East-West Encounter in Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle
IV
The White Castle is an assertion of the oneness of humanity that triumphs over racial, cultural, and ideological diversities. The fact that the characters in the novel exchange their identities so successfully compels us to pause and ponder over the question: Are not human beings basically the same everywhere? Pamuk thinks as much and dismisses the ideological humbug that divides human beings as stupidity. He observes, “What I am trying to do here is to make a game of it and to show that it does not matter whether you are an Easterner or a Westerner. The worst way of reading or misreading the book would be to take very seriously the ideologies, false consciousness, the stupidities that one has about these notions. The problem of East and West has been a huge weight for Turkish intellectuals” (Pamuk pg#). This authorial concern gets artistically expressed through the sultan’s questioning:
. . . the sovereign would ask thoughtfully: must one be a sultan to understand that men, in the four corners and seven climes of the world, all resembled one another? . . . Was it not the best proof that men everywhere were identical with one another that they could take each other’s place? (Pamuk 136)
The message of this Kafkaesque parable is loud and clear: at one point the indomitable human spirit renders all territorial boundaries infructuous and transcends to a height that politics and ideologies cannot possibly scale—a theme that finds a delicate poetic expression in Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” too. Frost begins the poem with the punch line: “Some thing there is that does not love a wall,” and adds “. . . Before I built a wall I would ask to know / What was I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense . . .” and chuckles at our and his neighbour’s foolishness who “will not go behind” our “father’s saying . . . ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’” Pamuk, too, seems to be making a veiled sarcasm at man’s rigid ideological orientation and fixity of ideas that render him frigid and inhuman.
The remarks of the seventeenth-century Ottoman sultan seem to have a contemporary relevance. In his speech made to the new membership of NATO in June 2004 in Istanbul, President George Bush, quoting Pamuk, insightfully expressed similar sentiment. He said that the finest view of the city was not from its European or Asian shores but from “the bridge that unites them.” He further added that “the important thing is not the clash of parties, civilizations, and cultures, East or West.” No, what is important is to recognize that “other peoples, in other continents and civilizations” are “exactly like you.” (Hitchens) Unfortunately, polarization of cultures and countries in terms of East and West has been the “addiction of our time. Connecting everything with everything else” would perhaps be humanity’s best bet for the future (Pamuk 4). Pamuk may well be implying a complete rethinking on the issue.
Works Cited
Europe Feature. Profile: Turkey’s Leading Novelist, Orhan Pamuk. Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, EPA/ARNE/DEDERT. Dec. 16, 2005.
Hitchens, Christopher. “Mind the Gap”. The Atlantic Monthly. Dec 14, 2004.
Pamuk, Orhan. The White Castle. Manchester: Faber and Faber, 1991.
Pourgouris, Marinos. “The Addiction of Our Time: Orhan Pamuk and the Nobel Prize.” Associations.
Traynor, Ian. The Guardian. Oct.13, 2006.
