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Ottoman Shadow Theater
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19299 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
3,525 Words |
| Author
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Talat S. Halman
Talat S. Halman was most recently Distinguished Visiting
Professor at Bilkent University (Ankara) and chairman of the
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at New
York University. He was on the faculties of Columbia, the
University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton for many years and
was a Rockefeller Fellow in the Humanities at the University
of Michigan. In 1971 he became Turkey's first minister of
culture, and from 1980 to 1982 he served as his country's
ambassador for cultural affairs. From 1991 to 1995 he was a
member of the executive board of UNESCO. A poet, critic,
literary historian, dramatist, and translator, he has
published forty-five books in Turkish and English. Faulkner's
first Turkish translator, Halman has also translated
Shakespeare's Complete Sonnets, Wallace Stevens, Mark Twain,
Eugene O'Neill, and Langston Hughes, among others. |
"To be a writer is to wear masks," Orhan Pamuk observed last year. In a talk he gave in Izmir, Turkey, he also said, "Every writer has an artificial, feigned, fake side to him." "As a novelist," he added, "I no longer want to be omniscient. I would rather command limited knowledge--and mastery of the art of fiction."
The White Castle reveals the quintessential aesthetic strategy that the 38-year-old author has thus mapped out. It is a masquerade, an intellectual game, an unabashed trompe l'oeil, a literary intrigue. Pamuk has avoided "know-it-all" narration; instead, he has opted for in-depth vision for his shadowy protagonists.
Shadows, not necessarily in the Platonic or Sufi sense, are the "heroes" of this chiaroscuric novel. Significantly (as I was told by the book's translator, Victoria Holbrook), Pamuk came close to giving the book the title The Book of Shadows, but he decided to go with the actual title preferred by the publishers. His title would have served better as a description of the novel's structure and creative strategy--not only for the interplay of shadows of identity maintained throughout with fascinating virtuosity but also because The White Castle is a postmodernist recasting of the Ottoman shadow theater (Karagoz).
Pamuk's Ottoman intellectual and Venetian impostor, like the clashing and frequently converging shadows of the two principal figures of the Karagoz plays, reflect the dichotomy of similar character and the sameness of disparity. They are both crafty and na?e, ingenious and bumbling. They come to symbolize, on Pamuk's screen of shadow puppets, the uneasy, awkward embrace of East and West (Europe and the Ottoman Empire, Christianity and Islam, science and literature, technology and politics). These fusions, Pamuk reminds us, are doomed to failure: They are a fiasco, to be sure, in cultural terms, but they entail a massive moral collapse as well.
In his delineations of identity crises, the master-slave relationship, and clashes of ethics and aesthetics, Pamuk intimates no prospect other than a tragicomedy. Although this is a book of delusions, the author himself regards neither Ottoman history nor European civilization with anything approaching admiration. He seems to be saying to them "a plague on both your houses."
The symbolism of the white castle reflects, in some ways, Pamuk's blend of pessimism and idealism. The citadel, christened Doppio, presumably belongs to the Poles. The name Doppio evokes
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