. ” Applying post-colonial theory in her study,
Adriana Alves concludes that by visiting, and describing the Istanbul of the present through the remains of the past, Pamuk revises and rewrites Turkish
official memory, making the Turks and the foreigners aware of the importance of the blend of the East with the West. And what matter the most is not civilizations,
but human lives, little things about daily life, little smells, colors, and atmosphere of daily life and their little stories that bring people together by acknowledging
their equality in their difference regardless of their East or their West.
93
Still focused on the dichotomy of the East and West, a research article by Rezzan Kocaöner Silkü, entitled “Nation and Narration: Cultural Interactions in
Orhan Pamuks My Name is Red explores the text as a portrayal of the Ottoman history and Turkish culture with reference to Bhabha’s postcolonial concepts such
as hybridity, in- betweenness, or double consciousness, and Saids arguments on the Orient and the Occident. This article shows that Pamuk tried to transgress the
cultural boundaries between the East and the West by using in- betweenness as a bridge through the medium of literature. He quotes from the Koran: To God
belongs the East and the West, suggests the unifying aspects of the eastern and western cultures. Orhan Pamuk also transgresses the traditional understanding of
point of view in the art of fiction and tells his story from different perspectives, including human beings, animals, colors and corpses that enable him to create
93
Adriana Alves De P aula, “Orhan Pamuk and the Construction of Turkey’s National Memory in
Istanbul. Memories of a City,” Mathesis 19 2010: 169-180.
33
suspense for his thriller and establish a bridge between the clashing cultural values of the East and the West.
94
Another study applying Bhabha’s concept of liminality is a dissertation of
Leyla Yücel entitled An Experimental Analysis: The Problem of Liminality in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and The New Life. In this dissertation, Yücel
examined the interpretation of Bhabha’s liminality on the concept of liminality within the scope of Turkey’s identity crisis in Pamuk’s The Black Book and The
New Life . Yücel’s research revealed that Bhabhian liminality celebrates hybrid
meanings and identities as well as negotiation and mediation of cultures. On the contrary, the problem of liminal identity crisis in Pamuk’s writings is an indicator
of the problem of the impossibility of transcending the liminal phase.
95
Semra Caraçoğlu, in her doctoral dissertation entitled Self-Reflectivity in Postmodernist Text: A Comparative Study of the Works of John Fowles and
Orhan Pamuk 2003, observed the comparables features in the novels of one British and one Turkish writer- John Fowles and Orhan Pamuk. Drawing on
Robert Scholes’ theory of reality, Linda Huncheon’s classification of self- reflexivity, and Jacques Lacan’s The Mirror Stage, this study discovered that the
analysis of the six novels The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Magus, Daniel Martin by Fowles, and The Black Book, The New Life, and My Name is Red by
94
Rezzan Kocaöner Silkü, “Nation and Narration: Cultural Interactions in Orhan Pamuk’s My
Name is Red, Aesthetic Education 37 2003: 1-13.
95
Leyla Yücel, An Experimental Analysis: The Problem of Liminality in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and The New Life, Unpublished Dissertation Belgium: Ghent University, 2013.
34
Pamuk demonstrates that self-reflexivity is an indispensable characteristic of postmodern fictions and that Pamuk is more postmodernist compared to Fowles.
96
Melİz Ergİn’s doctoral dissertation entitled Eat-West Entanglements: Pamuk, Özdamar, Derrida 2009, analyzed the representation of cultural,
linguistic, and religious tensions chronicled by these authors who have variously inhabited Western and non-Western worlds. The study revealed that Pamuk,
Özdamar, and Derrida accommodate the ever-shifting ways of interaction on the levels of both content and form. They offer examples of grafted genre that
accentuate the resemblances in difference across various generic forms. The grafted narratives they construct supersede and re-formulate the permeable
boundaries between self and other, and call attention to the many Easts and Wests, enmeshed as they are in one another.
97
H.E. Almaz, in his doctoral dissertation entitled Capitalizing Istanbul: reading Orhan Pamuk’s literary cityscape 2011,
examined Pamuk’s relevance for cultural debates around urbanization and for literary debates. In conducting his
research, Almaz selected six terms that serve as six lenses to explore Pamuk’s work and unpack his introduction of new symbols relating to Istanbul. These are:
1 the clas h and ‘the bridge,’ 2 the quest, 3 exile home, 4 melancholy, 5
the mist- as an image to describe the ‘soul’ of the city, and 6 Pamuk’s
96
Semra Caraçoğlu, Self-Reflectivity in Postmodernist Text: A Comparative Study of the Works of John Fowles and Orhan Pamuk, Unpublished Dissertation. Turkey: The Middle East Technical
University, 2003.
97
Melİz Ergİn, East-West’s Entanglements: Pamuk, Özdamar, Derrida, Unpublished Dissertation. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2009.
35
‘masterpiece.’ These six lenses provide a means to approach the various themes that converge to make Pamu
k’s Istanbul a literary capital.
98
A recent study by Üner Daglier entitled Orhan Pamuk on the Turkish Modernization Project: Is It a Farewell to the West? aimed to understand
Pamuk’s optimism in Snow regarding “the rise of political Islam and the future of democracy in Turkey by employing culturalist perspective on modernization and
development .” This study make use of Pamuk’s three novels The Black Book, My
Name is Red and Snow in analyzing the connection between Islamic culture and the progress of modernity. These three novels are employed to compare the
journey of Turkey’s modernization agenda since the earlier time of Ottoman era and Atat
ürk’s Westernization project. Based on the comparison of the three novels, the study unfolds
that the mission to abandon Turkey’s cultural root and tradition seems undo
able due to its “deep-seated cultural tradition” that hold back the progress of modernity.
99
In Indonesia, research or articles on Orhan Pamuk’s oeuvre has not yet been widely discussed or done. Only a few, and
extremely limited articles on Pamuk’s corpus can be found in articles written by A. Bagus Laksana. In his articles
entitled Istanbul: Melankoli yang Mendera, he examines that hüzün, the concept of melancholy in Pamuk’s memoirs Istanbul: Memories and the City and My
Name is Red affects Istanbul and its entirely resident’s feeling toward the
declining memory of their past’s legacy in their present identity. Another article
98
H.E. Almaz, Capitalizing Istanbul: reading Orhan Pamuk’s literary cityscape, Unpublished Dissertation. Amsterdam: University van Amsterdam, 2011.
99
Üner Daglier, “Orhan Pamuk on the Turkish Modernization Project: Is It a Farewell to the West?” Humanitas XXV 12: 146-167. Web. February 11. 2014.
36
written by A. Bagus Laksana entitled Mereka-reka Estetika Keribetan Hidup Harian explores the mystery of daily life as portrayed in
Pamuk’s Snow. Here, he discusses the complexity of daily life behind its simplicity. He shows that in Snow
the suicide done by young girls in Kars, small town in northeast Turkey is told as daily activity. Somehow behind this weave of suicidal action lays more complex
issues related to the veiling in Turkey. This issue reveals that the simplicity of daily life breathes its own mystery.
C. Theoretical Framework
