The Reminiscences and the City. Findigs on the Urban Spaces in Two Novels by Orhan Pamik

Authors:

Pages: 312-321
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/TXYN8150

Abstract:

This paper focuses on the problem-analytical research of the novels The White Castle and Snow by Nobel Prize Winner Orhan Pamuk. These novels consolidate the affinity of the Turkish writer to the psychological, historical and cultural dimensions of urban culture. Despite the name it bears, the city in Pamuk’s interpretation is a city of nostalgia and identity crisis that exacerbate the tension between the urban centre and periphery. The White Castle presents the city as a place of depersonalization where the unthinkable takes place – master and slave change their roles. The meeting between the two cities – Venice and Istanbul – represents, if not confrontation, at least the gap between the symbols of European culture and the philosophy of the East, the Oriental as a mode of thinking and living. Captivity, as an initiatory journey and disease (the plague) as God’s punishment are central motifs upon which the conceptual meaning of the novel is built up. The city in Snow is visualized as a labyrinth where the poet Ka regains his poetic talent, losing and finding himself. The city of Kars is a border place and multicultural centre, generating history and memory. The characters’ personal stories intertwine with (in) the stories of the city. The author’s consecutive synchronic and diachronic perspectives along with the horizontal and vertical sections of Kars reveal the city as a topos of differentiation and a cross point of the epistemological and ontological praxis.

Keywords:

multiculturalism, borderline, secularism, identity crisis, depersonalization

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