East-West Encounter in Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle
I
Orhan Pamuk’s novel The White Castle has provoked mixed responses ranging from extreme revulsion to excessive adulation. Some have debunked it as extremely boring, dull, flat, and an infelicitous drudgery, while others have praised it sky-high, comparing its author with Calvino, Borges, Eco, and Marquez. Detraction and deification of this kind help only to obscure the pith and core of the novel’s humanistic import. In spite of such criticism, Pamuk’s literary greatness remains unquestionable—the Nobel Literature Award of 2006 proves it. The ground swell of such reaction symptomizes, if anything, an a priori assumption, caused not so much by his writings, but by his being a Turk caught in the cross-fire of a political battle of wits between Europe and Turkey.
Pamuk’s statement to a Swiss periodical about the Armenian genocide of 1915 (when a million Armenians were killed in Turkey) and the more recent Kurdish genocide in his country (in which thirty-thousand Kurds were massacred), for which Turkey has not officially regretted, stirred vehement protests both from Turkey’s religious conservative camp and the secular establishment. Pamuk had to face a criminal trial in 2005 under the controversial Article 301 for belittling his country and “insulting Turkishness.”
Though the case was eventually dropped by the Turkish government to show that they respected the individual’s freedom of speech in a secular democracy, it nonetheless made him a controversial figure. Europe watched these developments in Turkey with bemused interest. In fact, the events that took place in Germany and France between Pamuk’s prosecution and his receiving the Noble Prize lend interesting insight into the uneasy political equation between Europe and Turkey. Shortly after Pamuk’s trial in 2005, he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. About a month later, in November, he was awarded the Prix Médicis étranger in France for his explicitly political novel, Snow. Then in September 2006, France honored him again with the Prix Méditerranée étranger. At this juncture, the Swedish Academy’s Nobel announcement in Stockholm in favor of Pamuk made Europe ecstatic. European leaders praised him in profusion.
French President Jacques Chirac called his views on society “intelligent, strong, and liberal.” Olli Rehn, the European Union Enlargement Commissioner, hailed the decision as “good news” for all those “who want to speak, search, and learn the truth.” He went on to add that artists “need freedom of expression as desperately as life needs water and air. Orhan knows more than others how precious and fragile such freedom is” (Pourgouris).
This seems a very carefully worded and heavily loaded statement with serious political implications. Rehn’s addressing Pamuk by his first name, Orhan, suggests the sense of comfort that the Europeans feel with what Pamuk represents. And the strategic positioning of the two words “precious” and “fragile” in the sentence make a devious hint at the very foundation of the precarious Turkish democracy.
One begins to suspect that secularism and freedom are perhaps at the mercy of Islamic Law. If one stretches the implication a little further from the Turkish point of view, it could mean that Pamuk is hand in glove with the Europeans and is only giving lip service to his country—a suspicion reinforced by what Professor Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, has observed in the context of Pamuk’s novel The White Castle: “he has stolen the novel, we can say, from us Westerners and transformed it into some thing else”(Pourgouris).
Whatever may have been the real intention behind these statements, Pamuk became a suspect in the eyes of the Turkish people, and they thought that the Europeans were using their own man against them. It touched the Turkish susceptibilities to the quick. It all happened at a time when Turkey was aspiring to join the European Union. This naturally gave rise to a tremendous nationalist backlash. Pamuk’s own countrymen saw him as a Westerner writing in Turkish. Turkish critics maintained that Pamuk was given the Nobel Prize not for his novels but for his politics. The leader of the Ultra-Nationalist Lawyers Kemal Kerincsiz said, “as a Turkish citizen I am ashamed . . . I don’t believe this prize was given for his books or for his literary identity. It was given because he belittled our national values for his recognition of the [Armenian] genocide” (Traynor).
It is a pity that Pamuk, whom Turkey should be proud of, was received with so much derision and hostility at home. No author in recent times has been so patently misunderstood by his countrymen as Pamuk. His love for secular democratic values and his attempt to bridge the gap between the East and West artistically were misconstrued as anti-Turkish. Such imputation, however, seems unjustified, for he has always maintained that tradition does not mean stasis—it is forward looking. In his view, tradition and liberalism are not contrary values. His main contention is that “upholding one’s history and tradition is not incompatible in a modern secular state that seeks to join the European Union.”
