SOURCE: Gün, Güneli. “The Turks are Coming: Deciphering Orhan Pamuk's Black Book.” World Literature Today 66, no. 1 (winter 1992): 59-63.

[In the following essay, Gün—the English-language translator of The Black Book—addresses the question of why Pamuk appeals to Western readers more than other contemporary Turkish authors.]

Orhan Pamuk takes his own portrait of the artist very seriously indeed—as he well should. After all, he's being touted as Turkey's new literary prodigy, putting in a timely appearance on the world literature scene. Turkish literature buffs ask one another: how come? After all, there are other Turkish writers who are as good or better but to whom the world pays scant attention. So, why Orhan Pamuk?

Well, for starters, not only does Pamuk's work sell quite briskly at home; it also translates into English like a dream. Educated at the prestigious Robert College (an extension of the American Ivy League in Istanbul), Pamuk can hear his work fall into place abroad. Besides, he has his finger on the pulse of world literature. While his compatriots are still tinkering with the secrets of the well-made modern novel, Pamuk has already graduated into postmodernism. He is part of what might be termed the New International Voice—like Isabel Allende, for example, who too must not be the only good writer in Chile, although she's the one we buy and read, in translation.

Pamuk's achievement is indeed considerable. At thirty-nine, he has four major novels under his belt. The first, Cevdet Bey ve Oğlulari (Cevdet Bey and His Sons; unavailable in translation), is a bildungsroman which tells the three-generation saga of an upper-class Istanbul family. The second, Sezsiz ev (The Quiet House; also not translated), a modernist novel told from five different perspectives, deals with a week spent by four siblings, who represent four distinct generations, at their dying grandmother's country house during a dark period in Turkish political history (1981), when the different generations of Turks were actually at one another's throats. The third, which is enjoying a good run in the West, is the recently translated Beyaz kale (Eng. The White Castle), an intriguing postmodernist novel ostensibly about a seventeenth-century Venetian slave and his Ottoman master, who resemble each other so much that they end up swapping identities.

In his fourth and most complex postmodernist novel, Kara kitap (Black Book), Pamuk capitalizes on the contemporary psychological insight that all we can know of others are the projections of ourselves. With this insight carried into the novel, it stands to reason that all the characters are figments of the basic enigma which is the mind of the author, as enigmatic to the author himself as it is to the reader who is trying to decipher the text. In an effort to clue in (or to psych out) the reader, the novelist/narrator quotes Sheikh Galip, the eighteenth-century Ottoman mystic poet (who, as well as sharing his name with the protagonist, Galip, provides the book with its literary underpinnings), admonishing his readers: “Enigma is sovereign, so treat it carefully.” We will try.

The novel takes the rudimentary form of the detective novel. Being sophisticated readers, however, we know that a detective story is only a setup to lead us through a maze where the entrance and the exit are preordained, strewn with clues and red herrings along the way, its arbitrary coincidences faked by the clever author to beguile, frustrate, and misguide us through a reality that turns out to have been illusion posing as reality—in other words, the fictive world. Of all the novel forms, the detective novel must be the most contrived. The novelist knows at the outset whodunit. With Black Book the convention is nevertheless turned on its ear: whodunit is an enigma. He is a voice on the telephone, perhaps.

Pamuk is not going to provide us with something so cheap as a solution. His protagonist remembers telling his lost wife once that the only kind of detective fiction he might find interesting is a story wherein the author does not know the identity of the murderer.

The plot of Black Book is deliberately simple: a guy is looking for his missing girl. He suspects that she is off with another fellow. He finds her by causing her demise as well as the other fellow's. What is complex about the work is the structure: a chimerical narrative (polyphonic, polyvalent, allusive, obscurantist, unreliable) in which chapters of the story are interspersed with chapters that are in the form of newspaper columns. No less complex is the content: a labyrinthine quest through Istanbul which encompasses an encyclopedia of Turkish life, past and present, with its cultural delights as well as its public shames.

Galip, an Istanbul lawyer, is abandoned by his wife, who also happens to be his first cousin. He guesses that, although she has vanished, she cannot have gone too far. She must be hiding out with her half-brother (and therefore another first cousin) Celâl, a newspaper columnist. And where could they be hiding? Well, at the family compound, of course, the old apartment building where the family intellectual, the newspaper columnist, lives (where else?) on the top floor. Not finding the missing pair there, Galip moves into the flat, sort of, and begins to lead a double life as himself and also as Cousin Celâl, the columnist.

The protagonist suffers from a case of deep hero-worship for his columnist boy-cousin as well as from unrequited love for his girl-cousin wife, who is his Beauty Incarnate. This is the stuff of a heavy-duty family romance, with incestuous implications strewn about like herrings that are strictly of the red variety. The wife's name, Rüya, inasmuch as it means “dream,” clues us that we have here a persona who is not only a Platonic Ideal but an identity closely related to the protagonist's as an Idealized Self: a narcissistic and incestuous anima (or the female double).

Wife-cousin-sister Rüya is a consumer of cheap fiction, especially detective novels, which she devours as she swings her long legs. Galip keeps her craving well supplied with sleazy reading material, but apparently she has other appetites that have gone unsatisfied. Why else would she have absconded? Well, irony of ironies, the heroine as an addict of detective fiction provides this “detective novel” with its mystery.

As the author has named Galip after the Ottoman poet who wrote the long mystical poem in which Love searches for Beauty (Hüsn-ü Ashk), Cousin Celâl's appellation obviously alludes to the great Sufi mystic teacher Mevlana, whose name was Celâl-ed-din Rümi. If the English-speaking reader gets the names of the two characters mixed up, not to worry; so does your Turkish-speaking literary sleuth. The state of confused identities seems to be a deliberate ploy on the part of the author.

The protagonist, the lawyer called Galip, having sneaked into and taken possession of his cousin's flat, clothes, files, and phone calls, takes on the columnist's function as well as his form. He goes through his cousin's mental and physical furniture, producing columns which he passes off as the work of the missing journalist. However, our lawyer-sleuth, unlike Perry Mason, bungles his quest and manages to get both his idols killed (unintentionally?) by an enigmatic assassin whose identity he never discovers.

The key to finding his wife-sister-cousin Rüya (Dream) seems to be not only to be like Cousin Celâl but to be Celâl. Remember, this kind of impersonation is exactly what every novelist, working in the interests of “realism,” wishes to accomplish successfully so that the reader will be fooled into thinking the person he has come to know so intimately is Emma Bovary when in fact he knows only an aspect of Gustave Flaubert (“Mme Bovary, c'est moi”). Remember also, collaterally, in the language of mystical enlightenment, that to become oneself is to be another—a notion that will be explained presently.

There are a couple of threads in Black Book (of the many that are dangled, abandoned, or used as false leads) which wind together into a kind of yarn to take us through the labyrinth, the enigma, or the black hole which will not reflect. Though tongue-in-cheek for the most part, Pamuk drags into his novel Gnostic and mystical texts which, to use his own words, are “all the more convincing because [he himself is] a nonbeliever.” The first involves Mevlana and his passion for a flimflam man called Shams. When Mevlana fell for his dubious love object, he was already the greatest Sufi master ever; but his passion served only to embarrass family, friends, and students, thereby putting Mevlana (one assumes) into a bad light vis-à-vis the expectations of proper behavior from him as the dean of a famous theological seminary. Mevlana had already achieved “enlightenment,” yet, having turned into the Big Cheese, there was nothing else for him to do but dry up. So, he surpassed himself by doing something really cheesy. His most famous catchphrase with which he regaled his students was, “If you wish to increase your perception, then increase your necessity.”

Falling in love inappropriately was one way of increasing his own necessity. He unabashedly told the world that he, the Great Mevlana, wanted “not to be like Shams, but to be Shams.” He could surpass himself only by totally submitting his identity to his lover's. (This is the heart of the mysterious paradox, by the way, that Pamuk lifts from Sheikh Galip: “Mystery is to be Oneself and to be Another”—the same mystery that we are admonished to treat carefully.) Well, Mevlana's submission of his exalted identity, under the identity of the town creep's, must have confused and frustrated his friends, relatives, and adherents. Being Oneself and also Another, indeed! It must have stuck in everybody's craw, and so it was not surprising that, eventually, Shams was thrown down a black well by assassins and killed.

Who had the motive and the opportunity to murder Shams? ponders the postmodern police detective Orhan Pamuk. Who stood most to gain from Shams's death? Mevlana's adherents and sons? Or Mevlana himself? Did Mevlana contrive to get Shams killed? After all, it was Mevlana whose necessity was in fact increased by the death of his lover, thereby increasing his perception. We shall, of course, never know.

Coincidentally, did our lawyer also arrange to get his cousins-idols bumped off (inadvertently on purpose) so that their deaths would illuminate his perceptions? This is the question that Pamuk never seems to tire of begging, obliquely behind his Black Book, but which he never answers. He misses no opportunity to posit another concentric equation: he himself (as the author) fulfills his dream (Rüya) to become the writer (Celâl) by submitting his alter selves to the mystery of art (death). In terms of the mystery in Black Book, who stood the most to gain, after all, by his love objects' (alter egos) deaths? The Author, of course! Did not Dante gain as a poet by Beatrice's death? Petrarch of Laura's? Orpheus of Eurydice's? One is reminded of a line by Margaret Atwood involving power politics between lovers in which the poet wants the upper hand: “Please die I said / so I can write about it.”

Another fascinating bit of mystic lore Pamuk digs up concerns a sect called Hurufi. At first glance one might even think the author invented the Hurufi Book of Onomancy in the interests of postmodernist high jinks. But no, Hurufism is for real and subject to serious scholarship, even today, involving divination by the letters “written” in faces. Fazlallah of Astarabad (b. 1339) was the founder of the sect, which drew meaning and conclusions from a combination of the letters of the Arabic alphabet. In Black Book we learn that, according to Fazlallah, sound was the demarcation line between Being and Nothingness, since everything that crossed over from nothingness into the world of materiality produced a sound. The acme of sound was, of course, the “word,” the exalted thing called “speech,” the magic known as “words,” which were made up of Letters. The origin of Being, its Meaning, and the material Aspect of God were distinguishable in Letters that were clearly written in the faces of men. We all had native-born characteristics of two brow lines, four eyelash lines, and one hairline—seven strokes in all. At puberty this figure increased to fourteen, with the late-blooming nose dividing our faces, and with its poetic doubling (reflection) we reached the number twenty-eight, the number of letters in the Arabic alphabet, which brought the Koran into existence. Fazlallah, in an effort to bring the count up to thirty-two, the number of letters in the Persian alphabet (he was, after all, Persian himself), perused the line under the chin and found two, which he then doubled, reaching thirty-two.

Crackpot stuff? Well, you will find references to what is “written” in the rose, for example—or in the spots of the tiger—in the fiction of the Great Borges himself, as well as in that of many other great Gnostic poets, past and present. Fazlallah, who started it all, proclaimed himself Messiah (the twelfth Imam returned to purify Islam) with seven apostles to help him proselytize in Isphahan on the hidden aspect of the Koran. Accused of heresy, he was tried and executed. The belief passed from Iran to Turkey, thanks to Nesimi, a poet and one of Fazlallah's successors, who put all his writings in a green trunk and went around Anatolia, finding followers for his sect. Nesimi himself was later captured in Aleppo, tried endlessly, and flayed; his body was subsequently exhibited in the city, then cut into seven pieces and buried in seven cities where he had adherents. Hurufism spread quickly among Anatolian Bektashis, who talked about kanz-i mahfi, the secret treasury of the universe, which is God's's True Quality. The problem was to decipher the clues in the world in order to achieve the treasury. They set themselves up to decipher this mystery in every thing, every place, every person.

It is all just too much fun for one postmodernist novelist to have by himself, but Pamuk does. He has Galip rifle through his columnist-cousin's treasury of arcane publications to find a weird little book by one F. M. Üçüncü (I still do not know if this Üçüncü is a legitimate commentator), who presumably says in his book Esrar-i Huruf ve Esrarin Kaybi (The Mystery of Huruf and the Loss of Mystery) that Fazlallah was a true Easterner. To think of him as part of any platonistic, pantheistic, cabalistic thought was wrong. According to Pamuk's protagonist, Üçüncü postulates that East and West occupied separate halves of the world and that never the twain shall meet. At times one of the two halves was victorious over the other, making it the master and the other the slave. The historic junctures in the seesaw of ascendancy were not coincidental but logical. Whichever half was at any given time successful in viewing the world as a mysterious, double, and magical place was the half that was the ascendant. Those who saw the world as a simple, single-meaninged, unmysterious place were doomed to fail and to end up as slaves.

The second part of Üçüncü's book (as the lawyer-protagonist registers it) is devoted to a detailed discussion of how Mystery was lost. The loss of Mystery was a loss of “center,” therefore a loss of order. In the Age of Happiness all of us had “meaning” in our faces, but with the loss of Mystery, our faces lost that “meaning.” The fact that faces looked so much like one another was because of the “emptiness” they all showed.

Galip, like the author himself, is also engaged in looking for clues to put together a meaning. None is forthcoming, however. All the clues are red herrings, coincidences that he contrives himself. The object of the search (Platonic Ideal, Beauty, Reality, Identity) is Dead on Arrival—in other words, a setup, the dead duck the author props up in order to shoot several hundred pages later. Art is all illusion, sleight-of-hand, trickery, impersonation, ventriloquism, the creating of mannequins or wax dummies by a master craftsman (which abound in Black Book in the subterranean passages of Istanbul). Art is a dark mirror, a black mirror: art does not reflect Life. So what's new?

Well, Black Book is very engaging. When it first fell into my hands, I read it with a quivering excitement, filled with both envy and recognition, much like Anton Salieri taking down Mozart's dictation of the Requiem at the end of the movie Amadeus: “Yes! Of course, yes! Ahh, yes!” I stopped friends on the street to narrate for them whole sections of the novel. No other book had spoken to me so completely, hitting my concerns on the head, grabbing the themes I myself pursued, beating me to the punch line. Granted, Pamuk and I share backgrounds, yet why all the excitement?

I had a hunch, as a watcher of the world literary scene, that here was a Turkish writer who was going to Make It. The Nobel, for example: for years the names of Yashar Kemal and Nazim Hikmet have been submitted, only to be turned down, as the Nobel Committee, one suspects, scratched its illustrious collective head and wondered what Turks see in those two writers; but here was Orhan Pamuk, a kid who was doing the right thing at the right time. I could already hear Black Book in English. All it needed was the right translator.

To speak more generally, Black Book is made of the stuff that grabs us all. Aside from being pertinent to our times, there is something appealing in Pamuk's unrequited quest for meaning, an innocence in his sophistication, and truth in his trickery. Here is a wide-eyed devourer of books, Pamuk himself, who is heartbroken at the fact that, seductive as literature is, it cannot deliver on its promises, let alone guarantee a good time in bed.

Pamuk, in his fourth and most ambitious novel, seems determined to reposit in this book a revolving index of a culture, high and low, that produces a Turkish intellectual: everything that delights and instructs the Turkish heart, including an obsession with history, beauty, mystical philosophy. The book derives from the world of the Haves (as opposed to the Have-Nots). Not only is Pamuk the bookish son of a well-heeled family who has inherited the pursuit of happiness as a natural right; he is also an obsessive researcher into odd historical quirks, which come out of the past in recognizable embroidered satin tatters that he works into the crazy quilt called the postmodernist novel.

The modern trend in Turkish “realism” had been the so-called Village Novel, in which the author, more often than not a member of the middle-class intelligentsia, depicts the trials and tribulations of godforsaken peasants in an effort to “educate” the reading public (also composed of the middle class) and to produce a national conscience as well as consciousness: the Writer posing as Teacher, as Pamuk never tires of pointing out. It is perhaps this educator's mask worn by the Turkish novelist that has turned off New York Publishing, which has no taste for teachers. And we all know that what doesn't play in New York doesn't get to play on the rest of the world's playgrounds.

Pamuk, who has deliberately set out to become a world-class writer, has borrowed the attitudes and strategies of Third World authors writing for the consumption of the First World. Not only does he know all the tricks; he never misses one. His work translates like a charm precisely for the same reason Isabel Allende's work travels easily into English: English is, in fact, the common language behind the various languages out of which the new world-voice is being created—like world rock music—the destination of which is also the United States.

As John Updike somewhat biliously points out in his New Yorker essay on Pamuk and the Czech Ivan Klíma (2 September 1991), it might be the Iowa International Writing Program that fosters a global voice. True, Pamuk has put in an almost obligatory stint at Iowa; but the global voice is more likely to be tied to world economics, I suspect, than to Midwestern schools playing host to world writers. Updike, as a master of the modern novel, justifiably feels left out of the fun and games perpetrated by the slew of international writers and foisted on him to review. “Fantasy and cleverness,” he says; “exotic visions,” he says; “effortless gymnastics,” he says. He is not entirely sure if the new kids on the block are For Real. How does one know if they are any good if one does not have the proper critical tools with which to measure them against the likes of himself, John Updike, or (heaven forbid) Master Hemingway?

True, fantasy and cleverness have taken the place of the restraint and symmetry of the modern novel, apparently because that is the form in which the material from the Third World sells over here. And why not? Vis-à-vis Turkish literature, the English-speaking world has been looking high and low for a Turkish writer with whom to identify. If fantasy or cleverness is the only vehicle on which Turkish literature can arrive upon the world scene, well then, all the more power to Orhan Pamuk.