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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
I am living in a culture where the clash of East and West, or the harmony of East and West is the lifestyle. That is Turkey- Orhan Pamuk
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A. The Issue at Hand
Turkey is an exceptional country where two civilizations, i.e. East and West, meet. It serves as a bridge that stretches out between two horizons of dominant
believes system in which the unique amalgam of Eastern and Western traditions mingle. The real major bridge lying over the Bosphorus strait unites these two
worlds: the European and Asian sides of Istanbul. Back to its glorious past as one of the grandest world empire, Turkey is a historical rendezvous
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of diverse civilizations, especially Greece, Persia, Byzantium, and Ottoman, that makes it a
meeting point of numerous traditions. This meeting brings a distinctively unique atmosphere in Turkish identity construction.
Turkey’s position as a bride between the two continents Asian and European is hypothesized by Huntington in his controversial book The Clash of Civilization
and the Remaking of World Order 1996, being a bridge between cultures, cements Turkey’s position as a country whose sense of identity will remain
forever torn. Huntington believes that as a rendezvous amongst two civilizations, Turkey exhibits ‘a fair degree of cultural homogeneity, but is divided over
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Quoted from Brian Lavery, “In the Thick Change Where Continents Meet,” New York Times 27 August 2003, 3.
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A term borrowed from A. Bagus Laksana’s article “Istanbul: Melancholy yang Mendera,” Basis 6 01-02, 2013: 28- 35.
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whether its society belongs to one civilization or another. Turkey is, the most obvious and prototypical,
torn country.’
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Turkish Nobel Laureate 2006, Orhan Pamuk, who is recognized worldwide for his most acclaimed work Benim Adim Karmizi My Name is Red, 1998, 2000,
and Kar Snow, 2002, 2004 seems to grab Huntington ’s notion of “torn country”.
The reason is that he focuses his works on the melancholy of Turkey’s identity
construction within its East and West conflicts.
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However, he argues with Huntington’s thesis that the confrontation between East and West will forever tear
his country apart. In his Paris Review he observes: I’m an optimist. Turkey should not worry about having two spirits,
belonging to two different cultures, having two souls. Schizophrenia makes you intelligent. You may lose your relation with reality-
I’m a fiction writer, so I don’t think that’s such a bad thing- but you shouldn’t worry about your
schizophrenia. If you worry too much about one part of you killing the other, you’ll be left with a single spirit. That is worse than having the
sickness. This is my theory. I try to propagate it in Turkish politics, among Turkish politicians who demand that the country should have one consistent
soul- that it should belong to either the East or the West or be nationalistic. I’m critical of that monistic outlook.
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In this commentary, Pamuk recognizes that identity formation is an ongoing process and requires an interaction with others, with the world around. It is an
endless flux of negotiation with outward milieu which is dynamic and fluid in nature.
Pamuk’s complex understanding of the East and West identity recalls Said definition that “identity does not necessarily imply ontologically given and
3
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order New York: Simon, 1996, 42.
4
David N. Coury, “”Torn Country”: Turkey and the West in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow,” Critique 50. 4 2009: 340-349, 345.
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Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors, trans. Maureen Freely New York: Alfred A. Knof, 2008, 369.
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eternally determined stability, or uniqueness, or irreducible character, or privileged status as something total and complete in and of itself”.
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Therefore, Pamuk points out that rejecting other elements that make up identity will be even
worse than having ‘schizophrenia’. In a similar tone, Rumi,
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the darling of the world
’s devout seeker, says the following: This human is guesthouse every morning a new arrival a joy, a depression,
meanness. Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all Even if they are a crowd of sorrows who
violently sweep your house empty of its furniture. Still treat each guest honorably. He may be cleaning out for some new delight. The dark, thought,
the shame, the malice met them at the door laughing and invite them in, be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from the
beyond.
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Rumi suggests that in his quest, a person is a craft for innumerable experience of diverse interactions he encounters with other people. To achieve the
wholeness, he should celebrate all similar grace that comes along visiting him; either the good or bad thing, as they are essential elements on his travel to seek his
true self.
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Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism New York: Vintage Books, 1993, 315.
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Rumi, the Sufi poet par excellence, was born in Balkh, northern Persia contemporary northern Afghanistan in September 30, 1207 and died in Konya a town in contemporary central south
eastern Turkey in December 17, 1273. His father Bahauddin, a respected Islamic scholar and mystic, led the family on a twelve year migration, likely due to the imminent arrival of the
Mongol army, across Iran, Syria, Iraq and Turkey, eventually settling in Konya, the capital of Rum around 1229. Rumis relocation from one place to other places shows that his life was not the
life of an ordinary man living peacefully in a settled family and society. This state of affairs that tear him away from the soil that had been the home of his family affects his tales that yearning for
union. One can feel and imagine Rumi’s longing and agony for his ‘home’ in his masterpieces: Mathnavi, Diwan-i- Shams-i Tabriz, and his table talk Fihi ma Fihi Discourse of Rumi. See
Rumi The Masnavi Book One, trans. Jawid Mojaddedi Oxford: Oxford UP 2008: xiii-xix.
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Rumi Masnavi III, 3256 qtd in Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil: Mystical Dimension of Poetry inIslam New York: Columbia University Press 1982, 19.
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However, Turkey’s unique role as the bridge between two dominant civilizations breathes a certain melancholy of predicament or a confusion of loss
identity brought by the conflict amongst European and Islamic values, between Kemalist secularism and their Ottoman past. The secular reorganization of the
Ottoman Empire began with the tanzimat restructuring reforms of 1839. Sultan Mahmud II executed a series of reforms by virtue of which the empire was to
assert itself vis-`a-vis Western accomplishments.
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With the determined leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,
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the elite who founded the Turkish Republic on the ashes of the empire in 1923, Turkey pursued
a more radical modernization. He proposed the principle of secularism, in which the religion would be controlled by the state rather than separated from it, as the
cornerstone of his reforms
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. These reforms represented a radical leap and a cultural separation from the past, partly because they disowned the Islamic
heritage of the Ottoman system, as Ataturk wanted to create a new Turkish identity opposed to Ottoman identity with its roots in Islam. Ataturk believes that
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Charter Vaughn Findley, “The Tanzimat” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, ed. Kemal H. Karpat Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008: 11-37, 11-12.
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Atatürk means “father Turk, ancestor of Turks” was the name given to Mustafa Kemal by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey following the Law on Family Names in 1935, and nobody is
allowed to use this surname as it is reserved exclusively for Mustafa Kemal. See Soner Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey. Who is a Turk? London: Rouledge, 2006
for more details on Westernization project in Turkey.
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Soner Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey. Who is a Turk
London: Rouledge, 2006, 63.
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to achieve his modernization agenda, the logical step he should take was to annul the cultural identity of being a Muslim.
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Atatü rk’s Republic closed down various religious sects in Turkey and
destroyed the hybridity of Ottoman or Turkish Islam. The decision to choose Ankara as the state capital instead of Istanbul, which was the soul of the Ottoman
empire for 450 years, the use of Latin alphabet instead of Arabic script, the
regulation to have a family name, the abolition of medrese-religious college and
dervish lodges as they symbolize the backwardness, and the abolition of the caliphate
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along with the office of Syeh-ul-islam
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were some of radical reforms executed by Atatürk. The outlaw of fez
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was considered as a great symbolic revolution since it was an important symbol of Muslim culture.
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These cultural and political discontinuities between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey have unavoidably created a cultural vacuum, which
produced an identity crisis.
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The westernization agenda that provides two extreme choices for Turkey, i.e. completely Western or totally Eastern would
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Soner Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey. Who is a Turk London:
Rouledge, 2006, 65.
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Islamic leadership of the community of Islam in the period of Ottoman Empire 1260-1923.
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The highest religious community in the Ottoman Empire.
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Headgear worn by Muslim men. It was also an official headgear of the army and civil service in the era of Ottoman Empire. In 1925 Turkey enacted the Hat Law that required the Turkish to wear
Western hats instead of their fez. This law forbade the use of any other head gear. Mustafa Kemal considered that the law was an important tool for him to modernize Turkish society and join
European civilization. See Camilla T. Nereid,” Kemalism on the Catwalk: the Turkish Hat Law of
1 925” Journal of Social History Spring 2011: 707- 726, 723.
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Sooner Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey. Who is a Turk? London: Rouledge, 2006, 13.
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Feroz Ahmad, Turkey the Quest for Identity Oxford: One World Publication, 2003, 77.
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bring danger for the future of the nation. On the one hand, if the westernization project were taken by the negation of Ottoman system and the adoption of
Western mode, Turkey would lose its national distinctiveness. On the other hand, if the Islamic legal frame of Ottoman legacy were maintained, Turkey would not
be able to modernize and become part of ‘civilized world”.
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This dilemma has been haunting Turkey’s national identity and has resulted in a certain melancholy
in Turkey’s identity quest. For Pamuk, however, this identity crisis becomes his sea of inspirations. As
the Ottoman Empire and Atatürk’s westernization long for inventing a new image
to transform Turkey, Pamuk skillfully interweaves these crisis for the newness of life and for adoption of another culture as a natural void inside us into a unique
tapestry of identity quest. This searching for other-self becomes the soul of his novels. He weaves this transformation and sprinkles it with the nostalgia of the
past glory and the dynamics of modernity that Turkey undergoes in their past and present days.
The agenda of modernity in Turkey’s history is characterized by the
abolishment of Turkey’s cultural root Ottoman Islam heritage. This abolition resulted in a certain melancholy as Turkey has to abandon their cultural identity
and replace it with totally new culture Western culture. In
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amuk’s novels this melancholy is intertwined with the pain of separation from the beloved or the
longing for the alterity in order to achieve the so called wholeness.
18
Alev Cinar, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, 14.
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The story of The Black Book 1990
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that Galip recites to the BBC film crew, narrating a nineteenth century prince who tries to become his own self by
getting rid of people, books, furniture, and anything that might make him wants to be someone else. Allthough boredom and solitude take over his life; he never
stops trying to clear his head of alien matter. The prince’s effort shows that to
resist newness is to reject the stuff of life. He envies the “stones in the desert for
just b eing themselves,” until he dies in his loneliness in a practically vacant room
painted white. The story reveals that the capacity to be in relation with the other is an
essential part of the self in identity construction as humans are naturally open to outside influence, change, and a new experience. Therefore, Rumi reminds us that
within people there are always longing and desire, that even the whole world were theirs to own, still they would find no rest or comfort. Refusing new idea or
imposing one particular concept will be a blunder in identity construction as fixity of the self is an illusion in identity sea
rching. Identity, as Bauman shows, ‘is not secured by a long life guarantee, it is eminently negotiable and revocable’.
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Identity in Pamuk’s tales is his best companion in narrating how his country came into being
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. This enormous theme is always contested and negotiated within the mist of East and W
est’s dichotomy and enveloped inside the richness
19
Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book, trans. Maureen Freely London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Unless specified, all further reference to The Black Book henceforth BB.
20
Zygmunt Bauman, Identity: conversations with Benedetto Vecchi Cambridge: Polity Press. 2004, 11.
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Based on Margaret Atwood’s review on Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, entitled, Headscarves to Die For, New York Times, August 15, 2004.
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of Turkey’s history. The way Pamuk flirts with history and mixes it with a breathtaking love story takes his readers into a maze of imaginative bewilderment
with ‘a number of fresh, intact, and new possibilities’.
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Erdağ Göknar
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states that historicity has been an i ssue in all of Pamuk’s
works which focus ing around four major ideas: “Ottoman history in European
context, the transition from Ottoman Empire to modern Middle East, the early- twentieth- century Kemalist revolution, and the legacy of all three on present day
Turkey ”.
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Pamuk’s oeuvre in general, is characterized by constant exposition of the tension between East-West long standing relations as well as the quest of
Turkish identity vis-à-vis the pull of Islam and the lure of European modernity. Interestingly, the tension between
East and West in Pamuk’s novels offers multi-faceted prisms of meaning and the meaning of identity formation which
will never be the same again after he transforms the characters in his novels by using his distinctive way. Pamuk intimately flirts with the bipolar notion of East
and West then collaboratively paints it on his canvas of thought. In the end, he tickles his readers with a new color of paradigms that lies
between these two endless sources of ‘inspiration’. Pamuk’s novels that thoroughly
constructed as synthesis of East and West’s along with its legacy and the influence of other literary figures is inevitable because
“all fables are
22
Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors, trans. Maureen Freely New York: Alfred A. Knof. 2008.
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Erdağ M. Göknar is Assistant Professor of Turkish Studies at Duke University and an award- winning literary translator for his translation on Orhan
Pamuk’s My Name is Red.
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Göknar, ‘Orhan Pamuk and the Ottoman Theme,” World Literature Today 2006: 34-37.
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everybody’s fables”.
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Pamuk’s galaxy of ideas displays fluidity of East and West everlasting bond. Apparently, Pamuk succeeded to wea
ve Rumi’s idea that either the Westerner or the Easterner is stranger to one another.
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How Pamuk’s knits the ‘sacred’ meeting between East and West along with the complexity of his country
’s history and intertwines it with a love story within an individual identity predicament into a delicate wave of tapestry, raise my
interest to do research based on his oeuvre. Reading Pamuk’s tales along with the narration of his country, Turkey, will inspire the readers to explore the richness of
various perspectives in solving issues related to identity formation and cultural plurality. It will encourage Indonesian readers to study more about their
differences as they will encounter labyrinth of identity quest coated with the ghostly
presence of the past lost glory and the dynamics of modern life’s contested identity within its plurality.
Pamuk’s oeuvre will also take us into different angle in deciphering a problem, as he offers an appealing alternative to
the obstacles a multicultural country has to deal with. Understanding Pamuk
’s tales means raising our awareness to be more tolerant in perceiving difference and in solving issues and conflicts from different
point of view as life is richer than it seems. Inclination toward specific or essential dogmas in the midst of diversity will merely leave one of us scarred.
Critics argue that Pamuk’s corpuses are highly influenced by Western literary figures. His first and last political novel, Snow 2004, evoked comparison
to Frantz Kafka’s The Castle. The New Life 1994 is described by reviewers as
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Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, trans. Erdağ Göknar London: Faber and Faber 2001, 428.
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A.J Arberry, Discourses of Rumi London: J. Murray, 1961, 99.
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James Joyce’s Ulysses with the light touch. The Black Book is acclaimed as a combination of the narrative trick of Italo Calvino and the medieval esoteric of
Umberto Eco. His memoirs Istanbul: The Memories and the City 2006 is placed alongside James
Joyce’s Dublin and Robert Musil’s Vienna.
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Pamuk himself also acknowledges the influence of those writers in his writing. As he confesses in Other Colors:
All my books are made from a mixture of Eastern and Western methods, styles, habits, and histories, and if I am rich
it’s thanks to these legacies. My comfort, my double happiness, comes from the same source: I can, without
any quilt, wander between two worlds, and in both I am at home. Conservatives and religious fundamentalists who are not at ease in the West,
as I am, and idealist modernist who are not ease with tradition, will never understand how this might be possible.
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Thus, East and West are a career
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for Pamuk. He earns his international standing from his restless effort wandering between these two worlds-resulting in
in- between amalgams of these two distinctive houses of civilizations that become part of his career. He also clarifies that he admires some Russian writers and
dedicates four chapters in his essay to discuss the books of Nabokov, Hugo, and mostly Dostoyevsky. These authors are those who leave foot prints in his heart for
the beauty of their texts.
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Apart from the influence of Western canonical literary figures, the traits in Pamuk’s novels are identity predicament folded in a blanket of the melancholy of
27
My own summary based on National Book Festival 2010 in Washington DC.
28
Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors Trans. Maureen Freely New York: Alfred A. Knof. 2008, 264.
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A modification based on the original version “The East is a Career” of Disdraeli’s 1847 novel Tancred used by Said as the opening quotation in his Orientalism.
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Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors, trans. Maureen Freely New York: Alfred A. Knof. 2008: 134- 153.
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nostalgia he refers as hüzün in Istanbul: Memories and the City. He weaves the yearning and despair for newness of the Venetian slave and his master Hoja in
The White Castle. He also flirts constantly with loneliness that he portrays in “his
first and political novel” Snow.
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It is a tale that depicts inconsolable solitude of wandering poet Ka. He is torn between
his Western’s intelligentsia and his East’s ‘backward’ origin.
The agony of losing memory and identity is beautifully written in The Black Book. His last novel The Museum of Innocence
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recounts an obsessive tragic love story within the dynamic of Turkish modernization and the immortal theme of
East and West meeting. These novels reveal th at the soul of Pamuk’s tales
somehow whispers similar voice with Rumi’s doctrine in his Mathnavi the
spiritual verses of Rumi’s masterpiece which contains 25.700 couplets, amassed in six volumes.
Mathnavi demands the “listeners to hear the story of human love and
se paration”.
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The opening of Mahnavi opens with The Song of the reed, the o
pening poem in Rumi’s Mathnavi in which Rumi uses the metaphor of a reed cut from a reed bed and then made into a flute which becomes a symbol of a human
separated from its source, the Beloved. And as the reed flute wails all day, telling
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Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. Maureen Freely New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
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Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. All future reference to The Museum of Innocence will henceforth by MoI.
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Rumi, Spiritual Verses, trans. Alan Williams London: Penguin Classic, 2006, xvii.
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about its separation from the reed bed, Rumi wails all day telling about being separated from his Beloved and the deep longing to reunite with it again.
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Similar song is sung in Pamuk’s tales; it sings the ecstatic longing for the loss
of Turkey’s origin in the present Turkey’s life. Being cut from the continuity of Ottoman
Empire’s legacy and Turkey’s cultural root, the characters in Pamuk’s novels are wandering constantly between two different polarizations, trapping in a
deep lamentation of losing their cultural roots and suffering from profound bewilderment of choosing on
e identity over another on their travel to their ‘true’ self in their identity quest.
Hence, to unfold the dynamic of Turkey identity’s predicament as well as the solution that Pamuk has to offer, this study formulates the research questions
as follows: 1.
How is the Sufi framework of meaning in the The Black Book, Snow, and The Museum of Innocence shown in terms of
symbolism, metaphors, and the stages of identity formation? 2.
How does Sufi framework indirectly influence Pamuk’s concept of
identity formation in The Black Book, Snow, and The Museum of Innocence?
B. Towards a Contribution