SNOW Nobel prize novel by Orhan Pamuk
Want to Read
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (Translator)
3.51 of 5 stars
Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between
secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism–these are the elements that
Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled
poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of
Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among
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religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also
drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced.
Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself
pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic
terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical
evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude
to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with
cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present
moment.
James Matkin asked:
As Pamuk masterfully blankets his story with the metaphor
of snow does he elucidate the transitory and existential angst
of Islam today? “Everyone Has His Own Snowflake” Ka says
to lighten up the growing frustration with violent Islam? Do
the headscarf girls suicides inform the dangers of literalist
religious belief? Is the way forward in this crazy world to
follow the path of metaphor and myth like Pamuk?
Question: I submit the relevance of Pamuk’s brilliant novel SNOW is
in its ability to transform us into the existential angst of Islam today,
without losing hope and love of life. Snow moves us to understand
and feel Ka’s ambivalence about religion, god the revolution and the
mystery of the suicidal headscarf girls facing off against the
government secularism. Even the constant threat of death and
violence from unseen random powers fails to blunt Ka’s burning love
for Ipek in these dark times. For me snow captures so poignantly the
current transitory reality of Muslim life with ISIS and the Taliban
making indiscrimate terror everywhere.
“Everyone Has His Own Snowflake” Chapter 41, Ka concludes after
reading books about snow.
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“Once a six-pronged snowflake crystallizes, it takes between eight and
ten minutes for it to fall through the sky, lose its original shape, and
vanish; when with further inquiry, he discovered that the form of
each snowflake is determined by the temperature, the direction and
strength of the wind, the altitude of the cloud, and any number of
other mysterious forces, Ka decided that snowflakes have much in
common with people. It was a snowflake that inspired “I, Ka” the
poem he wrote sitting in the Kars public library, and later when he
was to arrange all nineteen titles for his new collection, Snow; he
would assign “I, Ka” to the center point of that same snowflake.
Applying the same logic to “Heaven,” “Chess,” and “The Chocolate
Box” he was able to see that each of these poems, too, had its natural
and unique position on the imaginary snowflake. Soon he was certain
that every poem in his new collection – and, indeed, everything that
made him the man he was- could be indicated on the same set of
crystalline axes. It was, in short, a snowflake that mapped out the
spiritual course of every person who had every lived. The three axes
onto which he mapped his poems – Memory, Imagination, and
Reason – were he said, inspired by the classifications in Bacon’s tree
of knowledge, but he wrote extensively about his own efforts to
elucidate the meaning of the six-pronged snowflake’s nineteen
points.” P. 407.
After reading the novel and letting the metaphor of snow sink into
your subconscious anxiety about this mixed up world lessens. You
lighten up as you experience the connecting force of nature.
Do the headscarf girls’ suicides inform the dangers of literalist
religious belief?
Coleridge said, “Advice is like snow – the softer it falls, the longer it
dwells, upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.”
SNOW is informative literature about the secular reality in Islam
today.
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MAY 12, 2005 ISSUE
The Schizophrenic Sufi
Christian Caryl
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
Knopf, 426 pp., $26.00
1.
The hero of Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel has a long charcoalcolored coat, a weakness for porno movies, and a melancholic
longing for the god of the Koran. We never find out whether
the man called Orhan Pamuk in the novel shares these
attributes, but, speaking as the narrator, he does inform us that
he and his main character, who is also his friend, have a lot
else in common. Both are Turks. Both come from good
bourgeois Istanbul families of decidedly secular outlook. Both
are literary aesthetes with strikingly similar taste in women.
And both are authors of works called Snow.
Pamuk’s work is the novel at hand, and it tells the story of the
creation and loss of the second book, a volume of poetry
written by Pamuk’s alter ego, who goes by the name of Ka. As
Pamuk is at pains to explain, the name is actually a cipher,
formed from the two initials of Ka’s official name: acronym as
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pseudonym.1 But one suspects that its real origins lie in poetic
logic. The Turkish word for snow is kar—suggesting a
peculiarly intimate fusion of author and subject. It’s a nuance
that’s lost in translation, but, as we will see, the relationship
between Ka and snow is so much a part of the texture of the
novel that we don’t really need the reminder.
Pamuk and Ka also share a destination. It is the provincial city
of Kars, on Turkey’s far eastern border, and, though their trips
are separate, both men visit it in winter, when its harsh
contours vanish beneath heavy snowfall. Ka, kar, Kars. The
story opens with Ka’s arrival there at some point in the mid1990s; Pamuk will follow four years later in an attempt to
recreate his friend’s experiences. Kars proves the perfect
setting for these mirrored journeys, for it is a place—like so
many frontier regions that have shifted from one state to
another in the course of history—that embodies doubleness.
For many years it was part of the Russian Empire, becoming
part of the newborn Turkish republic in 1921, and Pamuk
rhapsodizes about the European character of its old buildings.
The persistent references to this point in the novel amount to
something of a geopolitical joke when we consider that we are
740 miles to the east of the Bosphorus, usually regarded as the
border between Europe and Asia. Kars has its Hotel Asia, to be
sure, but it is the city’s “elegant Baltic buildings” that linger in
the minds of the author and his hero. The irony—one travels
deep into Asia only to end up in Europe—is especially clear to
Ka, who is returning to Turkey after long years in political
exile in Germany. For the residents of Kars that charcoalcolored coat, purchased in a Frankfurt department store, marks
him as a would-be “European” just as surely as his cultivated
Istanbul speech and his Western-style education.
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Not that he ever felt European in Europe, of course. Ka seems
to have spent his twelve years in Frankfurt mainly by himself,
in almost complete isolation from the society around him. At
one point he boasts that he doesn’t know a word of German.
Ka, it will turn out, is even estranged from the other Turkish
political refugees in Frankfurt. And that, in fact, is entirely
appropriate for a political exile who, as Pamuk notes, “had
never been very much involved in politics.” Ka’s banishment,
moreover, actually hinged on a case of mistaken identity.
During one of Turkey’s intermittent spells of military rule,
Pamuk explains, in an aside, that Ka had to flee his homeland,
thanks to an antigovernment article that was incorrectly
attributed to him. In short, Ka is not just your ordinary
returning prodigal. He is an outsider even among outsiders.
Yet it is surely no accident that he feels drawn to Kars, a place
that is still deeply divided in spirit. In the early years of the
Turkish republic, we learn, it was a redoubt of Kemal
Atatürk’s program of militant Western-style modernization. By
the time of Ka’s visit, however, those days are little more than
a subject for the nostalgia of the elderly; the city has fallen
mysteriously into decline, and politics has come full circle. The
secularists are in retreat, and Kars, battered by poverty and a
pervasive sense of diminished possibilities, is on the verge of
electing its first Islamist mayor. (Yet another hint of the failure
of Kemalist ideology lurks in the background: the flickering
presence of Kurdish guerrillas, belying the founder’s embrace
of Turkish ethnic nationalism as the moving force of his new
state.)
Ka does not have to go looking very far in order to confront
these tensions. They are built into his ostensible reason for
making the trip to Kars in the first place. He has come on
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assignment from an Istanbul newspaper to investigate the case
of the “headscarf girls”—a group of pious young Muslim
women who have been committing suicide rather than obey the
official dictate that they must remove all outward attributes of
religion when participating in public life. It’s an issue that
strikes to the heart of the conflict between the Islamic revival
in modern-day Turkey and the still-enduring principles of the
Kemalist political legacy, which are rooted in a rigorous
separation of faith and state, and it quickly brings Ka into
contact not only with the families of the dead girls, but also
with Islamist circles in the city, both open and covert, as well
as their equally resolute opponents.
Small wonder, then, that Ka is soon immersed in countless
conversations about the nature of Turkish identity and its
oscillations between the imagined poles of East and West. The
subject is a familiar one to all Turkish intellectuals, who live in
a country that has never quite overcome an inborn sense of
civilizational schizophrenia, but here in Kars—where political
violence has been frequent through the years—the debate has
an urgency that belies the appearance of sleepy provinciality. It
is no coincidence that the city turns out to be suffering from a
bad case of divided loyalties. Spies and informers abound.
Government agents turn out to be pursuing personal agendas
rather than official ones. A visitor from the terrorist
underground is at large. You can get killed if you end up on the
wrong side of the identity question, and in the course of the
story that is exactly what will happen, more than once. And
even Ka—the innocent bystander, the aesthetically minded
loner, the instinctive sympathizer with the underdog—may
prove capable of lethal betrayal in the pursuit of love.
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2.
For all the density of its real-world detail Snow is really a book
about a quest, and a miracle that grows out of it. Ka’s quest is
not inspired by politics, and the mystery it engenders belongs
to an entirely different category altogether. Ka’s reporting job
about the headscarf girls—the professed motive for his trip to
Kars—is just a cover story. The real reason for his visit is a
woman named Ipek, an old love from his university days.
Having left Istanbul years before, she has now returned to her
hometown of Kars, where she is living with her father, a
former leftist political activist who, now resigned to the torpor
and apathy of late middle age, is managing the Snow Palace
Hotel.
The beautiful Ipek is divorced from her husband Muhtar, the
head of the local, relatively moderate Islamist political party
that now appears poised to win the coming elections, and Ka is
eager to exploit her availability. And, sure enough, he is
successful—at least at first. She responds to his entreaties, and
he convinces himself that Ipek is willing to return with him to
Frankfurt, and that they will live together there in bliss. But the
dim prospects for this unlikely liaison are made clear by the
events on their first date, when the local minister of education
is gunned down by an assassin in retaliation for enforcing the
state’s policies against the headscarf girls. It also soon
becomes clear that both Ipek and her sister Kadife, a believer
who sympathizes with the suicides, are more deeply implicated
in the political crisis in Kars than either will initially admit—
albeit through romance as much as through ideology. That
complication has catastrophic effects for Ka, and for his
prospects for happiness, once it becomes clear that the
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Islamists’ foes are preparing a counterblow.
Throughout it all the snow keeps falling—thick, muffling
snow. We know that Ka has seen plenty of snow during his
years in Frankfurt, but this particular brand—the snow of Kars,
of Ipek, and of the locals’ tortuous search for redemption,
whether it be in faith or politics—somehow strikes home in the
most literal sense. It sets off memories, reminding him of the
winters of his Istanbul childhood, but also suggests the
oblivion imposed by time, replete with melancholy and regret.
It summons up both beauty and boredom. At another moment
the snow triggers a sudden surge of religious yearning:
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Mesut asked, with
some annoyance. “Aren’t you an atheist too?”
“I don’t know,” said Ka.
“Then tell me this: Do you or don’t you believe that God
Almighty created the universe and everything in it, even the
snow that is swirling down from the sky?”
“The snow reminds me of God,” said Ka.
“Yes, but do you believe that God created snow?” Mesut
insisted.
There was a silence….
This encounter resounds like a tuning fork, and a few
paragraphs later, as a myriad of details from his past converge
on the unifying paradox of the snow, Ka hears
the call deep inside him: the call he heard only at moments of
inspiration, the only sound that could ever make him happy,
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the sound of his muse. For the first time in four years a poem
was coming to him; although he had yet to hear the words, he
knew it was already written; even as it waited in its hiding
place, it radiated the power and beauty of destiny. Ka returns to
his hotel room and immediately writes down the poem in “the
green notebook he had brought with him from Frankfurt.”
He calls the poem “Snow,” and it serves as the overture to a
series of other poems—nineteen in all—that soon fill the
notebook. We never get a look at its contents; for reasons that
become clearer later on, the poems are merely evoked. Though
they have many images and motifs (titles include “Stars and
their Friends,” “Chess,” and “The Chocolate Box”), they turn
out to form a mysterious whole. Later Ka will be “able to see”
(as Pamuk puts it) that they can be plotted on a pattern in the
form of a snowflake according to axes “inspired by the
classifications in Bacon’s tree of knowledge.” At first glance
this seems like just the sort of postmodern artifice we have
come to expect from practitioners of literary formalism in the
mode of Borges and Nabokov. But one could just as easily see
it as a crystalline riddle in the grandest traditions of Sufi
mysticism. (An Islamist calls Ka “a modern-day dervish.”)
One of the book’s most moving scenes comes when Ka meets
the local Sufi sheikh:
“May God bless you for accepting my invitation,” said the
sheikh. “I saw you in my dream. It was snowing.”
“I saw you in my dream, Your Excellency,” said Ka. “I came
here to find happiness.”
Ka explains to the sheikh his own paradox: he longs for faith
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but finds it impossible to accept the strictures and
backwardness of Islam. “I want to believe in the God you
believe in and be like you, but because there’s a Westerner
inside me, my mind is confused.” The sheikh gently consoles
him (at one point he says, jokingly, “Do they have a different
God in Europe?” and soon “a feeling of peace rose up inside
Ka.” The poem that results from this encounter will be titled
“Hidden Symmetry”—a phrase that harks back to an earlier
reflection:
Much later, when he thought about how he’d written this
poem, he had a vision of a snowflake; this snowflake, he
decided, was his life writ small; the poem that had unlocked
the meaning of his life, he now saw sitting at its center. But—
just as the poem itself defies easy explanation—it is difficult to
say how much he decided at that moment and how much of his
life was determined by the hidden symmetries this book is
seeking to unveil.
Though he never quite manages to find God, Ka encounters
these symmetries all around him during his stay, and embraces
the otherworldly origins of the poems that they seem to inspire.
Inspiration, he notes, is something that comes from outside,
almost in spite of him: “Later he would point to the speed with
which this happened as proof that this and all the poems that
followed it were—like the world itself—not of his own
creation.” Elsewhere he recalls the note at the start of
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and concludes: “Imagine, a
magnificent poem that had created itself, without the poet’s
having exerted any mental energy!” Yet the poems are not a
tonic; they provide no solutions. “He hoped the poem had been
sent to console him, to give him hope. But when it was done,
he still felt crushing pain throughout his body, so he left the
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National Theater in distress.” Art offers transcendence; in the
end it will be as close to belief as Ka is ever going to get. But it
will not save him. Neither will love.
3.
The reasons for that lie in yet another twist in the narrative. It
turns out that snow has a more mundane role to play in this
story. When Ka arrives in town, the falling snow soon builds
into a blizzard that cuts Kars off from the outside world. The
opportunity is seized upon by an intriguing character named
Sunay Zaim, an itinerant actor who has come to Kars with his
avant-garde theater company, which is planning to put on a
performance of a 1930s-era work of Kemalist propaganda
entitled My Fatherland or My Scarf. The play, which depicts
the modernizers’ triumph over the backwardness of Islam, is a
calculated provocation aimed at the enthusiasts of religious
politics in the city.
But it soon becomes apparent that this, too, is a cover story.
What Sunay actually has in mind is no less than a temporary
coup d’état, with himself at the helm, designed to eliminate the
Islamist threat and make him a secularist hero. (Though the
precedent is never explicitly mentioned, both his plans and his
high-modernist aesthetics seem to owe a lot to the Italian
writer Gabriele D’Annunzio and his founding of an early
fascist mini-state in Fiume after World War I.) Sunay, in a selfdescribed “Jacobin mode,” finds plenty of allies among the
local military and a couple of renegade right extremists, all of
whom are happy to seize upon the chance to settle scores with
the religious camps. One particular target of their anger is
Blue, the ultra-conspiratorial Islamic militant who has settled
12
in Kars out of sympathy with the headscarf girls. They will win
in the end—but not before Ka has been drawn deeply into both
sides of the conflict.
Like Pamuk and Ka, Sunay and Blue are twins of a kind (even
if they are ideologically opposites). Both are charismatic
political extremists who want to remake the world; and both
understand the power of culture as a political weapon. Sunay,
like many of his fascist predecessors, views politics as a work
of art, not vice versa; as part of a game of political blackmail
he will force Ipek’s sister to remove her headscarf on stage as
part of a play, a symbolic annihilation of the ideals of his
opponents. Blue, for his part, first gained notoriety for his
threats against the “un-Islamic” behavior of a game show host,
and he treats Ka to a long rant about the importance of the
Shakh nameh, the thousand-year-old classic of Persian
literature. There is very little that is Islamic about the work, but
Blue seems to be making a point about protecting “one’s own”
cultural traditions. He challenges Ka to consider whether “this
story is so beautiful that a man could kill for it.”
Despite their pretensions, though, both men are deadly serious.
Both Sunay and Blue are artists, in their way, but unlike the
mystical Ka both are convinced that they know how secular
mystery is to be solved. And in contrast to Ka, whose imagined
snowflakes come to exemplify the “singularity” of individual
experience, both Blue and Sunay are obsessed with enforcing
visions of conformity that leave little room for innocents.
Neither is particularly worried about the prospect of hurting
anyone. But both will be casualties themselves by the end of
the tale.
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Where Pamuk really excels in this novel is in the deftness with
which he allows these forces to tug at one another. Like
Dostoevsky, the literary forebear whose spirit haunts this book
most palpably, Pamuk appears to value politics, among other
things, as a great opportunity to let his characters rant in all
sorts of productive ways.2 The simplicity and coherence of
ideology are seductive, but the principles they contain rarely
stand up to social reality. In their place we are treated to a
blizzard of motives. One of my favorite chapters brings
together a host of the city’s political radicals for a “secret
meeting” (every word of which is being monitored by the
state) on how to respond to the coup. Grand debate about
issues of global concern mingles with personal vendettas,
comical small talk, and inside gossip. One of the “old-wave
socialists” will be informing on the meeting to the relevant
authorities:
His intentions weren’t malign; he did this to help the
associations head off police harassment. He would inform the
state of any activities he didn’t like—most of which seemed
unnecessary in retrospect anyway—but in his heart of hearts,
he was proud that there were rebels out there fighting for the
cause, so proud, in fact, that he would brag about the
shootings, the kidnappings, the beatings, the bombings, and the
assassinations to anyone who would listen.
Ka is capable of listening with sympathy to representatives of
even the most extreme views. Yet he also has no illusions
about the ends to which politics can lead:
By his thirties, he’d seen too many of his friends and
classmates tortured for the sake of foolish, even malign
principles; then there were those who were shot dead in the
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attempt to rob banks and those who made bombs that wound
up exploding in their hands. Seeing the havoc of his lofty ideas
put into action, Ka deliberately distanced himself from them.
If activism can change the world we are still mistaken if we
believe that we can always predict the results of our actions
(like the bullets that ricochet indiscriminately through the
audience when Sunay stages his coup de théatre). We think we
understand cause and effect, but the actual links may be
inscrutable. When Ka arrives in Kars, he is told about the
assassination of the former mayor; by the end of the novel he
will have heard three different versions of the death, and the
enigma—a favorite Pamuk word—is never resolved.
Human beliefs are not just rich with multiplicity; in Pamuk’s
world they are also in constant flux. Some of the novel’s
Islamists, like Ipek’s former husband, began as Marxists; the
same applies to a few of the right-wingers as well. By the end
of the novel several of the Islamic radicals have abandoned
political activity altogether, joining earlier generations’
utopians among the ranks of the resigned. Moreover,
ideological labels that initially seem so clear turn fuzzy under
scrutiny. The more that Pamuk’s characters obsess over the
binary opposition of East and West, for example, the more they
undermine the very notion. The Westernizers are by no means
all “atheists.” Blue has been weaned not only on the Koran and
the twentieth-century radical Islamist theorist Sayid Qutb, but
also on somewhat dated Western traditions of third-world
liberation ideology and Hollywood movies. During the “secret
meeting” he turns out to be the only one who’s been to Europe.
For his part, Ka says, “I wanted to be a Westerner and a
believer.” It never works, of course, for Ka can’t really commit
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himself to either. Nor does love offer much of a panacea; it is
yet another brand of belief, predicated on trust between two
people who can never know everything about each other.
When Sunay’s henchmen try to enlist Ka as an ally in their
hunt for Blue, they reveal, along the way, that Ipek once had an
affair with the alleged terrorist mastermind. Ka will betray
Blue in turn—and lose Ipek forever as a result. Ejected from
Kars by the coup plotters, he returns to Germany and lives
there in solitude for another few years until he is killed by an
assassin—apparently in retaliation for informing on the
Islamist leader. We will never know the precise circumstances
of the matter, of course. But one thing is eminently clear. Here,
too, Ka has failed to become a believer.
But perhaps Ka can find posthumous redemption, of a sort, in
art—through the mystical unity, without religion, he has found
in his own work called Snow. Toward the end of the novel
Pamuk arrives in Kars on a quest of his own: to recover at least
something of his dead friend’s work, and to write a book
memorializing it. Pamuk has already searched Ka’s belongings
in Frankfurt and found no trace of the little green notebook of
poems, which appears to have been lost forever—probably
stolen by the killer. In Kars Pamuk hopes to reconstruct the
genesis of the poems, and possibly even find a recording of
Ka’s reading of one of the poems in the local TV archives. He
ends up retracing Ka’s steps, visiting the scenes of the events
we know so well from what has gone before.
Along the way he encounters many of the same talismanic
details that once affected Ka: the black dog, a poster warning
that suicide is an offense against Islam, little wheels of
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“famous Kars cheese.” Pamuk writes, “That morning, as I
walked the streets of Kars, talking to the same people Ka had
talked to, sitting in the same teahouses, there had been many
moments when I almost felt I was Ka.” And just like Ka, he
comes together with Ipek for the first time over walnut pastries
in the New Life Café—where Pamuk is similarly “undone by
her beauty” and falls in love, to the same futile end. He leaves
by train, just as his predecessor has done—but not before the
locals have had a chance to warn us readers not to trust the
author’s portrayal of them.
As we find ourselves retracing Ka’s steps, in more or less
reverse order, we realize that we are in a palindrome, a
crystalline mirroring. The symmetry may be only half-hidden,
but it is all the more singular for that. We may not know what
axis of the snowflake we now find ourselves on. But the sense
remains that somehow the mystical unity sought by Ka and
traced and evoked by Pamuk has survived the murder of the
poet, and the loss of his poems; while, along the way, Pamuk
the novelist illuminates his country’s quandaries of identity,
and the crisis of confidence between Islam and the West, with
an imaginative depth we had not known before.
. 1 There is an echo or two as well of Kafka’s hero K. Note, for example, Pamuk’s
observation that his normally mild-mannered central character has always
stubbornly insisted on using this made-up name in official documents, “even if it
meant conflict with teachers and government officials.”↩
2 Here, too, the pages are crowded with febrile youth; revolutionaries morphed into
reactionaries; obsessive talk of suicide, atheism, and political terror; politics as deadly
serious theater or scandal; and breathless musings about the relationship of the home
country to ideals of “Europe” and “European civilization.” The Possessed, driven by the
moral quandaries posed by terrorism and political extremism, is a particularly strong
influence. The proto-Leninist Nikolai Stavrogin finds his analogy in the charis-matic
Islamofascist Blue. Ipek’s father Turgut Bey, the disillusioned leftist, seems a sly
recasting of Stepan Verkhovensky, once radical, now contemptible liberal. Blue’s
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demand to be executed as an “individual act,” thereby mocking Western worship of the
self, sounds like a Dostoevskian conundrum. He gets his wish.↩
December 23, 2014
Is there a Santa Claus?
Filed under: Catholicism and other questions of religion —
theotheri @ 3:34 pm
Tags: the power of the metaphor
I was raised as a Roman Catholic. But my parents, and the
priests and religious brothers who were in our house literally
on at least a weekly basis all understood that something that
is metaphorically true is no less true than something that is
literally true. I understood, for instance, that someone who
might be “A bright light” wasn’t someone you switched on
to read in the dark. But that did not reduce the value of the
person’s gifts or make it less true. Alternatively, someone
who was “a pain in the neck,” was not a physical pain to be
treated with an aspirin but an irritation on a psychological or
social level.
Metaphorical truth on
the religious level was no less elevated. My favourite biblical
metaphor was the injunction not to bury one’s talents, but to
use them. It never occurred to me that I was being
exhorted to go out and literally bury something in the
ground. And if it had, the idea as I reached adulthood would
have appeared childish, if not downright silly.
In many cases, metaphors are far more powerful than literal
truth. My wedding ring, for instance, is the most valuable
piece of jewelry I own. It’s not the most valuable in terms
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of money, but in terms of what it stands for – a lifetime
commitment from a man who loves me. I remember
someone who put her hand on my shoulder when I
spilled hot oil onto her legs when I was taking a roast out of
the oven. I was aghast. “It’s all right,” that gesture said. It
was a metaphorical truth I still remember.
I remember these things because metaphors so often
convey an emotional depth that literal fact does not. They
convey a strength and significance that gives them an
endurance.
In this context, I think much of modern Christianity,
including the Roman Catholic Church, robs its followers of its
greatest gifts by insisting on literal interpretations of so
many of its doctrines. We’re coming up to Christmas, a
feast of immense metaphorical potential. Is it less powerful
if there was no literal birth in a stable? no star guiding three
kings with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh? No
angels calling the shepherds to the manger? Is it less
powerful if Mary was not literally a virgin? Any parent with
their newborn child in his or her arms knows that gold and
singing angels are not literally needed to make those
moments any more profound.
In truth, if so many biblical and doctrinal truths were
understood as metaphorical truths, we would not in the
modern world find ourselves so often scoffing in
disbelief. Instead, we could ask what the metaphorical
meaning of the doctrines might mean, rather than struggling
with the conflict between religious teaching and science, or
the ridiculous conclusions so often required by a literal
interpretation.
We could listen to the music, we could look at the art, we
could listen to the stories and the poetry and be transformed
by their beauty and hope. And yes, their truth.
Yes, Virginia: there is a Santa Claus.
19
20
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (Translator)
3.51 of 5 stars
Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between
secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism–these are the elements that
Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled
poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of
Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among
1
religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also
drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced.
Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself
pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic
terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical
evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude
to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with
cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present
moment.
James Matkin asked:
As Pamuk masterfully blankets his story with the metaphor
of snow does he elucidate the transitory and existential angst
of Islam today? “Everyone Has His Own Snowflake” Ka says
to lighten up the growing frustration with violent Islam? Do
the headscarf girls suicides inform the dangers of literalist
religious belief? Is the way forward in this crazy world to
follow the path of metaphor and myth like Pamuk?
Question: I submit the relevance of Pamuk’s brilliant novel SNOW is
in its ability to transform us into the existential angst of Islam today,
without losing hope and love of life. Snow moves us to understand
and feel Ka’s ambivalence about religion, god the revolution and the
mystery of the suicidal headscarf girls facing off against the
government secularism. Even the constant threat of death and
violence from unseen random powers fails to blunt Ka’s burning love
for Ipek in these dark times. For me snow captures so poignantly the
current transitory reality of Muslim life with ISIS and the Taliban
making indiscrimate terror everywhere.
“Everyone Has His Own Snowflake” Chapter 41, Ka concludes after
reading books about snow.
2
“Once a six-pronged snowflake crystallizes, it takes between eight and
ten minutes for it to fall through the sky, lose its original shape, and
vanish; when with further inquiry, he discovered that the form of
each snowflake is determined by the temperature, the direction and
strength of the wind, the altitude of the cloud, and any number of
other mysterious forces, Ka decided that snowflakes have much in
common with people. It was a snowflake that inspired “I, Ka” the
poem he wrote sitting in the Kars public library, and later when he
was to arrange all nineteen titles for his new collection, Snow; he
would assign “I, Ka” to the center point of that same snowflake.
Applying the same logic to “Heaven,” “Chess,” and “The Chocolate
Box” he was able to see that each of these poems, too, had its natural
and unique position on the imaginary snowflake. Soon he was certain
that every poem in his new collection – and, indeed, everything that
made him the man he was- could be indicated on the same set of
crystalline axes. It was, in short, a snowflake that mapped out the
spiritual course of every person who had every lived. The three axes
onto which he mapped his poems – Memory, Imagination, and
Reason – were he said, inspired by the classifications in Bacon’s tree
of knowledge, but he wrote extensively about his own efforts to
elucidate the meaning of the six-pronged snowflake’s nineteen
points.” P. 407.
After reading the novel and letting the metaphor of snow sink into
your subconscious anxiety about this mixed up world lessens. You
lighten up as you experience the connecting force of nature.
Do the headscarf girls’ suicides inform the dangers of literalist
religious belief?
Coleridge said, “Advice is like snow – the softer it falls, the longer it
dwells, upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.”
SNOW is informative literature about the secular reality in Islam
today.
3
MAY 12, 2005 ISSUE
The Schizophrenic Sufi
Christian Caryl
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
Knopf, 426 pp., $26.00
1.
The hero of Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel has a long charcoalcolored coat, a weakness for porno movies, and a melancholic
longing for the god of the Koran. We never find out whether
the man called Orhan Pamuk in the novel shares these
attributes, but, speaking as the narrator, he does inform us that
he and his main character, who is also his friend, have a lot
else in common. Both are Turks. Both come from good
bourgeois Istanbul families of decidedly secular outlook. Both
are literary aesthetes with strikingly similar taste in women.
And both are authors of works called Snow.
Pamuk’s work is the novel at hand, and it tells the story of the
creation and loss of the second book, a volume of poetry
written by Pamuk’s alter ego, who goes by the name of Ka. As
Pamuk is at pains to explain, the name is actually a cipher,
formed from the two initials of Ka’s official name: acronym as
4
pseudonym.1 But one suspects that its real origins lie in poetic
logic. The Turkish word for snow is kar—suggesting a
peculiarly intimate fusion of author and subject. It’s a nuance
that’s lost in translation, but, as we will see, the relationship
between Ka and snow is so much a part of the texture of the
novel that we don’t really need the reminder.
Pamuk and Ka also share a destination. It is the provincial city
of Kars, on Turkey’s far eastern border, and, though their trips
are separate, both men visit it in winter, when its harsh
contours vanish beneath heavy snowfall. Ka, kar, Kars. The
story opens with Ka’s arrival there at some point in the mid1990s; Pamuk will follow four years later in an attempt to
recreate his friend’s experiences. Kars proves the perfect
setting for these mirrored journeys, for it is a place—like so
many frontier regions that have shifted from one state to
another in the course of history—that embodies doubleness.
For many years it was part of the Russian Empire, becoming
part of the newborn Turkish republic in 1921, and Pamuk
rhapsodizes about the European character of its old buildings.
The persistent references to this point in the novel amount to
something of a geopolitical joke when we consider that we are
740 miles to the east of the Bosphorus, usually regarded as the
border between Europe and Asia. Kars has its Hotel Asia, to be
sure, but it is the city’s “elegant Baltic buildings” that linger in
the minds of the author and his hero. The irony—one travels
deep into Asia only to end up in Europe—is especially clear to
Ka, who is returning to Turkey after long years in political
exile in Germany. For the residents of Kars that charcoalcolored coat, purchased in a Frankfurt department store, marks
him as a would-be “European” just as surely as his cultivated
Istanbul speech and his Western-style education.
5
Not that he ever felt European in Europe, of course. Ka seems
to have spent his twelve years in Frankfurt mainly by himself,
in almost complete isolation from the society around him. At
one point he boasts that he doesn’t know a word of German.
Ka, it will turn out, is even estranged from the other Turkish
political refugees in Frankfurt. And that, in fact, is entirely
appropriate for a political exile who, as Pamuk notes, “had
never been very much involved in politics.” Ka’s banishment,
moreover, actually hinged on a case of mistaken identity.
During one of Turkey’s intermittent spells of military rule,
Pamuk explains, in an aside, that Ka had to flee his homeland,
thanks to an antigovernment article that was incorrectly
attributed to him. In short, Ka is not just your ordinary
returning prodigal. He is an outsider even among outsiders.
Yet it is surely no accident that he feels drawn to Kars, a place
that is still deeply divided in spirit. In the early years of the
Turkish republic, we learn, it was a redoubt of Kemal
Atatürk’s program of militant Western-style modernization. By
the time of Ka’s visit, however, those days are little more than
a subject for the nostalgia of the elderly; the city has fallen
mysteriously into decline, and politics has come full circle. The
secularists are in retreat, and Kars, battered by poverty and a
pervasive sense of diminished possibilities, is on the verge of
electing its first Islamist mayor. (Yet another hint of the failure
of Kemalist ideology lurks in the background: the flickering
presence of Kurdish guerrillas, belying the founder’s embrace
of Turkish ethnic nationalism as the moving force of his new
state.)
Ka does not have to go looking very far in order to confront
these tensions. They are built into his ostensible reason for
making the trip to Kars in the first place. He has come on
6
assignment from an Istanbul newspaper to investigate the case
of the “headscarf girls”—a group of pious young Muslim
women who have been committing suicide rather than obey the
official dictate that they must remove all outward attributes of
religion when participating in public life. It’s an issue that
strikes to the heart of the conflict between the Islamic revival
in modern-day Turkey and the still-enduring principles of the
Kemalist political legacy, which are rooted in a rigorous
separation of faith and state, and it quickly brings Ka into
contact not only with the families of the dead girls, but also
with Islamist circles in the city, both open and covert, as well
as their equally resolute opponents.
Small wonder, then, that Ka is soon immersed in countless
conversations about the nature of Turkish identity and its
oscillations between the imagined poles of East and West. The
subject is a familiar one to all Turkish intellectuals, who live in
a country that has never quite overcome an inborn sense of
civilizational schizophrenia, but here in Kars—where political
violence has been frequent through the years—the debate has
an urgency that belies the appearance of sleepy provinciality. It
is no coincidence that the city turns out to be suffering from a
bad case of divided loyalties. Spies and informers abound.
Government agents turn out to be pursuing personal agendas
rather than official ones. A visitor from the terrorist
underground is at large. You can get killed if you end up on the
wrong side of the identity question, and in the course of the
story that is exactly what will happen, more than once. And
even Ka—the innocent bystander, the aesthetically minded
loner, the instinctive sympathizer with the underdog—may
prove capable of lethal betrayal in the pursuit of love.
7
2.
For all the density of its real-world detail Snow is really a book
about a quest, and a miracle that grows out of it. Ka’s quest is
not inspired by politics, and the mystery it engenders belongs
to an entirely different category altogether. Ka’s reporting job
about the headscarf girls—the professed motive for his trip to
Kars—is just a cover story. The real reason for his visit is a
woman named Ipek, an old love from his university days.
Having left Istanbul years before, she has now returned to her
hometown of Kars, where she is living with her father, a
former leftist political activist who, now resigned to the torpor
and apathy of late middle age, is managing the Snow Palace
Hotel.
The beautiful Ipek is divorced from her husband Muhtar, the
head of the local, relatively moderate Islamist political party
that now appears poised to win the coming elections, and Ka is
eager to exploit her availability. And, sure enough, he is
successful—at least at first. She responds to his entreaties, and
he convinces himself that Ipek is willing to return with him to
Frankfurt, and that they will live together there in bliss. But the
dim prospects for this unlikely liaison are made clear by the
events on their first date, when the local minister of education
is gunned down by an assassin in retaliation for enforcing the
state’s policies against the headscarf girls. It also soon
becomes clear that both Ipek and her sister Kadife, a believer
who sympathizes with the suicides, are more deeply implicated
in the political crisis in Kars than either will initially admit—
albeit through romance as much as through ideology. That
complication has catastrophic effects for Ka, and for his
prospects for happiness, once it becomes clear that the
8
Islamists’ foes are preparing a counterblow.
Throughout it all the snow keeps falling—thick, muffling
snow. We know that Ka has seen plenty of snow during his
years in Frankfurt, but this particular brand—the snow of Kars,
of Ipek, and of the locals’ tortuous search for redemption,
whether it be in faith or politics—somehow strikes home in the
most literal sense. It sets off memories, reminding him of the
winters of his Istanbul childhood, but also suggests the
oblivion imposed by time, replete with melancholy and regret.
It summons up both beauty and boredom. At another moment
the snow triggers a sudden surge of religious yearning:
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Mesut asked, with
some annoyance. “Aren’t you an atheist too?”
“I don’t know,” said Ka.
“Then tell me this: Do you or don’t you believe that God
Almighty created the universe and everything in it, even the
snow that is swirling down from the sky?”
“The snow reminds me of God,” said Ka.
“Yes, but do you believe that God created snow?” Mesut
insisted.
There was a silence….
This encounter resounds like a tuning fork, and a few
paragraphs later, as a myriad of details from his past converge
on the unifying paradox of the snow, Ka hears
the call deep inside him: the call he heard only at moments of
inspiration, the only sound that could ever make him happy,
9
the sound of his muse. For the first time in four years a poem
was coming to him; although he had yet to hear the words, he
knew it was already written; even as it waited in its hiding
place, it radiated the power and beauty of destiny. Ka returns to
his hotel room and immediately writes down the poem in “the
green notebook he had brought with him from Frankfurt.”
He calls the poem “Snow,” and it serves as the overture to a
series of other poems—nineteen in all—that soon fill the
notebook. We never get a look at its contents; for reasons that
become clearer later on, the poems are merely evoked. Though
they have many images and motifs (titles include “Stars and
their Friends,” “Chess,” and “The Chocolate Box”), they turn
out to form a mysterious whole. Later Ka will be “able to see”
(as Pamuk puts it) that they can be plotted on a pattern in the
form of a snowflake according to axes “inspired by the
classifications in Bacon’s tree of knowledge.” At first glance
this seems like just the sort of postmodern artifice we have
come to expect from practitioners of literary formalism in the
mode of Borges and Nabokov. But one could just as easily see
it as a crystalline riddle in the grandest traditions of Sufi
mysticism. (An Islamist calls Ka “a modern-day dervish.”)
One of the book’s most moving scenes comes when Ka meets
the local Sufi sheikh:
“May God bless you for accepting my invitation,” said the
sheikh. “I saw you in my dream. It was snowing.”
“I saw you in my dream, Your Excellency,” said Ka. “I came
here to find happiness.”
Ka explains to the sheikh his own paradox: he longs for faith
10
but finds it impossible to accept the strictures and
backwardness of Islam. “I want to believe in the God you
believe in and be like you, but because there’s a Westerner
inside me, my mind is confused.” The sheikh gently consoles
him (at one point he says, jokingly, “Do they have a different
God in Europe?” and soon “a feeling of peace rose up inside
Ka.” The poem that results from this encounter will be titled
“Hidden Symmetry”—a phrase that harks back to an earlier
reflection:
Much later, when he thought about how he’d written this
poem, he had a vision of a snowflake; this snowflake, he
decided, was his life writ small; the poem that had unlocked
the meaning of his life, he now saw sitting at its center. But—
just as the poem itself defies easy explanation—it is difficult to
say how much he decided at that moment and how much of his
life was determined by the hidden symmetries this book is
seeking to unveil.
Though he never quite manages to find God, Ka encounters
these symmetries all around him during his stay, and embraces
the otherworldly origins of the poems that they seem to inspire.
Inspiration, he notes, is something that comes from outside,
almost in spite of him: “Later he would point to the speed with
which this happened as proof that this and all the poems that
followed it were—like the world itself—not of his own
creation.” Elsewhere he recalls the note at the start of
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and concludes: “Imagine, a
magnificent poem that had created itself, without the poet’s
having exerted any mental energy!” Yet the poems are not a
tonic; they provide no solutions. “He hoped the poem had been
sent to console him, to give him hope. But when it was done,
he still felt crushing pain throughout his body, so he left the
11
National Theater in distress.” Art offers transcendence; in the
end it will be as close to belief as Ka is ever going to get. But it
will not save him. Neither will love.
3.
The reasons for that lie in yet another twist in the narrative. It
turns out that snow has a more mundane role to play in this
story. When Ka arrives in town, the falling snow soon builds
into a blizzard that cuts Kars off from the outside world. The
opportunity is seized upon by an intriguing character named
Sunay Zaim, an itinerant actor who has come to Kars with his
avant-garde theater company, which is planning to put on a
performance of a 1930s-era work of Kemalist propaganda
entitled My Fatherland or My Scarf. The play, which depicts
the modernizers’ triumph over the backwardness of Islam, is a
calculated provocation aimed at the enthusiasts of religious
politics in the city.
But it soon becomes apparent that this, too, is a cover story.
What Sunay actually has in mind is no less than a temporary
coup d’état, with himself at the helm, designed to eliminate the
Islamist threat and make him a secularist hero. (Though the
precedent is never explicitly mentioned, both his plans and his
high-modernist aesthetics seem to owe a lot to the Italian
writer Gabriele D’Annunzio and his founding of an early
fascist mini-state in Fiume after World War I.) Sunay, in a selfdescribed “Jacobin mode,” finds plenty of allies among the
local military and a couple of renegade right extremists, all of
whom are happy to seize upon the chance to settle scores with
the religious camps. One particular target of their anger is
Blue, the ultra-conspiratorial Islamic militant who has settled
12
in Kars out of sympathy with the headscarf girls. They will win
in the end—but not before Ka has been drawn deeply into both
sides of the conflict.
Like Pamuk and Ka, Sunay and Blue are twins of a kind (even
if they are ideologically opposites). Both are charismatic
political extremists who want to remake the world; and both
understand the power of culture as a political weapon. Sunay,
like many of his fascist predecessors, views politics as a work
of art, not vice versa; as part of a game of political blackmail
he will force Ipek’s sister to remove her headscarf on stage as
part of a play, a symbolic annihilation of the ideals of his
opponents. Blue, for his part, first gained notoriety for his
threats against the “un-Islamic” behavior of a game show host,
and he treats Ka to a long rant about the importance of the
Shakh nameh, the thousand-year-old classic of Persian
literature. There is very little that is Islamic about the work, but
Blue seems to be making a point about protecting “one’s own”
cultural traditions. He challenges Ka to consider whether “this
story is so beautiful that a man could kill for it.”
Despite their pretensions, though, both men are deadly serious.
Both Sunay and Blue are artists, in their way, but unlike the
mystical Ka both are convinced that they know how secular
mystery is to be solved. And in contrast to Ka, whose imagined
snowflakes come to exemplify the “singularity” of individual
experience, both Blue and Sunay are obsessed with enforcing
visions of conformity that leave little room for innocents.
Neither is particularly worried about the prospect of hurting
anyone. But both will be casualties themselves by the end of
the tale.
13
Where Pamuk really excels in this novel is in the deftness with
which he allows these forces to tug at one another. Like
Dostoevsky, the literary forebear whose spirit haunts this book
most palpably, Pamuk appears to value politics, among other
things, as a great opportunity to let his characters rant in all
sorts of productive ways.2 The simplicity and coherence of
ideology are seductive, but the principles they contain rarely
stand up to social reality. In their place we are treated to a
blizzard of motives. One of my favorite chapters brings
together a host of the city’s political radicals for a “secret
meeting” (every word of which is being monitored by the
state) on how to respond to the coup. Grand debate about
issues of global concern mingles with personal vendettas,
comical small talk, and inside gossip. One of the “old-wave
socialists” will be informing on the meeting to the relevant
authorities:
His intentions weren’t malign; he did this to help the
associations head off police harassment. He would inform the
state of any activities he didn’t like—most of which seemed
unnecessary in retrospect anyway—but in his heart of hearts,
he was proud that there were rebels out there fighting for the
cause, so proud, in fact, that he would brag about the
shootings, the kidnappings, the beatings, the bombings, and the
assassinations to anyone who would listen.
Ka is capable of listening with sympathy to representatives of
even the most extreme views. Yet he also has no illusions
about the ends to which politics can lead:
By his thirties, he’d seen too many of his friends and
classmates tortured for the sake of foolish, even malign
principles; then there were those who were shot dead in the
14
attempt to rob banks and those who made bombs that wound
up exploding in their hands. Seeing the havoc of his lofty ideas
put into action, Ka deliberately distanced himself from them.
If activism can change the world we are still mistaken if we
believe that we can always predict the results of our actions
(like the bullets that ricochet indiscriminately through the
audience when Sunay stages his coup de théatre). We think we
understand cause and effect, but the actual links may be
inscrutable. When Ka arrives in Kars, he is told about the
assassination of the former mayor; by the end of the novel he
will have heard three different versions of the death, and the
enigma—a favorite Pamuk word—is never resolved.
Human beliefs are not just rich with multiplicity; in Pamuk’s
world they are also in constant flux. Some of the novel’s
Islamists, like Ipek’s former husband, began as Marxists; the
same applies to a few of the right-wingers as well. By the end
of the novel several of the Islamic radicals have abandoned
political activity altogether, joining earlier generations’
utopians among the ranks of the resigned. Moreover,
ideological labels that initially seem so clear turn fuzzy under
scrutiny. The more that Pamuk’s characters obsess over the
binary opposition of East and West, for example, the more they
undermine the very notion. The Westernizers are by no means
all “atheists.” Blue has been weaned not only on the Koran and
the twentieth-century radical Islamist theorist Sayid Qutb, but
also on somewhat dated Western traditions of third-world
liberation ideology and Hollywood movies. During the “secret
meeting” he turns out to be the only one who’s been to Europe.
For his part, Ka says, “I wanted to be a Westerner and a
believer.” It never works, of course, for Ka can’t really commit
15
himself to either. Nor does love offer much of a panacea; it is
yet another brand of belief, predicated on trust between two
people who can never know everything about each other.
When Sunay’s henchmen try to enlist Ka as an ally in their
hunt for Blue, they reveal, along the way, that Ipek once had an
affair with the alleged terrorist mastermind. Ka will betray
Blue in turn—and lose Ipek forever as a result. Ejected from
Kars by the coup plotters, he returns to Germany and lives
there in solitude for another few years until he is killed by an
assassin—apparently in retaliation for informing on the
Islamist leader. We will never know the precise circumstances
of the matter, of course. But one thing is eminently clear. Here,
too, Ka has failed to become a believer.
But perhaps Ka can find posthumous redemption, of a sort, in
art—through the mystical unity, without religion, he has found
in his own work called Snow. Toward the end of the novel
Pamuk arrives in Kars on a quest of his own: to recover at least
something of his dead friend’s work, and to write a book
memorializing it. Pamuk has already searched Ka’s belongings
in Frankfurt and found no trace of the little green notebook of
poems, which appears to have been lost forever—probably
stolen by the killer. In Kars Pamuk hopes to reconstruct the
genesis of the poems, and possibly even find a recording of
Ka’s reading of one of the poems in the local TV archives. He
ends up retracing Ka’s steps, visiting the scenes of the events
we know so well from what has gone before.
Along the way he encounters many of the same talismanic
details that once affected Ka: the black dog, a poster warning
that suicide is an offense against Islam, little wheels of
16
“famous Kars cheese.” Pamuk writes, “That morning, as I
walked the streets of Kars, talking to the same people Ka had
talked to, sitting in the same teahouses, there had been many
moments when I almost felt I was Ka.” And just like Ka, he
comes together with Ipek for the first time over walnut pastries
in the New Life Café—where Pamuk is similarly “undone by
her beauty” and falls in love, to the same futile end. He leaves
by train, just as his predecessor has done—but not before the
locals have had a chance to warn us readers not to trust the
author’s portrayal of them.
As we find ourselves retracing Ka’s steps, in more or less
reverse order, we realize that we are in a palindrome, a
crystalline mirroring. The symmetry may be only half-hidden,
but it is all the more singular for that. We may not know what
axis of the snowflake we now find ourselves on. But the sense
remains that somehow the mystical unity sought by Ka and
traced and evoked by Pamuk has survived the murder of the
poet, and the loss of his poems; while, along the way, Pamuk
the novelist illuminates his country’s quandaries of identity,
and the crisis of confidence between Islam and the West, with
an imaginative depth we had not known before.
. 1 There is an echo or two as well of Kafka’s hero K. Note, for example, Pamuk’s
observation that his normally mild-mannered central character has always
stubbornly insisted on using this made-up name in official documents, “even if it
meant conflict with teachers and government officials.”↩
2 Here, too, the pages are crowded with febrile youth; revolutionaries morphed into
reactionaries; obsessive talk of suicide, atheism, and political terror; politics as deadly
serious theater or scandal; and breathless musings about the relationship of the home
country to ideals of “Europe” and “European civilization.” The Possessed, driven by the
moral quandaries posed by terrorism and political extremism, is a particularly strong
influence. The proto-Leninist Nikolai Stavrogin finds his analogy in the charis-matic
Islamofascist Blue. Ipek’s father Turgut Bey, the disillusioned leftist, seems a sly
recasting of Stepan Verkhovensky, once radical, now contemptible liberal. Blue’s
17
demand to be executed as an “individual act,” thereby mocking Western worship of the
self, sounds like a Dostoevskian conundrum. He gets his wish.↩
December 23, 2014
Is there a Santa Claus?
Filed under: Catholicism and other questions of religion —
theotheri @ 3:34 pm
Tags: the power of the metaphor
I was raised as a Roman Catholic. But my parents, and the
priests and religious brothers who were in our house literally
on at least a weekly basis all understood that something that
is metaphorically true is no less true than something that is
literally true. I understood, for instance, that someone who
might be “A bright light” wasn’t someone you switched on
to read in the dark. But that did not reduce the value of the
person’s gifts or make it less true. Alternatively, someone
who was “a pain in the neck,” was not a physical pain to be
treated with an aspirin but an irritation on a psychological or
social level.
Metaphorical truth on
the religious level was no less elevated. My favourite biblical
metaphor was the injunction not to bury one’s talents, but to
use them. It never occurred to me that I was being
exhorted to go out and literally bury something in the
ground. And if it had, the idea as I reached adulthood would
have appeared childish, if not downright silly.
In many cases, metaphors are far more powerful than literal
truth. My wedding ring, for instance, is the most valuable
piece of jewelry I own. It’s not the most valuable in terms
18
of money, but in terms of what it stands for – a lifetime
commitment from a man who loves me. I remember
someone who put her hand on my shoulder when I
spilled hot oil onto her legs when I was taking a roast out of
the oven. I was aghast. “It’s all right,” that gesture said. It
was a metaphorical truth I still remember.
I remember these things because metaphors so often
convey an emotional depth that literal fact does not. They
convey a strength and significance that gives them an
endurance.
In this context, I think much of modern Christianity,
including the Roman Catholic Church, robs its followers of its
greatest gifts by insisting on literal interpretations of so
many of its doctrines. We’re coming up to Christmas, a
feast of immense metaphorical potential. Is it less powerful
if there was no literal birth in a stable? no star guiding three
kings with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh? No
angels calling the shepherds to the manger? Is it less
powerful if Mary was not literally a virgin? Any parent with
their newborn child in his or her arms knows that gold and
singing angels are not literally needed to make those
moments any more profound.
In truth, if so many biblical and doctrinal truths were
understood as metaphorical truths, we would not in the
modern world find ourselves so often scoffing in
disbelief. Instead, we could ask what the metaphorical
meaning of the doctrines might mean, rather than struggling
with the conflict between religious teaching and science, or
the ridiculous conclusions so often required by a literal
interpretation.
We could listen to the music, we could look at the art, we
could listen to the stories and the poetry and be transformed
by their beauty and hope. And yes, their truth.
Yes, Virginia: there is a Santa Claus.
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