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Being Oneself and Another
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19298 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
6,024 Words |
| Author
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Guneli Gun
Guneli Gun is a Turk who writes her fiction in English. She
lives in Oberlin, Ohio, where she has taught creative writing
and women's studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of
Book of Trances (Julian Friedmann Publishers, 1979) and the
recent picaresque novel On the Road to Baghdad (Hunter House,
1991). She is a contributor to the Paris Review and World
Literature Today. |
The White Castle is a fake--in the best postmodernist sense. Ostensibly set in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth century, Orhan Pamuk's third and only book available in English translation pretends to be a historical novel. Yet an acquaintance with Pamuk's other work clues the wary reader that this book is really a postmodernist treatise, replete not only with a preface by a character from a previous novel but with a dedication to the character's fictional dead sister. We know we're being taken for a ride, being conducted, as it were, by an unreliable narrator, that tricky tour guide so well employed by the postmodern fiction writers.
The character, a fat and crapulous professor of history (obviously an alter ego of the writer, who appears to be thin and sober), claims to have rewritten the story and informs us in "his" preface that he's discovered the original manuscript at a shabby little archive in a small town not too far from Istanbul. The good professor is drawn to it at once and, being "too lazy to transcribe it," he pinches the manuscript. Obsessed with the text despite its historical discrepancies, the character decides to retell the story in his own words, thereby relieving the real author (Orhan Pamuk) of linguistic accuracy as well. We are given to understand the redactor has no language in his bag of tricks other than modern Turkish intellectualese, into which he renders the original Ottoman text.
A guided tour through the text
On a voyage to Naples, sometime in the middle of the seventeenth century, the boat a young Venetian is sailing aboard is set upon by Turkish ships appearing "like phantoms in the fog." The Venetian student of arts and sciences is captured but avoids galley slavery by pretending to be a doctor. Taken to Istanbul amid victory celebrations, he's put into jail there; but thanks to his talents as a quick study, he's able not only to master Turkish but to gain fame as a doctor, thereby attracting the attention of the pasha who owns him.
Pleased with the young Venetian's medical advice, the pasha saves him from the jail and puts him to work with another protégé, a Turk who's known throughout the book only by his professional title: Hoja, the teacher. The narrator, also nameless, is immediately confounded by the uncanny resemblance between himself and Hoja--such a physical look-alike that Hoja is his virtual double. Hoja, on the other hand, does not seem to recognize or care about the resemblance. He is interested in the Venetian only because he is a potential teacher of Western science,
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