East-West Encounter in Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle
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Pamuk writes about the Ottoman Turkey and Islam. Though he is not a practicing Muslim, he is deeply rooted in his native city, Istanbul. Being born and brought up in a city that spans Europe and Asia, he is torn between loyalties to his Asian roots and his European upbringing. Pamuk, therefore, represents the typical Turkish paradox—of European ambition and its Ottoman culture, its scientific aspiration and its religious conservatism, its democratic establishment and its Islamic law, its old morality and its new economy. The East-West polarity, which is predominant in the Turkish consciousness, is deftly delineated in his major novels such as The White Castle, Snow, and My Name is Red.
Beneath the facile surface of the novels, however, one can detect deeper ontological postulations: Why should a European captive be subjected to life-long slavery as in the case of the unnamed European scholar in The White Castle? Why aren’t people who are slightly different or imitate Europeans tolerated in Turkey as is displayed in Snow? And why should Effendi, the master miniaturist, be put to death for designing the books for his sovereign after European fashion as in My Name is Red? Do cultures and man-made boundaries make men different? Are not human beings basically the same everywhere?
Pamuk seems to be addressing these questions in The White Castle, and artistically registering his reaction to the omnipresent question of the identity of man. Working on this theme, he constantly explores a language that corresponds to the texture of life in Istanbul. He writes, “I wanted to make you feel the terror of living in this city… I wanted to convey the idea of hopelessness, the idea of despair.” It is imperative for every artist to find for oneself an idiom, a set of symbols and a universal correspondent that represents the hopes and aspirations, fears and phobias of the people he or she is writing for. Pamuk has admirably handled the language and brought into focus the typical existential burden that every Turk has groaned under. This fact is corroborated by the Nobel Foundation’s announcement: “Orhan Pamuk, who in the quest for the melancholic souls of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures” (Pourgouris).
