After a practically breezy couple chapters, Orhan Pamuk brings the discomfort in chapter five when the nameless narrator, through the promise of self-discovery, prompts Hoja to write out the negative aspects of himself. True to form, Hoja insists that he is "not a coward" and that "because most people were imperfect and negative that everything was wrong in the world." When our hero insists that Hoja is defiantly worse than him, regardless if he is or isn't a coward, then the real abuse starts. Forcing the narrator to write out his faults, and then rewarding these abstractions with physical abuse, Hoja reveals a deep rooted hatred for the faults of all others, and a complete lack of recognition of his own.
This got me to thinking about the warped morality and invisible guilt of the slave keeper. I was reminded of a quote by Victor Vazquez (aka: KOOL A.D.), one half of the now-defunct rap group Das Racist, that reads "classic western philosophy is slave owners trying to learn how to sleep at night." Hojo is an intellectual with a ravenous appetite for all the knowlege he can get his hands on. Not satisfied with his own education, he metaphorically bleeds dry the narrator's stock of knowledge, and consumes within a week the entire written word of the kingdom's last official astronomer. Throughout the story, Hojo's status as a slave holder isn't contested once, But i believe that when the major issue of the book turns to the strong similarities, visual and intellectual, between the two men, it is the Narrator's insistence that Hojo is a worse man that reminds us of our hero's status as a captive person. Hojo is woefully stumped by the conundrum "why i am what i am?" because he is incapable of seeing himself. He has no trouble seeing horrors all around him in the behaviors of others, yet if he were capable of self-inspection he might find his tyranny over the narrator unsettling. Although not "about" slavery, Pamuk's The White Castle does a good job of illustrating an age old question about those who hold others as property: How do they sleep at night?
This is a very insightful comment regarding the two primary characters of Pamuk's The White Castle. However, I would include more about the cultural background of the characters. We cannot view the Venetian and the Hoja in a limbo apart from their environment and judge them thusly. Rather, we must question to what extent their environment paints their view. Yes, certainly we must ask how the Hoja sleeps at night, but if his culture (not realistically, but as depicted by Pamuk) is desensitized to the stigma of slavery, perhaps we should not be asking how the Hoja sleeps at night, but how to what extent his values are those of his culture and to what extent they are his own. This decides whether we use the Hoja's character as Pamuk's representation of that particular group of people, or representative of an antagonism that is more individual. We cannot simply ask, "Why can't they see what they're doing is wrong?" We must understand that even fictional characters live within a nexus of their culture, as interpreted by the author, and thus, that what is black-and-white in our eyes is not so clear-cut when we remember that not all of us think in the same way.
ReplyDeleteI know this is a stretch but we might be able to view the negative aspects of the Hoja as "negative" in an aesthetic way. Meaning that Pamuk is intentionally shielding the audience from what the Hoja is writing down because it actually does not exist. This might be a comment on the West's denial of the Islamic worlds consciousness. The Hoja's unwillingness to share his stories could serve as an allegory of the West juxtaposing its own story onto the East and muzzling interpretations from actual Muslims. The fact that the Hoja is not conscious of any of his faults not only tells of the West's conservative view of the East but also the erasure of history.
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