In the first half of Ohran Pamuk’s The White Castle, Hoja exhibits great curiosity about science, literature, and the world around him. His quest for knowledge seems to stem from the need to create a unified reality. Every object has its place, from the stars in the sky to the gears in his oversized clock. He is obsessed with making models and questioning their accuracy. The narrator, on the other hand, is a vision of disunity. He is both physically displaced and mentally incoherent, openly mixing memory with imagination. Hoja’s quest for universal harmony juxtaposed with the narrator’s frustratingly disjointed identity has interesting implications about the perceived dichotomy between the East and the West. The same gap between perception and reality that leads to the narrator’s muddled identity and Hoja’s desire for unity is also responsible for more general stereotypes about “the East” and “the West.” Hoja demands that the narrator teach him all he knows from his education in Venice. Not only does he legally own the narrator, he claims the sum of his intellect as well. The narrator feels underappreciated by his Turkish doppelganger to whom he was forced to surrender much of his individual identity. Once the narrator’s knowledge and understanding of the world becomes Hoja’s, the master uses it to develop new theories and ideas beyond the narrator’s comprehension. So, when Hoja took the narrator’s identity, he fit it into the existing structure of his previous worldview and thereby made it his own. Although Hoja is an “Eastern” character, the way he alters his slave’s identity by trying to place it within his own subjectively designed universe is suggestive of Orientalism. While Hoja fills the gaps in his models with science and factual information, the narrator covers the holes in his identity with imagination. The reader knows, through both the preface and the confession of the narrator himself, that the story being told is only semi-true even in the fictional world. While some events are confirmed, others are potentially or admittedly conjured for the sake of fluidity. The story’s various metafictional layers amplify this factual uncertainty. For the English-speaking audience, The White Castle is the real translation of a fictional translation of a semi-fictional manuscript. Even the dedication immediately following the copyright is made up. All parties, from the real translator to the fictional translator to the narrator, have digested and therefore changed the story before it reaches the mind of the reader, where it is altered once again to fit within the reader’s own worldview. Therefore, the orientalist tendency to fill confusion and misunderstanding with fiction is exemplified through the uniquely structured narration and the narrator himself. The meeting of Hoja and the narrator is representative of a meeting between East and West in which individual perceptions are impressed upon and consequently change the “other.”
You described the relationship between Hoja and the Venetian in an interesting way; that Hoja "claims the sum of their intellect." When I was reading, I viewed it more that the Venetian was teaching Hoja, and even when Hoja would recite it back to the sultan it all came down to what the Venetian told him in the first place. Your approach changes the book a little for me, though I agree with you; the first step of Hoja taking over the Venetian's identity was when they first started working together scientifically. It was not a mutual learning process; the Venetian got nothing in return, didn't gain a significantly different world view, and that made it a lot easier for the Hoja to sort of take over. It also was interesting how you connected it back to the unreliability of the narrator. The Venetian seemed a bit imaginative, but the connection between his imagination and his inability to retain his own memories was not clear to me before.
Orham Pamuk’s White Castle is written with a strikingly different narrative style than our last novel, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree. Whereas Shadows eases the reader into the lives of the Banu Hadyl family and the sufferings of the people in the Iberian Peninsula, Pamuk plunges the reader directly into the middle of the action. The very first line of chapter 1 describes the encroaching Turkish ships that will ultimately capture and enslave the speaker. Ali’s novel goes to great lengths to describe the physical setting of the story, and to slowly build up a clear depiction of the characters’ physical and internal states. White Castle, conversely is written in sparse prose, where physical description comes second to the intellectual musings of the speaker and the descriptions of interactions between characters. White Castle forces the reader to read between the lines in order to understand what the characters are like and what their motivations are. What are the consequences of Pamuk’s narrative style? First, the fact that it is written reflectively in the first person (an old man looking back on the adventures of his younger days) the novel is infused with a sense of inevitability and determinism. At some points, Pamuk makes this determinism strikingly clear: on page 13 he muses that “events they [people] once took for chance were really inevitable”. But often the sense of determinism is more subtle, stemming from the way in which the speaker gives less emphasis to personal choice than to events that happen to a person. It is helpful to think of this in relation to Shadows, where the internal conflicts of the characters are described in detailed, giving the reader a sense of the importance of choice and free will in the characters. In White Castle, the fate of the speaker is caught up in an endless chain of circumstances imposed upon him—the capturing of the vessel, his enslavement, his work for the pasha, his work for Hoja. While his choices within these circumstances are important (for example, he chooses to lie and say he’s a doctor), they are secondary to outside forces that are pushing his life along a certain path. Ultimately, this produces the effect of the speaker being caught up in the inevitable sweep of History. ***End Note: I had this blog response prepared before class today. I could have written it over completely given what we discussed today about Pamuk’s subtle ironic plays with the West’s perception of the Orient woven throughout the novel. But I think it is important to look at my first response, where I assumed the book was expounding the idea of determinism and pronouncing the natural trajectory of history, and question why I took the novel at its word and didn’t question the inconsistencies with history that Pamuk uses on purpose.
In The White Castle, the narrator and Hoja have an intriguing relationship. Their physical similarities are emphasized; at one point, the narrator thinks he is looking at himself, though he is uneasy by the fact that Hoja seems to either not notice or not care about their resemblance. Hoja is very concerned about why he is what he is; what is it about his life, his upbringing, and his surroundings, that made him the man he is now? In an attempt to answer this question, he enlists the narrator for help, asking him the same question. Our narrator looks back on his life, focusing at first on his early memories to create a sort of foundation; eventually he includes a list of memories that made him happy. Hoja, on the other hand, experiences great difficulty in trying to find an answer. Instead of focusing on himself, he can only think about the faults of others. The narrator suggests that Hoja start by working out his own negative characteristics to find out why he turned out the way that he did, which angers Hoja. Orhan Pamuk creates an interesting dynamic between these two characters. Their physical characteristics are nearly identical; they only truly differ in their beliefs. Hoja is a Muslim, and refuses to discuss his own shortcomings. The narrator, on the other hand, is a Christian who has no problem looking inside himself for the answers, no matter what he finds. In the beginning of the novel, the narrator refused to deny his faith, even though in the process he is offered freedom, and then death if he doesn’t convert; the pasha and Hoja are impressed with his devotion to religion. This may have something to do with the narrators ability to judge himself without bias; he knows who he is as a man of faith, and is confident enough in this fact to die for his religion. Once he faces death, it is easy for him to admit to his faults.
The end of White Castle is the kind of ending that makes you feel like you should go back and re-read the rest of the book to make sure you didn’t miss something. I believe this is exactly the effect that Orhan Pamuk was looking to achieve. I was so caught up in following the fast-paced events at the end of the book, and in trying to grapple with how to distinguish between the Italian and the Hoja and their merge into one, that I almost missed the important symbol of the White Castle itself. Although the White Castle is the namesake of the book, it makes only a brief appearance at the end of the novel. The sultan’s army, along with the Italian, the Hoja, and the mysterious weapon approach the white castle at the end of their invading march and are stopped at its gates. The description the narrator gives of the white castle is a moment of awe and wonder: “It was at the top of a high hill, its towers streaming with flags were caught by the faint red glow of the setting sun, and it was white; purest white and beautiful,” (143). The castle, as a symbol in and of itself, seems to have more than one meaning. First, perhaps, its very whiteness represents a kind of purity and innocence—the fact that it cannot be besieged by the Sultan’s army attests to this as well. The castle in this way seems to stand in for some sort of essence, some uncorrupted, basic level of being that both the Italian and the Hoja have been seeking for so many years. The fact that it is at this moment, in the presence of the white castle, that identity change between the two men finally occurs suggests that they both had a similar realization that they had found the answer to the question that had so long haunted them: “Why am I what I am?” In a less existential reading of the white castle as a symbol, we may also interpret it to be some representation of the interface between two cultures. This is, after all, the place where the two armies, Christian and Muslim, meet and face an extended stalemate. The castle, because of its whiteness and beauty, seems to represent not an unconquerable divide between the two sides, but something essentially similar in the nature of both parties that makes them act the way they do towards the other side.
I noticed throughout this entire work there is some type of division that the narrator establishes between himself and the other characters of the story. There seems to constantly be this diversion of who is better; the ‘us’ or the ‘them.’ It seems in most parts of the book, especially towards the end that he is creating this huge difference among the Italians and the Turks. However, the part that is most confusing of the story itself is whether the narrator separates himself from the ‘us’ or ‘them.’ After a while even though he is a natively born Italian, he seems to become a Turk, not just because he switches spots with Hoja but because in certain areas of the book he represents himself as a part of Hoja. “[…] He listened contemptuously to everything I said as if he were merely a witness to my hypocrisy surfacing in a game he himself took no part in, he gave me no hope, he said nothing to hint that we would return to those days when we lived together as brothers.” (p. 101) I find this statement so intriguing because for a long time the narrator seems that he wants to return to his life in Italy and become a freeman, but here he chooses to imagine himself as brothers with his master. However Hoja is portrayed to have a different version of ‘us and them.’ He believes constantly that he and Hoja; who are on completely different ecosocionomic paths of life are also the same and everyone else is ‘them.’ Maybe because he wants to be so much like the character and have his sort of mind set of intelligence that he sees no one else as worthy but himself and the narrator. Hoja’s view of the ‘them’ isn’t just the Turks as the narrators seem to be but t everyone who doesn’t see things the way Hoja does. “[…] but he was soon disgusted by these pastimes which he found shameless and stupid, so he’d interrupt me and begin to describe his plan, speaking of ‘us’ and ‘them’.” (p.119) What I find the most interesting is that both these main characters have a different view of who the ‘them’ is to them but their ‘us’ is the same. Being an outsider of the book I would probably say that the rest of the world looks at them as the ‘them’; for being so different from them.
Throughout the second half of The White Castle Orhan Pamuk the concept of identity and switching roles plays an even bigger part. The narrator still talks about the resemblance between himself and the Hoja. They try to see the resemblance between themselves this is why the Hoja has him pull up his shirt in front of the mirror he is looking to see if he to have this rash that the Hoja has. This is the point where a difference is seen because not only does the Narrator not have this rash but he also feels differently about the plague then the Hoja does. For example the he sees this as a very critical and important situation where as Hoja just joke and messes around with the narrator and his fear of the plague and dying because of. Though they have differences here in what they believe and take seriously it is foreshadowed throughout almost the entire book that they are going to switch places such as on page 103 "I was sometimes overcome by the feeling that I was watching myself. " it would only make sense for the narrator to be looking at himself in order to say this. As we touched on in class the issue of identity seems to be there right through the end of the book and for me even after the book has ended when thinking obvious this quote I wondering if it was actually the Hoja saying this knowing that they did switch places eventually. I guess the question I am left with is is the narrator the Hoja throughout the entire book or did he become the narrator when they switched places?
Jeanne Magnetti The Grass is Always Greener In “The White Castle,” Hoja and the Venetian are seen to switch identities, Hoja out of some attraction to the novelty of the other’s culture, and the Venetian because of the status in which he is held by the Turks. From the outset, Hoja is fascinated by the Venetian and the world he represents. First, Hoja wants to learn everything that the Venetian knows about Western science, then everything about the Italian culture, and then everything about the Venetian’s personal life. Hoja buys the Venetian in order to learn “everything that was taught in [the Venetian’s] country” (32). Perhaps, in light of Hoja’s frustration with the pettiness of the royal court, he even imagined that such political pettiness did not occur in a world so entrenched in the sciences. Further, while a knowledge of Western science could be viewed as valuable to Hoja’s education, his desire to know all the Venetian has “heard and seen…. about rivers, bridges, lakes, caves and clouds and seas” (32) transcends academic curiosity and is more indicative of an obsession with a foreign place that Hoja perceives to be better than his own. Moreover, the Venetian goes so far as to learn every detail about the Venetian’s personal life. When the Venetian shares the details of his personal life, Hoja asks “Do they always live happily like that there?” (79). Hoja sees the West as some sort of paradise, a world that must be better than his own, when truthfully Venice has its pros and cons just like any nation. The Venetian, for his part, is hailed as some sort of celebrity or idol due to his foreign status. The Sultan is fascinated by the Venetians tales, and he is “invited… to the ceremonies and celebrations which were the daily palace fare” (117). The Venetian maintains a sort of celebrity status among the Turkish upper class, who dote on him and with elaborate food and entertainment. Further, the Western emissaries are “so curious about” the Venetian and “ask about the terrifying adventures” he has lived through (118). The Westerners view Turkey as a place of great adventure, while the Venetian’s life is, in actually quite mundane. So, while Hoja envies the presumed sophistication of the West, the Westerners envy the presumed excitement of the East. It is evident that whichever world the characters come from, the grass is greener on the other side, and this contributes to the choice of the two men to switch places.
Upon finishing The White Castle, Orhan Pamuk’s utilization of dreams and prophecies throughout the novel began to distinctly stand out to me. The way in which this element was used to foreshadow events that ultimately unfold in the end, adds a mystical sense to the overall novel, and I felt that it worked exceptionally well. Starting at the very beginning of the novel, on page 44, the narrator has one of the first dreams in which he sees the Hoja taking his former life and marrying his former fiancée. Looking back on the novel having finished it, it becomes clear how this was an utter moment of foreshadowing. These dreams begin to repeat themselves as the narrator continues on with his story, repetitively divulging these eerie images to the reader.
The element of the dream does not simply apply to the narrator, on page 76 the Sultan is witnessed having both the Hoja and the narrator interpret his dreams in order to derive conclusions on his future. These scenes within the novel I feel add to the overall image of fantasy and exoticism that the west perceives the east as embodying. Our opinion of the east typically consists of a view of these people as possessing some sort of supernatural power; whether it is snake charming, levitating carpets, or foreseeing the future. It is here that these characteristics are portrayed, as the Sultan truly believes that the Hoja and the narrator are able to foresee his future based off of his outlandish dreams.
Finally, the last aspect of the element of dreams that truly stood out to me, was in the title of the novel “The White Castle”nas it is described in the final scenes of the book. It is almost as if this entire book was an attempt to achieve an ultimate objective, that in fact turned out to be just a dream. There are definitely elements of self-consciousness throughout the novel as the narrator toys with and constantly discusses the subject of dreams. On page 143, the way in which he describes the final moments of viewing this white castle is described and acknowledged in a dream-like sense. “It was at the top of a high hill, its towers streaming with flags were caught by the faint red glow of the setting sun, and it was white…I didn’t know why I thought that one could see such a beautiful and unattainable thing only in a dream” (Page 143). The language used to simply describe this exquisite sight is exactly as one might imagine a castle in a dream. Furthermore, the narrator recognizes this and goes on to explain how this castle essentially represents something he may never actually get to. The white castle I feel represents the unattainable goal that the narrator has spent a majority of the novel searching for. When in fact this essence, or goal, never actually existed. Further down on page 143 the narrator admits, “I knew now that many of the things I’d experienced for years as coincidence had been inevitable, that our soldiers would never be able to reach the white towers of the castle”. In the end he sadly recognizes that what he has been searching for will never be achieved, and finally moves on to a new life.
Who am I? I have come to the conclusion long ago that I am who I am as a culmination of my past experiences, my current thoughts and my future possibilities. I am hopes and dreams, success and failure. The mission of self-discovery, the question of ‘who am I really?’ the wonderment at the lives of others and their viewpoints, all culminate to the final epic end.
In the literary world, confusion of identity and attempts at self-discovery are common themes. For example, the confusion within the novel reminds me of Shakespeare’s comedy “Twelfth Night”, a comedy where no one is as they seem, and only the audience appears to know what is truly going on.
Broadly explored within the novel is the concept of attempting to capture with the use of language a personality, a ‘who’. Anyone whom has ever been in love understands how futile it is to try to express emotions in words to a satisfactory limit; a human being’s personality, who they truly are, is so much more complex than a simple feeling. On this scale, then, it becomes obvious how impossible it is to use the conventions of language to discover one’s true self.
Yet writing, the keeping of journals, the expression of things as simple as the day’s events and as complex as the day’s feelings in an effort towards completing the journey of self-discovery is a common practice, even slightly clichéd. The journey of self-discovery is a complex and destructive dance. Writing down feelings, reactions, events and inner thoughts gives, if only an illusion, a feeling of progress, a tangible thing that anchors our feet in the world and keeps our illusion of sanity alive.
“We are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.” -Unknown
Who is the Narrator? This question has been getting to me these past couple of days. I have re-read the last chapter of The White Castle maybe three times. Each time I would try and follow every little clue that the narrator gave but each time I become frustrated and restart my search. Back and forth I went looking for plot connections to what the narrator had said in the past and what he was saying now. Was I anywhere closer to coming to an answer? No. So I refined my question to the following, is there an answer? My guess is probably not. I would assume that Orhan Pamuk is playing a game with his readers about who the narrator is.
First he gives us a preface that tells us that this book is a second hand account of a second hand account. Immediately we are told to not trust anything this book is telling us. Then in the last chapter we come to a complete loss of who the narrator is. We learn that he has problems realizing what is his reality and what is someone else’s. Therefore we now know that everything in the story was probably not true or maybe was someone else’s. Basically what the story says is different from what actually happened.
So after all of this we wonder, why is Pamuk doing this? If he were trying to write a book about East and West why do we need to see his ideas through this way? Why are we led to believe something and then given reasons to not believe it? What does this say about the validity of the message throughout the book? These questions can go on and on, which then makes people frustrated. My thought is that Pamuk’s game is one that plays on Human Nature. He poses all of these questions and then in the end leaves us with no answer, leaving the reader either, confused, unsatisfied, or angry even. Humans need answers, they need the security that all things are understood; this is why religion is extremely important to humans. It gives us an answer to greatest question, what happens after we die? We are led into this large amount of ambiguity, we expect to come out with an answer, but we are not given it. This causes a lot of anger in Human Beings.
So then one of my last question is why is the book called the White Castle? We briefly come into contact with the Castle in the book. The castle almost seems irrelevant and non-important. Except for the fact that even a large mechanical weapon could not defeat it. The castle is impregnable, it cannot be knocked down and the characters of this book understand that. I think this Castle is a metaphor for the truth, in that it is as strong as a castle on the top of a hill. So if the characters can come to terms with defeat to the castle the last question is, do we admit defeat to the truth and give up? Or do we die trying to find it?
After finishing the novel, I find myself wondering if perhaps the narrator was Hoja all along. It is quite obvious from the beginning of White Castle that Hoja has an eery, perhaps even homoerotic interest in the Venetian. In the final chapter of Pamuk's novel, the capitalization of "Him" makes one infer that the narrator feels a deep sense of worship for whomever he is speaking of; this is identical to the way Hoja viewed the Venetian. Hoja was obsessed with learning every detail of the Venetian's life and emulating his characteristics. In the scene in which he coerces the Venetian to stand half naked with him in front of the mirror, Hoja is extremely pleased with the similarities they share and the way he is able to mimic and even predict the Venetian's movements. He then grabs the Venetian and tells him he possesses his soul. I believe because Hoja has been able to perfectly emulate the Venetian, he has written the narrative from the Venetian's perspective as a way to show his mastery. He observes himself from the Venetian's eyes, the way he was so desperate for approval, and looks down upon his once pitiful self.
Our discussion in class today really got me thinking about the relationship between Hoja and the Venetian as a love relationship. There are several instances in which Hoja seems to attempt the to move beyond their relationship into a physical one.
One instance is when the plague frightens the Venetian. "Every night he'd reach for me with the hands he said he'd touched people with all day long. […] His fingers did not resemble mine; running them coolly over my flesh Hoja would ask 'Are you afraid?'"(Pamuk 74). This contact is spilling with sexual undertones. Instead of just poking or prodding the Venetian he sensually runs his fingers over him. This happens again later, "Putting his hands on my shoulders he came forward and stood next to me. He acted like a dearold friend who had shared my deepest secrets. Squeezing he nape of my neck from both sides with his fingers, he pulled me towards him" (Pamuk 82). Keepin mind this exchange happens after both characters have taken off their shirts. It seems as if Hoja has a deep desire for the Venetian. This could also be proven by his aversion to marriage.
In the second half of The White Castle Hoja and the Venetian switch places and begin to act as if they truly were the ‘other;’ no longer is there a visible power struggle between the two based around knowledge. Throughout the novel, Pamuk defines both the Venetian and Hoja by their Eastern or Western roots. The Venetian is seen to have a much more advanced level of intelligence and broader knowledge of the world, while the Hoja is characterized as more childish and violent. Yet, as time passes and the two men spend more time together Pamuk forces readers to recognize how the two characters have become much more alike and are no longer simply defined by their Eastern or Western backgrounds. Hoja becomes invested in books and creating a weapon while the Venetian spends time with the sultan and at public festivals. Therefore the switch that eventually occurs does not simply seem to be a change of behaviors and appearances, but instead reveals how the East and the West have more in common than one would expect. Stereotypical understandings of these two areas are proven to be wrong as two men find a way to overcome these supposedly extreme differences. When Hoja forces the Venetian to begin writing about his life and his earlier memories he quickly recognizes that they have shared similar fears and dreams despite the Venetian’s more privileged and educated childhood. Hoja quickly realizes that he could live the way the Venetian always has while simultaneously recognizing that the two have gained a deep understanding of one another. When Hoja forces the Venetian to stand in front of a mirror with him to look at their outward similarities he tells the Venetian his fantasy of living out the rest of his (the Venetian's) life. The Venetian is quite surprised at how much Hoja has remembered, but is also utterly shocked that Hoja’s dreams for the future are the same as the Venetian’s would be for himself (85). This scene in particular, forces readers to recognize how easily these two men have overcome many of their cultural differences and have begun to merge their worldviews together. Even an outsider, the sultan, is also able to recognize the similarities that have overcome the original differences between Hoja and the Venetian. The narrator fears that the sultan has begun to see the two men merged into one “imaginary creature” and fears that he has become to understand them more than they understand themselves (115). The Venetian also remarks that the sultan looks to judge to what extent each man has become more like the other (114). The changing personalities of both the Venetian and Hoja and their ability to merge into one similar person, allowing them to eventually switch lives, marks a distinct difference of the themes I interpreted at the start of the novel. The ideas of Orientalism seemed quite prevalent to me when first reading the novel as I interpreted that both Hoja and the Venetian looked at one another as the stereotypical ‘other.’ Yet, this second half of the novel allows Pamuk to challenge readers’ perspectives by illustrating how these two clashing personalities have overcome their biased opinions about the ‘other.’ While I do not believe that Pamuk is arguing that the East and the West are the same, I think he is forcing readers to question their contrasting opinions regarding the other area. By utilizing Hoja and the Venetian as representations of both sides of the world it appears that Pamuk is asking readers to analyze what outward images we are receiving from the ‘other’ and to instead dig deeper and search for the human traits that connect us all. Everyone has a unique identity that does not have to be based off of where they currently live or where they have come from and Pamuk continuously forces readers to question and analyze their own identities as well as the ideas they have about others.
The last few sentences of The White Castle are so telling of what Pamuk is trying to illustrate. To be sure, the mixing of the narrator's identity is important but the image of the narrator at the end lends the truest account of the author's intentions.
"...I waited with excitement till at last he found the page he was looking for and read it. Then he looked again at the view from the window overlooking the garden behind my house. I knew exactly what he saw. Peaches and cherries lay on a tray inlaid with mother of pearl upon a table, behind the table was a divan upholstered with straw matting, strewn with feather cushions the same color as the green window frame. I was sitting there nearly seventy now...A swing tied with long ropes to a high branch of a walnut-tree swayed slightly in a barely perceptible breeze."
It is fascinating how Pamuk ties domestic comfort with this eerie portrait of the narrator. The green cushions paired with the green frame outlines and contradicts the composition of this scene. We are supposed to see this from the perspective of the Italian as an holistic work of art. The still life of the fruit, the studies of the sparrow and the mother of pearl, and the seventy year old man who serves as the negative space in the portrait. The captive audience of the Italian is trying to bring these constituent elements together just as he would with Da Vinci.
The narrator no longer needs to see himself in a mirror. To him, that was only a simulation. Now he needs to be recognized as a whole, or as one with his society. The portrait metaphor might be another simulation but the "imperceptible breeze" gives the scene an uncanny quality. The Italian would be used to a scene like this in a painting of the East but the fact that it's moving ever so slightly is not only disturbing but makes the perceived Eastern portrait a reality. Although the Italian has probably hit on some discovery of the narrator's identity, we might also be able to take this surprise as the West's possible acceptance of the Easterner as being just as human while recognizing the differences in culture.
The scene might also connote a transcendent quality. It is a cliche metaphor but the window might act as Alice's looking glass. Instead of the reflection of the mirror, the Italian is confronted with a world and person much like himself (possibly more than he can imagine). The image of the garden is familiar but both men are captive to his own identity.
In a close reading of a critical scene between Hoja and the Venetian in Chapter Six of The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk, the identities of these two characters seem to converge while they talk in front of the mirror about the pustule on Hoja’s chest. The scene, beginning on page 81, illustrates a moment of interaction between these foils where their thoughts, dialogue, and actions can all be easily combined to portray a single frightened yet skeptical individual.
Pamuk’s narrative style suggests that in this moment the two become seamless by how they interact. The Venetian’s inner monologue and Hoja’s dialogue flow into one another and form what could be interpreted as one greater inner monologue uniting the two identities into one. These foils complete one another by how their minds coalesce to represent a fully formed psyche consisting of the Venetian’s fear and Hoja’s skepticism. This notion is most apparent when the Venetian is inspecting the pustule hesitantly in front of the mirror while his own thoughts and Hoja’s dialogue become one stream of consciousness. Pamuks’ narrative style makes this most apparent when the narrator reflects, “I knew I was afraid of the pustule. He knew it as well. Yet, wanting to conceal my fear I fixed upon that swelling, that inflammation, with the air of a doctor. ‘You’re afraid aren’t you?’ Hoja said at last. Trying to prove that I was not, I brought my head even closer. ‘You’re afraid it’s a plague bubo.’” (81).
The interaction between these characters also goes further to demonstrate a fully formed individual by how one aspect of the mind, the Venetian, demonstrates helplessness and inferiority, while the other aspect, Hoja, represents brashness and superiority. The Venetian exhibits helplessness by how he is vulnerable and possessed by his fear of the plague. The narrator compares himself to a child on several occasions to portray how fear has made him subordinate to his foil Hoja, whose tone and harshness are comparable to a bully, stern adult, or parent-like figure. When Hoja demands, “’Come here, I say!’” the Venetian obeys him and reflects, “Fearfully I approached him like a student about to be punished”. Hoja also demeans him for being afraid of “a simple insect bite”. The Venetian continues to obey Hoja’s orders when he demands “’…Take off your shirt, now!’” and pulls off his shirt “like a child who hates to be washed”. These instances, where the interplay between these two characters demonstrates the relationship between a superior and a subordinate, can also be used to show how the human mind works in a Freudian sense. The Freudian superego, the Venetian, has become subordinate to the id, Hoja. The two characters, representing two separate aspects of the human psyche struggle to form the rational ego.
The end of The White Caste came as quite a surprise. Not only is the reader thrown off guard from the opening chapter, describing the story written by a slave that the book was written from being found abandoned in a file cabinet, but in the last chapter it is revealed that the narrator of the story was not the author. With Hoja being identified as the author of the story, it puts everything Venetian slave said and thought into a different perspective. Although the ending of The White Castle is open to many different interpretations, with the possibility of Hoja and Venetian slave having traded places, after my first reading I took what happened as literal. Hoja wrote an interesting story about an eccentric doppelganger from Venice who was his slave, and who ran away to save himself after the tank failed in the swamps. Such a story is bizarre enough for me to believe Hoja would, later in his life, write about it.
If there is something troubling about this, it is that Hoja wrote all of Venetian slaves lines, and intentionally “orientalized” all of the information learned from venetian slave about Istanbul and its culture. While he knew better of the scientific and medical achievements of the East, he leaves the reader in the dark. Hoja, in the last chapter also tells of teaching a traveler about Italy, because he had learned some of its history and culture from Venetian slave in the years they were together. “For every city he wanted a curious tale as well. Passing thirteen nights in thirteen cities in this way, we traversed from north to south the whole of this land I was seeing for the first time in my life”(p.153). In this passage Hoja admits to passing on inaccurate if not false information about someplace he has never been (he was seeing the land he was describing for the first time). The traveler, unaware of any other truth, takes it as fact and goes on his merry way. If the narration from Venetian slave shows examples of Orientalism, then perhaps the narration from Hoja shows an example of reverse-Orientalism, how the East views the West.
Perhaps the book being written by a Turkish author, is poking fun at the ignorance of the West because a typical Western reader would take what Venetian Slave says as fact (the typical Orientalist view), while readers native to Turkey would know what bits of information are incorrect.
In Orhan Pamuk’s novel The White Castle, the sultan has an uncanny ability to separate the idiosyncrasies of the Venetian slave from the Hoja, and is the only character that can consistently tell the two men apart. He is able, “Like an attentive father who separates two brothers arguing over their marbles, saying ‘this one is yours, and this one is yours’” (115) to discern the Venetian from the Hoja based on “his observations about [their] speech and behavior” (115). The Venetian slave even states that “the sultan…had come to know us better than we knew ourselves” (115). Because the sultan is so well versed in telling the two men apart when they look identical, it is hard to believe that the sultan does not notice that the Venetian and the Hoja switch places after the Venetian gains weight, with the Hoja running away to Italy and the Venetian taking the place of the Hoja as Imperial Astrologer. While reading the second half of the novel, I was left with the question: How does the sultan not realize the Hoja and the Venetian switch places? And why does Pamuk choose to leave this gaping hole in the plot of the novel?
While I’m not quite sure of these answers, the identities of the Venetian and the Hoja directly reflects upon the identities of the Orientalist, ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ perspective that frequently appears throughout the novel. The Venetian, a foreign Westerner in the Eastern city of Istanbul, becomes an object of interest to the Hoja as he becomes obsessed with the concept of identity: “Why am I what I am?” (58) The Hoja repeatedly asks the Venetian. The Hoja questions the Venetian on the Western world, learning the different sciences the Venetian has learned in school, and eventually becoming more interested in the Venetian’s private life. After learning about the Venetian’s private flaws, his sexual infidelities and jealously of his brothers, the Hoja judges the entire Western world upon these flaws: when interrogating Polish citizens he encounters with the sultan, the Hoja becomes convinced that “they must have committed sins much more profound, more real that distinguished them from us” (133). While although the Polish citizens the Hoja encounters do not admit to sins that measure up to those admitted by the Venetian, the Hoja continues to judge the Western world by the flaws he believes the Venetian has in order to justify his perspective of West vs. East and ‘them’ vs. ‘us.’
While I am still confused about the ending of the novel, and the true identities of the Hoja and the Venetian, I am left wondering whether that was Pamuk’s exact purpose. Perhaps he meant for readers to become confused regarding the identities of his two main characters because of what those characters represent: the East vs. West dichotomy. Who exactly is ‘us,’ and who ‘them?’ Even the Venetian and the Hoja have trouble distinguishing East vs. West and the ‘other’ from each other. By the end of the novel, I am left wondering whether Pamuk had a clear idea of the identities behind each of his characters within his book, or whether he wanted the mixed identities of those characters to represent the global inability to categorize people, and cultures, into one identity: East or West.
Throughout the narrative,the concept of a mirror image is repeatedly used. Early on in the story, the narrator mentions an uncanny similarity between himself and the Hoja: "the resemblance between myself and the man who entered the room was incredible! It was me there...for that instant this is what I thought" (22). This moment is only one of the many instances of foreshadowing present within the novel. Here, both facets of how the concept of "the mirror" in literature are represented in Orhan Pamuk's narrative.
First, "the mirror" as represented as refracting society is expressed through the remarkable similarity between the Venetian and Hoja. The existence of the doppelganger attempts to show that both characters are the same. They are so similar in quality that they could swap positions and no difference could be noticed. This idea is expressed clearly when they gaze into a mirror together and fancy switching places: "He was going to take my place, I his, and to accomplish this it would be enough for us to exchange clothes and for him to cut his beard while I left mine to grow" (84). The conclusion of this ideology is that it is what is destined to be judging from the resolution of the novel, in that the Turk is happy having taken the Venetian's fiancee as his wife and assimilated into Italian life whereas the Venetian takes on a wife and has children in Turkey.
Another interpretation of "the mirror" is that the reality and the reflection contrast each other. The figure in reality, the Venetian, is constantly contrasted with the East, or the Hoja. Where they are physically identical, their cultural, intellectual and spiritual differences are far too great to consider them "mirrored images" in the sense that they are wholly equal. The two forces appear to be constantly at war to step out from the "looking glass" and absorb each other's culture. When the Hoja forced the Venetian to write stories about himself and the Hoja refused to reveal stories of his own highlights the clear distinctions between the two people.
Ellen Walpole – February 19, 2013 “The White Castle” 2nd Half
Who Is Really Who?
As we talked about in class today, there are so many different aspects and angles that you can read this novel from. The idea of a “mirror image” made me question which character was in fact the narrator, because if the Venetian and the Hoja did swap identities, was it written afterwards? So then would the narrator actually be the Turkish and Muslim Hoja?
After thinking about that, I also questioned the other topic we discussed on how someone decides what and in what order they are what they are. If the Venetian had been such a devote Christian in the beginning and was willing to die for his religion, at what point did he become okay with no longer being a Christian Italian? I thought when he was first made a slave to the Hoja he knew that he had the upper hand in knowledge and experience, and while he used that to his advantage for quite some time, he did end up losing his identity.
He admitted to thinking and dreaming about Italy and his fiancé and family less and less and finding himself enjoying life in Istanbul. Furthermore, when the Hoja was receiving recognition from the Sultan and the Venetian was in the crowd, he wanted so badly to be with him, not only because he deserved credit for the work, but he felt as if he was looking at himself and had no idea whose mind he was actually in.
I think it was when he was trampled in the crowd that the Venetian lost sight of his identity and succumbed to the influence of the Hoja and Turkish life in general. However, if the story was in fact written by the Hoja after he had taken an Italian identity, it would make more sense as to why the Turks were not talked too harshly about even after they had enslaved him.
Now I’m struggling to decide what perspective I’m reading the novel from and whose true character is what. Also, the preface perspective implies another angle all together.
In second half of The White Castle Pamuk exhibits the unchanging orientalist mentality that has countries and whole groups of people frozen in time and in a certain way of life. The orientalist view doesn’t change and evolve with people as cultures do and our understanding of them should. Instead it implements stereotypes on those people and has them captured in them and unable to escape from them. In the last chapter of his novel Pamuk references the traveler Evliya Chelebi. Up till this point we are given no reason to trust the writer as giving us any factual information in any way and as such don’t have reason to believe this person is any more real than the man presented in the preface of the novel. Evliya Chelebi, however, was actually an “Ottoman Turkish traveler who journeyed through the territory of the Ottoman Empire and neighboring lands over a period of forty years” [1]. In Pamuk’s novel, however, Chelebi is represented as an old man who doesn’t really understand the world or travel at all. He, as a world traveler possessed and referred to as “…the worst map of Italy [the narrator had] ever seen”(153) that shows the inadequacy of the Turkish people, in the novel, at something that he is supposed to be doing for a living and is praised for. He doesn’t even seem to care about the accuracy of the information that he will pass off as his own when questioning the narrator about Italy and understanding that the Venetian had described everything to the narrator and so this information can be passed off as fact (153). He is portrayed as a petty Turkish man who could not even be bothered to do his job correctly and doesn’t have the knowledge to use a correct map of the place he so dearly want’s to learn about. He is stuck in, what is portrayed as, an underdeveloped world that has not caught up with world enough to know about it. Further more in all the years that the Venetian had been in the Turkey and with all the time he spent with the Hoja he, the Hoja, was never able to develop any sense of critical thinking or independence. All he has been able to do is continually ask the Venetian for all he knew so that he could become more and more like the exotic foreigner that he looked up to so dearly. Over all those years the Venetian’s knowledge never seemed to cease or develop. He wasn’t portrayed as being caught unprepared for a subject or unlearned in any area. The Middle East is stuck in a state of infancy in the East’s eyes, even though throughout history they have proven to be the leading charge in all the fields described throughout the novel.
Slowly trying to figure out this novel, I’m looking for repeated images and clues that the narrator swears he dropped. After thinking the narrator might have schizophrenia, a twin, or just completely be making everything up, I ended up at a [admittedly] strange conclusion about what may have possibly happened early on in the novel. The last image of the novel may be one of the most helpful in beginning to decipher some confusing aspects. (Of course, we have to wonder if we’re even meant to try to unravel Pamuk’s tangles, but I’m going to at least try, just in case.) The novel ends with the visitor looking out the window into the garden, where the narrator knows that he sees that “Peaches and cherries lay on a tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl upon a table […]”. This may jolt some neurons: this is the same scene, the same description that the Venetian visualizes before he is to be beheaded (30). Not only does the garden come up there, but again before the alleged “switch” at the end of chapter ten. The narrator tells Hoja more tiny details about his past, remembering the “things [he] had seen from the window overlooking the garden behind our house” (144). Next, in the final chapter, the narrator recalls how the sultan would press him to write about “the view through the window…of His house that He recalled when he was about to be beheaded” (151). Not only do we see this specific image repeated, but the narrator shares that when he had his current home built, he “landscaped the back garden” as he wanted, “according to inner impulses” (152). Meanwhile, the “He” in the last chapter had returned home and returned that garden to its former state (158). So, I’m taking this garden image and running with it because I think that the page the visitor searches for frantically in the last chapter is that one on which the Venetian first visualizes the garden (my page 30). Before this realization of the visitor, the narrator states that he watched his blank gaze become focused, saying that he “was looking at the scene through the frame of the window” (160). This felt like a metafictional moment to me, so I realized that perhaps the author was suggesting that we as readers needed to be looking through the correct frame of narrative in order to understand at least part of this story. Since the literal frame is the window, I went back to that beheading scene and, forgive me, I think that there’s a possibility that our narrator has been dead for the majority of this story. (At the risk of sounding really stupid, I just want to say I haven’t exactly seen how that would function in the entire novel, but there seems to be valid support.) First, the garden scene at the close now says, “I was sitting there, nearly seventy now” (161). While I don’t know if people still keep track of age in the afterlife, I think that the garden could easily be a representation of a sort of heaven, or at least limbo. If you examine the garden scene the first time it appears (now that you think someone might be dead), it can be read as if the beheading was a successful one. There definitely seem to be more moments where a deceased narrator would hold up and make sense of symbols, but I’m not sure if everything makes sense in that frame.
(Now that I’m about to post, I’m really concerned that this sounds a lot worse than I originally thought it might…)
According to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, true love is impossible because love occurs when you identify strongly with another person. You can never identify with someone completely because you do not share a consciousness with that person, so you can never fully love him or her. Deep down, Sartre argues, we are all aware of this fact and it causes us great anxiety. It would be interesting to apply this philosophy to the relationships between Hoja and the Venetian, and, consequently, between the East and the West. There are certainly elements of homoeroticism between Hoja and the Venetian, particularly on the part of the Hoja. Like we discussed in class, Hoja rejects marriage prospects and is at once obsessed and extremely frustrated with the Venetian. Hoja sees the Venetian as an “other” that he is determined not just to learn from, but to become him. The reason that two people cannot experience true love is that each has had unique life experiences that prevent him or her from completely knowing the other. However, by forcing the Venetian to recount the intimate details of his past life to the Hoja through his writing, the Hoja is essentially closing the gap between the two men’s realities, thus approaching Sartre’s definition of love. The narration itself is a meshing of the Venetian’s consciousness and Hoja’s consciousness. At the end, we learn there is a chance that the novel’s narrator is actually Hoja, which would indicate further communion between the two men. However, the fact that the narration, no matter whose perspective it comes from, is factually distorted shows that the transformation of identity was not seamless. Part of the reason love, or rather the inability to completely achieve it, causes us anxiety is that we need to know other people in order to define ourselves. Hoja is stressed partly because he needs the Venetian to reveal the master’s own identity. Similarly, the West requires an “other” in order to define itself as separate from it. Therefore, the West creates its own, more comprehensible version of the East to compare itself to. The East must do the same to the West, and stereotypes are born. Like Hoja expresses his frustration over not understanding the Venetian by beating him, the “West” and the “East” exert violence over the “other” because if the other cannot be accurately known, it must be forced into an artificial definition of itself that pleases the master. This concept is evidenced by issues we have discussed in class, such as the Spanish Inquisition and Islamist terrorism. To ratify yourself or your culture as existent and distinct, you must know the “other.” Ironically, though, in completely knowing the other you cease to be yourself. This paradox is explored throughout The White Castle through the relationship between the Venetian and the Hoja.
At first, I was completely unsurprised by the ending of The White Castle. From the first time that Hoja and the Venetian met, I had guessed that they would switch places at some point during the novel. The author placed so much emphasis on their physical similarities that it seemed like a red flag. As the novel progressed, the hints became more frequent and more obvious; the Venetian has nightmares about switching roles with Hoja, and in the mirror scene where Hoja has the potential plague bubo on his chest (page 84), the narrator says directly “He was going to take my place.” When I finished reading I had drawn the conclusion that Hoja and the Venetian had switched places, each gotten married and had children, and continued living as each other until they died. Reading the last pages again, however, has completely muddled up my understanding of the book. At some points, it seems that Hoja and the Venetian did not switch places. On page 147, the narrator says that the sultan told him not to be “ashamed to have been influenced by him.” The reader may assume that the “him” is the Venetian, forcing the speaker to be Hoja; but then the question remains, is the speaker actually the character of Hoja, or is it the Venetian sticking to his new role? Page 148 offers “when they learned the infidel escaped, they wanted my head…” In this case the narrator would have to be Hoja because the infidel is the Venetian; but by only referring to him as “the infidel” and not by name, the narrator removes all identifiers from the equation, leaving it again open-ended. Conversely, on page 149 the narrator is asked about his identity, and his response is that “the important thing is what we have done and will do,” meaning that it is possible to be someone else; the focus should be on how that person chooses to live in the new identity. On page 153, there is a paragraph in which the narrator tells of men that had exchanged lives, presumably Hoja and the Venetian. I believe there is another option; that Hoja and the Venetian are in fact the same person. On page 144, the narrator says “these stories have seemed to me mere reflections of my fantasies”; the fantasies would be that the narrator can live two different lives, that of Hoja’s and that of the Venetians. Another supporting detail is that neither character actually has a name; it is the Venetian, or the slave, and Hoja; although we use the term “Hoja” as a name, it really just means “Master.”
In the first half of Ohran Pamuk’s The White Castle, Hoja exhibits great curiosity about science, literature, and the world around him. His quest for knowledge seems to stem from the need to create a unified reality. Every object has its place, from the stars in the sky to the gears in his oversized clock. He is obsessed with making models and questioning their accuracy. The narrator, on the other hand, is a vision of disunity. He is both physically displaced and mentally incoherent, openly mixing memory with imagination. Hoja’s quest for universal harmony juxtaposed with the narrator’s frustratingly disjointed identity has interesting implications about the perceived dichotomy between the East and the West. The same gap between perception and reality that leads to the narrator’s muddled identity and Hoja’s desire for unity is also responsible for more general stereotypes about “the East” and “the West.” Hoja demands that the narrator teach him all he knows from his education in Venice. Not only does he legally own the narrator, he claims the sum of his intellect as well. The narrator feels underappreciated by his Turkish doppelganger to whom he was forced to surrender much of his individual identity. Once the narrator’s knowledge and understanding of the world becomes Hoja’s, the master uses it to develop new theories and ideas beyond the narrator’s comprehension. So, when Hoja took the narrator’s identity, he fit it into the existing structure of his previous worldview and thereby made it his own. Although Hoja is an “Eastern” character, the way he alters his slave’s identity by trying to place it within his own subjectively designed universe is suggestive of Orientalism. While Hoja fills the gaps in his models with science and factual information, the narrator covers the holes in his identity with imagination. The reader knows, through both the preface and the confession of the narrator himself, that the story being told is only semi-true even in the fictional world. While some events are confirmed, others are potentially or admittedly conjured for the sake of fluidity. The story’s various metafictional layers amplify this factual uncertainty. For the English-speaking audience, The White Castle is the real translation of a fictional translation of a semi-fictional manuscript. Even the dedication immediately following the copyright is made up. All parties, from the real translator to the fictional translator to the narrator, have digested and therefore changed the story before it reaches the mind of the reader, where it is altered once again to fit within the reader’s own worldview. Therefore, the orientalist tendency to fill confusion and misunderstanding with fiction is exemplified through the uniquely structured narration and the narrator himself. The meeting of Hoja and the narrator is representative of a meeting between East and West in which individual perceptions are impressed upon and consequently change the “other.”
ReplyDeleteYou described the relationship between Hoja and the Venetian in an interesting way; that Hoja "claims the sum of their intellect." When I was reading, I viewed it more that the Venetian was teaching Hoja, and even when Hoja would recite it back to the sultan it all came down to what the Venetian told him in the first place. Your approach changes the book a little for me, though I agree with you; the first step of Hoja taking over the Venetian's identity was when they first started working together scientifically. It was not a mutual learning process; the Venetian got nothing in return, didn't gain a significantly different world view, and that made it a lot easier for the Hoja to sort of take over.
DeleteIt also was interesting how you connected it back to the unreliability of the narrator. The Venetian seemed a bit imaginative, but the connection between his imagination and his inability to retain his own memories was not clear to me before.
Orham Pamuk’s White Castle is written with a strikingly different narrative style than our last novel, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree. Whereas Shadows eases the reader into the lives of the Banu Hadyl family and the sufferings of the people in the Iberian Peninsula, Pamuk plunges the reader directly into the middle of the action. The very first line of chapter 1 describes the encroaching Turkish ships that will ultimately capture and enslave the speaker. Ali’s novel goes to great lengths to describe the physical setting of the story, and to slowly build up a clear depiction of the characters’ physical and internal states. White Castle, conversely is written in sparse prose, where physical description comes second to the intellectual musings of the speaker and the descriptions of interactions between characters. White Castle forces the reader to read between the lines in order to understand what the characters are like and what their motivations are.
ReplyDeleteWhat are the consequences of Pamuk’s narrative style? First, the fact that it is written reflectively in the first person (an old man looking back on the adventures of his younger days) the novel is infused with a sense of inevitability and determinism. At some points, Pamuk makes this determinism strikingly clear: on page 13 he muses that “events they [people] once took for chance were really inevitable”. But often the sense of determinism is more subtle, stemming from the way in which the speaker gives less emphasis to personal choice than to events that happen to a person. It is helpful to think of this in relation to Shadows, where the internal conflicts of the characters are described in detailed, giving the reader a sense of the importance of choice and free will in the characters. In White Castle, the fate of the speaker is caught up in an endless chain of circumstances imposed upon him—the capturing of the vessel, his enslavement, his work for the pasha, his work for Hoja. While his choices within these circumstances are important (for example, he chooses to lie and say he’s a doctor), they are secondary to outside forces that are pushing his life along a certain path. Ultimately, this produces the effect of the speaker being caught up in the inevitable sweep of History.
***End Note: I had this blog response prepared before class today. I could have written it over completely given what we discussed today about Pamuk’s subtle ironic plays with the West’s perception of the Orient woven throughout the novel. But I think it is important to look at my first response, where I assumed the book was expounding the idea of determinism and pronouncing the natural trajectory of history, and question why I took the novel at its word and didn’t question the inconsistencies with history that Pamuk uses on purpose.
In The White Castle, the narrator and Hoja have an intriguing relationship. Their physical similarities are emphasized; at one point, the narrator thinks he is looking at himself, though he is uneasy by the fact that Hoja seems to either not notice or not care about their resemblance. Hoja is very concerned about why he is what he is; what is it about his life, his upbringing, and his surroundings, that made him the man he is now? In an attempt to answer this question, he enlists the narrator for help, asking him the same question. Our narrator looks back on his life, focusing at first on his early memories to create a sort of foundation; eventually he includes a list of memories that made him happy.
ReplyDeleteHoja, on the other hand, experiences great difficulty in trying to find an answer. Instead of focusing on himself, he can only think about the faults of others. The narrator suggests that Hoja start by working out his own negative characteristics to find out why he turned out the way that he did, which angers Hoja. Orhan Pamuk creates an interesting dynamic between these two characters. Their physical characteristics are nearly identical; they only truly differ in their beliefs. Hoja is a Muslim, and refuses to discuss his own shortcomings. The narrator, on the other hand, is a Christian who has no problem looking inside himself for the answers, no matter what he finds. In the beginning of the novel, the narrator refused to deny his faith, even though in the process he is offered freedom, and then death if he doesn’t convert; the pasha and Hoja are impressed with his devotion to religion. This may have something to do with the narrators ability to judge himself without bias; he knows who he is as a man of faith, and is confident enough in this fact to die for his religion. Once he faces death, it is easy for him to admit to his faults.
The end of White Castle is the kind of ending that makes you feel like you should go back and re-read the rest of the book to make sure you didn’t miss something. I believe this is exactly the effect that Orhan Pamuk was looking to achieve. I was so caught up in following the fast-paced events at the end of the book, and in trying to grapple with how to distinguish between the Italian and the Hoja and their merge into one, that I almost missed the important symbol of the White Castle itself.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the White Castle is the namesake of the book, it makes only a brief appearance at the end of the novel. The sultan’s army, along with the Italian, the Hoja, and the mysterious weapon approach the white castle at the end of their invading march and are stopped at its gates. The description the narrator gives of the white castle is a moment of awe and wonder: “It was at the top of a high hill, its towers streaming with flags were caught by the faint red glow of the setting sun, and it was white; purest white and beautiful,” (143). The castle, as a symbol in and of itself, seems to have more than one meaning. First, perhaps, its very whiteness represents a kind of purity and innocence—the fact that it cannot be besieged by the Sultan’s army attests to this as well. The castle in this way seems to stand in for some sort of essence, some uncorrupted, basic level of being that both the Italian and the Hoja have been seeking for so many years. The fact that it is at this moment, in the presence of the white castle, that identity change between the two men finally occurs suggests that they both had a similar realization that they had found the answer to the question that had so long haunted them: “Why am I what I am?”
In a less existential reading of the white castle as a symbol, we may also interpret it to be some representation of the interface between two cultures. This is, after all, the place where the two armies, Christian and Muslim, meet and face an extended stalemate. The castle, because of its whiteness and beauty, seems to represent not an unconquerable divide between the two sides, but something essentially similar in the nature of both parties that makes them act the way they do towards the other side.
Rachel Reff
ReplyDelete02/18/13
‘Us and Them’
I noticed throughout this entire work there is some type of division that the narrator establishes between himself and the other characters of the story. There seems to constantly be this diversion of who is better; the ‘us’ or the ‘them.’ It seems in most parts of the book, especially towards the end that he is creating this huge difference among the Italians and the Turks. However, the part that is most confusing of the story itself is whether the narrator separates himself from the ‘us’ or ‘them.’ After a while even though he is a natively born Italian, he seems to become a Turk, not just because he switches spots with Hoja but because in certain areas of the book he represents himself as a part of Hoja. “[…] He listened contemptuously to everything I said as if he were merely a witness to my hypocrisy surfacing in a game he himself took no part in, he gave me no hope, he said nothing to hint that we would return to those days when we lived together as brothers.” (p. 101) I find this statement so intriguing because for a long time the narrator seems that he wants to return to his life in Italy and become a freeman, but here he chooses to imagine himself as brothers with his master.
However Hoja is portrayed to have a different version of ‘us and them.’ He believes constantly that he and Hoja; who are on completely different ecosocionomic paths of life are also the same and everyone else is ‘them.’ Maybe because he wants to be so much like the character and have his sort of mind set of intelligence that he sees no one else as worthy but himself and the narrator. Hoja’s view of the ‘them’ isn’t just the Turks as the narrators seem to be but t everyone who doesn’t see things the way Hoja does. “[…] but he was soon disgusted by these pastimes which he found shameless and stupid, so he’d interrupt me and begin to describe his plan, speaking of ‘us’ and ‘them’.” (p.119) What I find the most interesting is that both these main characters have a different view of who the ‘them’ is to them but their ‘us’ is the same. Being an outsider of the book I would probably say that the rest of the world looks at them as the ‘them’; for being so different from them.
Throughout the second half of The White Castle Orhan Pamuk the concept of identity and switching roles plays an even bigger part. The narrator still talks about the resemblance between himself and the Hoja. They try to see the resemblance between themselves this is why the Hoja has him pull up his shirt in front of the mirror he is looking to see if he to have this rash that the Hoja has. This is the point where a difference is seen because not only does the Narrator not have this rash but he also feels differently about the plague then the Hoja does. For example the he sees this as a very critical and important situation where as Hoja just joke and messes around with the narrator and his fear of the plague and dying because of. Though they have differences here in what they believe and take seriously it is foreshadowed throughout almost the entire book that they are going to switch places such as on page 103 "I was sometimes overcome by the feeling that I was watching myself. " it would only make sense for the narrator to be looking at himself in order to say this. As we touched on in class the issue of identity seems to be there right through the end of the book and for me even after the book has ended when thinking obvious this quote I wondering if it was actually the Hoja saying this knowing that they did switch places eventually. I guess the question I am left with is is the narrator the Hoja throughout the entire book or did he become the narrator when they switched places?
ReplyDeleteJeanne Magnetti
ReplyDeleteThe Grass is Always Greener
In “The White Castle,” Hoja and the Venetian are seen to switch identities, Hoja out of some attraction to the novelty of the other’s culture, and the Venetian because of the status in which he is held by the Turks. From the outset, Hoja is fascinated by the Venetian and the world he represents. First, Hoja wants to learn everything that the Venetian knows about Western science, then everything about the Italian culture, and then everything about the Venetian’s personal life. Hoja buys the Venetian in order to learn “everything that was taught in [the Venetian’s] country” (32). Perhaps, in light of Hoja’s frustration with the pettiness of the royal court, he even imagined that such political pettiness did not occur in a world so entrenched in the sciences. Further, while a knowledge of Western science could be viewed as valuable to Hoja’s education, his desire to know all the Venetian has “heard and seen…. about rivers, bridges, lakes, caves and clouds and seas” (32) transcends academic curiosity and is more indicative of an obsession with a foreign place that Hoja perceives to be better than his own. Moreover, the Venetian goes so far as to learn every detail about the Venetian’s personal life. When the Venetian shares the details of his personal life, Hoja asks “Do they always live happily like that there?” (79). Hoja sees the West as some sort of paradise, a world that must be better than his own, when truthfully Venice has its pros and cons just like any nation. The Venetian, for his part, is hailed as some sort of celebrity or idol due to his foreign status. The Sultan is fascinated by the Venetians tales, and he is “invited… to the ceremonies and celebrations which were the daily palace fare” (117). The Venetian maintains a sort of celebrity status among the Turkish upper class, who dote on him and with elaborate food and entertainment. Further, the Western emissaries are “so curious about” the Venetian and “ask about the terrifying adventures” he has lived through (118). The Westerners view Turkey as a place of great adventure, while the Venetian’s life is, in actually quite mundane. So, while Hoja envies the presumed sophistication of the West, the Westerners envy the presumed excitement of the East. It is evident that whichever world the characters come from, the grass is greener on the other side, and this contributes to the choice of the two men to switch places.
"The White Castle": It Was All A Dream
ReplyDeleteDia Seskin
Upon finishing The White Castle, Orhan Pamuk’s utilization of dreams and prophecies throughout the novel began to distinctly stand out to me. The way in which this element was used to foreshadow events that ultimately unfold in the end, adds a mystical sense to the overall novel, and I felt that it worked exceptionally well. Starting at the very beginning of the novel, on page 44, the narrator has one of the first dreams in which he sees the Hoja taking his former life and marrying his former fiancée. Looking back on the novel having finished it, it becomes clear how this was an utter moment of foreshadowing. These dreams begin to repeat themselves as the narrator continues on with his story, repetitively divulging these eerie images to the reader.
The element of the dream does not simply apply to the narrator, on page 76 the Sultan is witnessed having both the Hoja and the narrator interpret his dreams in order to derive conclusions on his future. These scenes within the novel I feel add to the overall image of fantasy and exoticism that the west perceives the east as embodying. Our opinion of the east typically consists of a view of these people as possessing some sort of supernatural power; whether it is snake charming, levitating carpets, or foreseeing the future. It is here that these characteristics are portrayed, as the Sultan truly believes that the Hoja and the narrator are able to foresee his future based off of his outlandish dreams.
Finally, the last aspect of the element of dreams that truly stood out to me, was in the title of the novel “The White Castle”nas it is described in the final scenes of the book. It is almost as if this entire book was an attempt to achieve an ultimate objective, that in fact turned out to be just a dream. There are definitely elements of self-consciousness throughout the novel as the narrator toys with and constantly discusses the subject of dreams. On page 143, the way in which he describes the final moments of viewing this white castle is described and acknowledged in a dream-like sense. “It was at the top of a high hill, its towers streaming with flags were caught by the faint red glow of the setting sun, and it was white…I didn’t know why I thought that one could see such a beautiful and unattainable thing only in a dream” (Page 143). The language used to simply describe this exquisite sight is exactly as one might imagine a castle in a dream. Furthermore, the narrator recognizes this and goes on to explain how this castle essentially represents something he may never actually get to. The white castle I feel represents the unattainable goal that the narrator has spent a majority of the novel searching for. When in fact this essence, or goal, never actually existed. Further down on page 143 the narrator admits, “I knew now that many of the things I’d experienced for years as coincidence had been inevitable, that our soldiers would never be able to reach the white towers of the castle”. In the end he sadly recognizes that what he has been searching for will never be achieved, and finally moves on to a new life.
The White Castle: part II
ReplyDeleteAlexis Donahue
Who am I? I have come to the conclusion long ago that I am who I am as a culmination of my past experiences, my current thoughts and my future possibilities. I am hopes and dreams, success and failure. The mission of self-discovery, the question of ‘who am I really?’ the wonderment at the lives of others and their viewpoints, all culminate to the final epic end.
In the literary world, confusion of identity and attempts at self-discovery are common themes. For example, the confusion within the novel reminds me of Shakespeare’s comedy “Twelfth Night”, a comedy where no one is as they seem, and only the audience appears to know what is truly going on.
Broadly explored within the novel is the concept of attempting to capture with the use of language a personality, a ‘who’. Anyone whom has ever been in love understands how futile it is to try to express emotions in words to a satisfactory limit; a human being’s personality, who they truly are, is so much more complex than a simple feeling. On this scale, then, it becomes obvious how impossible it is to use the conventions of language to discover one’s true self.
Yet writing, the keeping of journals, the expression of things as simple as the day’s events and as complex as the day’s feelings in an effort towards completing the journey of self-discovery is a common practice, even slightly clichéd. The journey of self-discovery is a complex and destructive dance. Writing down feelings, reactions, events and inner thoughts gives, if only an illusion, a feeling of progress, a tangible thing that anchors our feet in the world and keeps our illusion of sanity alive.
“We are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.” -Unknown
The White Castle of Truth by Brian Remy
ReplyDeleteWho is the Narrator? This question has been getting to me these past couple of days. I have re-read the last chapter of The White Castle maybe three times. Each time I would try and follow every little clue that the narrator gave but each time I become frustrated and restart my search. Back and forth I went looking for plot connections to what the narrator had said in the past and what he was saying now. Was I anywhere closer to coming to an answer? No. So I refined my question to the following, is there an answer? My guess is probably not. I would assume that Orhan Pamuk is playing a game with his readers about who the narrator is.
First he gives us a preface that tells us that this book is a second hand account of a second hand account. Immediately we are told to not trust anything this book is telling us. Then in the last chapter we come to a complete loss of who the narrator is. We learn that he has problems realizing what is his reality and what is someone else’s. Therefore we now know that everything in the story was probably not true or maybe was someone else’s. Basically what the story says is different from what actually happened.
So after all of this we wonder, why is Pamuk doing this? If he were trying to write a book about East and West why do we need to see his ideas through this way? Why are we led to believe something and then given reasons to not believe it? What does this say about the validity of the message throughout the book? These questions can go on and on, which then makes people frustrated. My thought is that Pamuk’s game is one that plays on Human Nature. He poses all of these questions and then in the end leaves us with no answer, leaving the reader either, confused, unsatisfied, or angry even. Humans need answers, they need the security that all things are understood; this is why religion is extremely important to humans. It gives us an answer to greatest question, what happens after we die? We are led into this large amount of ambiguity, we expect to come out with an answer, but we are not given it. This causes a lot of anger in Human Beings.
So then one of my last question is why is the book called the White Castle? We briefly come into contact with the Castle in the book. The castle almost seems irrelevant and non-important. Except for the fact that even a large mechanical weapon could not defeat it. The castle is impregnable, it cannot be knocked down and the characters of this book understand that. I think this Castle is a metaphor for the truth, in that it is as strong as a castle on the top of a hill. So if the characters can come to terms with defeat to the castle the last question is, do we admit defeat to the truth and give up? Or do we die trying to find it?
After finishing the novel, I find myself wondering if perhaps the narrator was Hoja all along. It is quite obvious from the beginning of White Castle that Hoja has an eery, perhaps even homoerotic interest in the Venetian. In the final chapter of Pamuk's novel, the capitalization of "Him" makes one infer that the narrator feels a deep sense of worship for whomever he is speaking of; this is identical to the way Hoja viewed the Venetian. Hoja was obsessed with learning every detail of the Venetian's life and emulating his characteristics. In the scene in which he coerces the Venetian to stand half naked with him in front of the mirror, Hoja is extremely pleased with the similarities they share and the way he is able to mimic and even predict the Venetian's movements. He then grabs the Venetian and tells him he possesses his soul. I believe because Hoja has been able to perfectly emulate the Venetian, he has written the narrative from the Venetian's perspective as a way to show his mastery. He observes himself from the Venetian's eyes, the way he was so desperate for approval, and looks down upon his once pitiful self.
ReplyDeleteHomoerotocism in White Castle
ReplyDeleteOur discussion in class today really got me thinking about the relationship between Hoja and the Venetian as a love relationship. There are several instances in which Hoja seems to attempt the to move beyond their relationship into a physical one.
One instance is when the plague frightens the Venetian. "Every night he'd reach for me with the hands he said he'd touched people with all day long. […] His fingers did not resemble mine; running them coolly over my flesh Hoja would ask 'Are you afraid?'"(Pamuk 74). This contact is spilling with sexual undertones. Instead of just poking or prodding the Venetian he sensually runs his fingers over him. This happens again later, "Putting his hands on my shoulders he came forward and stood next to me. He acted like a dearold friend who had shared my deepest secrets. Squeezing he nape of my neck from both sides with his fingers, he pulled me towards him" (Pamuk 82). Keepin mind this exchange happens after both characters have taken off their shirts. It seems as if Hoja has a deep desire for the Venetian. This could also be proven by his aversion to marriage.
The East and West - More Similar than Different?
ReplyDeleteBy Kristen Fisher
In the second half of The White Castle Hoja and the Venetian switch places and begin to act as if they truly were the ‘other;’ no longer is there a visible power struggle between the two based around knowledge. Throughout the novel, Pamuk defines both the Venetian and Hoja by their Eastern or Western roots. The Venetian is seen to have a much more advanced level of intelligence and broader knowledge of the world, while the Hoja is characterized as more childish and violent. Yet, as time passes and the two men spend more time together Pamuk forces readers to recognize how the two characters have become much more alike and are no longer simply defined by their Eastern or Western backgrounds. Hoja becomes invested in books and creating a weapon while the Venetian spends time with the sultan and at public festivals. Therefore the switch that eventually occurs does not simply seem to be a change of behaviors and appearances, but instead reveals how the East and the West have more in common than one would expect. Stereotypical understandings of these two areas are proven to be wrong as two men find a way to overcome these supposedly extreme differences.
When Hoja forces the Venetian to begin writing about his life and his earlier memories he quickly recognizes that they have shared similar fears and dreams despite the Venetian’s more privileged and educated childhood. Hoja quickly realizes that he could live the way the Venetian always has while simultaneously recognizing that the two have gained a deep understanding of one another. When Hoja forces the Venetian to stand in front of a mirror with him to look at their outward similarities he tells the Venetian his fantasy of living out the rest of his (the Venetian's) life. The Venetian is quite surprised at how much Hoja has remembered, but is also utterly shocked that Hoja’s dreams for the future are the same as the Venetian’s would be for himself (85). This scene in particular, forces readers to recognize how easily these two men have overcome many of their cultural differences and have begun to merge their worldviews together.
Even an outsider, the sultan, is also able to recognize the similarities that have overcome the original differences between Hoja and the Venetian. The narrator fears that the sultan has begun to see the two men merged into one “imaginary creature” and fears that he has become to understand them more than they understand themselves (115). The Venetian also remarks that the sultan looks to judge to what extent each man has become more like the other (114). The changing personalities of both the Venetian and Hoja and their ability to merge into one similar person, allowing them to eventually switch lives, marks a distinct difference of the themes I interpreted at the start of the novel. The ideas of Orientalism seemed quite prevalent to me when first reading the novel as I interpreted that both Hoja and the Venetian looked at one another as the stereotypical ‘other.’ Yet, this second half of the novel allows Pamuk to challenge readers’ perspectives by illustrating how these two clashing personalities have overcome their biased opinions about the ‘other.’
While I do not believe that Pamuk is arguing that the East and the West are the same, I think he is forcing readers to question their contrasting opinions regarding the other area. By utilizing Hoja and the Venetian as representations of both sides of the world it appears that Pamuk is asking readers to analyze what outward images we are receiving from the ‘other’ and to instead dig deeper and search for the human traits that connect us all. Everyone has a unique identity that does not have to be based off of where they currently live or where they have come from and Pamuk continuously forces readers to question and analyze their own identities as well as the ideas they have about others.
The last few sentences of The White Castle are so telling of what Pamuk is trying to illustrate. To be sure, the mixing of the narrator's identity is important but the image of the narrator at the end lends the truest account of the author's intentions.
ReplyDelete"...I waited with excitement till at last he found the page he was looking for and read it. Then he looked again at the view from the window overlooking the garden behind my house. I knew exactly what he saw. Peaches and cherries lay on a tray inlaid with mother of pearl upon a table, behind the table was a divan upholstered with straw matting, strewn with feather cushions the same color as the green window frame. I was sitting there nearly seventy now...A swing tied with long ropes to a high branch of a walnut-tree swayed slightly in a barely perceptible breeze."
It is fascinating how Pamuk ties domestic comfort with this eerie portrait of the narrator. The green cushions paired with the green frame outlines and contradicts the composition of this scene. We are supposed to see this from the perspective of the Italian as an holistic work of art. The still life of the fruit, the studies of the sparrow and the mother of pearl, and the seventy year old man who serves as the negative space in the portrait. The captive audience of the Italian is trying to bring these constituent elements together just as he would with Da Vinci.
The narrator no longer needs to see himself in a mirror. To him, that was only a simulation. Now he needs to be recognized as a whole, or as one with his society. The portrait metaphor might be another simulation but the "imperceptible breeze" gives the scene an uncanny quality. The Italian would be used to a scene like this in a painting of the East but the fact that it's moving ever so slightly is not only disturbing but makes the perceived Eastern portrait a reality. Although the Italian has probably hit on some discovery of the narrator's identity, we might also be able to take this surprise as the West's possible acceptance of the Easterner as being just as human while recognizing the differences in culture.
The scene might also connote a transcendent quality. It is a cliche metaphor but the window might act as Alice's looking glass. Instead of the reflection of the mirror, the Italian is confronted with a world and person much like himself (possibly more than he can imagine). The image of the garden is familiar but both men are captive to his own identity.
-Corey Scibilia
Hoja and the Venetian: When Identities Converge
ReplyDeleteIn a close reading of a critical scene between Hoja and the Venetian in Chapter Six of The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk, the identities of these two characters seem to converge while they talk in front of the mirror about the pustule on Hoja’s chest. The scene, beginning on page 81, illustrates a moment of interaction between these foils where their thoughts, dialogue, and actions can all be easily combined to portray a single frightened yet skeptical individual.
Pamuk’s narrative style suggests that in this moment the two become seamless by how they interact. The Venetian’s inner monologue and Hoja’s dialogue flow into one another and form what could be interpreted as one greater inner monologue uniting the two identities into one. These foils complete one another by how their minds coalesce to represent a fully formed psyche consisting of the Venetian’s fear and Hoja’s skepticism. This notion is most apparent when the Venetian is inspecting the pustule hesitantly in front of the mirror while his own thoughts and Hoja’s dialogue become one stream of consciousness. Pamuks’ narrative style makes this most apparent when the narrator reflects, “I knew I was afraid of the pustule. He knew it as well. Yet, wanting to conceal my fear I fixed upon that swelling, that inflammation, with the air of a doctor. ‘You’re afraid aren’t you?’ Hoja said at last. Trying to prove that I was not, I brought my head even closer. ‘You’re afraid it’s a plague bubo.’” (81).
The interaction between these characters also goes further to demonstrate a fully formed individual by how one aspect of the mind, the Venetian, demonstrates helplessness and inferiority, while the other aspect, Hoja, represents brashness and superiority. The Venetian exhibits helplessness by how he is vulnerable and possessed by his fear of the plague. The narrator compares himself to a child on several occasions to portray how fear has made him subordinate to his foil Hoja, whose tone and harshness are comparable to a bully, stern adult, or parent-like figure. When Hoja demands, “’Come here, I say!’” the Venetian obeys him and reflects, “Fearfully I approached him like a student about to be punished”. Hoja also demeans him for being afraid of “a simple insect bite”. The Venetian continues to obey Hoja’s orders when he demands “’…Take off your shirt, now!’” and pulls off his shirt “like a child who hates to be washed”. These instances, where the interplay between these two characters demonstrates the relationship between a superior and a subordinate, can also be used to show how the human mind works in a Freudian sense. The Freudian superego, the Venetian, has become subordinate to the id, Hoja. The two characters, representing two separate aspects of the human psyche struggle to form the rational ego.
The end of The White Caste came as quite a surprise. Not only is the reader thrown off guard from the opening chapter, describing the story written by a slave that the book was written from being found abandoned in a file cabinet, but in the last chapter it is revealed that the narrator of the story was not the author. With Hoja being identified as the author of the story, it puts everything Venetian slave said and thought into a different perspective. Although the ending of The White Castle is open to many different interpretations, with the possibility of Hoja and Venetian slave having traded places, after my first reading I took what happened as literal. Hoja wrote an interesting story about an eccentric doppelganger from Venice who was his slave, and who ran away to save himself after the tank failed in the swamps. Such a story is bizarre enough for me to believe Hoja would, later in his life, write about it.
ReplyDeleteIf there is something troubling about this, it is that Hoja wrote all of Venetian slaves lines, and intentionally “orientalized” all of the information learned from venetian slave about Istanbul and its culture. While he knew better of the scientific and medical achievements of the East, he leaves the reader in the dark. Hoja, in the last chapter also tells of teaching a traveler about Italy, because he had learned some of its history and culture from Venetian slave in the years they were together. “For every city he wanted a curious tale as well. Passing thirteen nights in thirteen cities in this way, we traversed from north to south the whole of this land I was seeing for the first time in my life”(p.153). In this passage Hoja admits to passing on inaccurate if not false information about someplace he has never been (he was seeing the land he was describing for the first time). The traveler, unaware of any other truth, takes it as fact and goes on his merry way. If the narration from Venetian slave shows examples of Orientalism, then perhaps the narration from Hoja shows an example of reverse-Orientalism, how the East views the West.
Perhaps the book being written by a Turkish author, is poking fun at the ignorance of the West because a typical Western reader would take what Venetian Slave says as fact (the typical Orientalist view), while readers native to Turkey would know what bits of information are incorrect.
Identity and East vs. West
ReplyDeleteIn Orhan Pamuk’s novel The White Castle, the sultan has an uncanny ability to separate the idiosyncrasies of the Venetian slave from the Hoja, and is the only character that can consistently tell the two men apart. He is able, “Like an attentive father who separates two brothers arguing over their marbles, saying ‘this one is yours, and this one is yours’” (115) to discern the Venetian from the Hoja based on “his observations about [their] speech and behavior” (115). The Venetian slave even states that “the sultan…had come to know us better than we knew ourselves” (115). Because the sultan is so well versed in telling the two men apart when they look identical, it is hard to believe that the sultan does not notice that the Venetian and the Hoja switch places after the Venetian gains weight, with the Hoja running away to Italy and the Venetian taking the place of the Hoja as Imperial Astrologer. While reading the second half of the novel, I was left with the question: How does the sultan not realize the Hoja and the Venetian switch places? And why does Pamuk choose to leave this gaping hole in the plot of the novel?
While I’m not quite sure of these answers, the identities of the Venetian and the Hoja directly reflects upon the identities of the Orientalist, ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ perspective that frequently appears throughout the novel. The Venetian, a foreign Westerner in the Eastern city of Istanbul, becomes an object of interest to the Hoja as he becomes obsessed with the concept of identity: “Why am I what I am?” (58) The Hoja repeatedly asks the Venetian. The Hoja questions the Venetian on the Western world, learning the different sciences the Venetian has learned in school, and eventually becoming more interested in the Venetian’s private life. After learning about the Venetian’s private flaws, his sexual infidelities and jealously of his brothers, the Hoja judges the entire Western world upon these flaws: when interrogating Polish citizens he encounters with the sultan, the Hoja becomes convinced that “they must have committed sins much more profound, more real that distinguished them from us” (133). While although the Polish citizens the Hoja encounters do not admit to sins that measure up to those admitted by the Venetian, the Hoja continues to judge the Western world by the flaws he believes the Venetian has in order to justify his perspective of West vs. East and ‘them’ vs. ‘us.’
While I am still confused about the ending of the novel, and the true identities of the Hoja and the Venetian, I am left wondering whether that was Pamuk’s exact purpose. Perhaps he meant for readers to become confused regarding the identities of his two main characters because of what those characters represent: the East vs. West dichotomy. Who exactly is ‘us,’ and who ‘them?’ Even the Venetian and the Hoja have trouble distinguishing East vs. West and the ‘other’ from each other. By the end of the novel, I am left wondering whether Pamuk had a clear idea of the identities behind each of his characters within his book, or whether he wanted the mixed identities of those characters to represent the global inability to categorize people, and cultures, into one identity: East or West.
Turkey Through the Looking Glass
ReplyDeleteThroughout the narrative,the concept of a mirror image is repeatedly used. Early on in the story, the narrator mentions an uncanny similarity between himself and the Hoja: "the resemblance between myself and the man who entered the room was incredible! It was me there...for that instant this is what I thought" (22). This moment is only one of the many instances of foreshadowing present within the novel. Here, both facets of how the concept of "the mirror" in literature are represented in Orhan Pamuk's narrative.
First, "the mirror" as represented as refracting society is expressed through the remarkable similarity between the Venetian and Hoja. The existence of the doppelganger attempts to show that both characters are the same. They are so similar in quality that they could swap positions and no difference could be noticed. This idea is expressed clearly when they gaze into a mirror together and fancy switching places: "He was going to take my place, I his, and to accomplish this it would be enough for us to exchange clothes and for him to cut his beard while I left mine to grow" (84). The conclusion of this ideology is that it is what is destined to be judging from the resolution of the novel, in that the Turk is happy having taken the Venetian's fiancee as his wife and assimilated into Italian life whereas the Venetian takes on a wife and has children in Turkey.
Another interpretation of "the mirror" is that the reality and the reflection contrast each other. The figure in reality, the Venetian, is constantly contrasted with the East, or the Hoja. Where they are physically identical, their cultural, intellectual and spiritual differences are far too great to consider them "mirrored images" in the sense that they are wholly equal. The two forces appear to be constantly at war to step out from the "looking glass" and absorb each other's culture. When the Hoja forced the Venetian to write stories about himself and the Hoja refused to reveal stories of his own highlights the clear distinctions between the two people.
Ellen Walpole – February 19, 2013
ReplyDelete“The White Castle” 2nd Half
Who Is Really Who?
As we talked about in class today, there are so many different aspects and angles that you can read this novel from. The idea of a “mirror image” made me question which character was in fact the narrator, because if the Venetian and the Hoja did swap identities, was it written afterwards? So then would the narrator actually be the Turkish and Muslim Hoja?
After thinking about that, I also questioned the other topic we discussed on how someone decides what and in what order they are what they are. If the Venetian had been such a devote Christian in the beginning and was willing to die for his religion, at what point did he become okay with no longer being a Christian Italian? I thought when he was first made a slave to the Hoja he knew that he had the upper hand in knowledge and experience, and while he used that to his advantage for quite some time, he did end up losing his identity.
He admitted to thinking and dreaming about Italy and his fiancé and family less and less and finding himself enjoying life in Istanbul. Furthermore, when the Hoja was receiving recognition from the Sultan and the Venetian was in the crowd, he wanted so badly to be with him, not only because he deserved credit for the work, but he felt as if he was looking at himself and had no idea whose mind he was actually in.
I think it was when he was trampled in the crowd that the Venetian lost sight of his identity and succumbed to the influence of the Hoja and Turkish life in general. However, if the story was in fact written by the Hoja after he had taken an Italian identity, it would make more sense as to why the Turks were not talked too harshly about even after they had enslaved him.
Now I’m struggling to decide what perspective I’m reading the novel from and whose true character is what. Also, the preface perspective implies another angle all together.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIn second half of The White Castle Pamuk exhibits the unchanging orientalist mentality that has countries and whole groups of people frozen in time and in a certain way of life. The orientalist view doesn’t change and evolve with people as cultures do and our understanding of them should. Instead it implements stereotypes on those people and has them captured in them and unable to escape from them.
ReplyDeleteIn the last chapter of his novel Pamuk references the traveler Evliya Chelebi. Up till this point we are given no reason to trust the writer as giving us any factual information in any way and as such don’t have reason to believe this person is any more real than the man presented in the preface of the novel. Evliya Chelebi, however, was actually an “Ottoman Turkish traveler who journeyed through the territory of the Ottoman Empire and neighboring lands over a period of forty years” [1]. In Pamuk’s novel, however, Chelebi is represented as an old man who doesn’t really understand the world or travel at all. He, as a world traveler possessed and referred to as “…the worst map of Italy [the narrator had] ever seen”(153) that shows the inadequacy of the Turkish people, in the novel, at something that he is supposed to be doing for a living and is praised for. He doesn’t even seem to care about the accuracy of the information that he will pass off as his own when questioning the narrator about Italy and understanding that the Venetian had described everything to the narrator and so this information can be passed off as fact (153). He is portrayed as a petty Turkish man who could not even be bothered to do his job correctly and doesn’t have the knowledge to use a correct map of the place he so dearly want’s to learn about. He is stuck in, what is portrayed as, an underdeveloped world that has not caught up with world enough to know about it.
Further more in all the years that the Venetian had been in the Turkey and with all the time he spent with the Hoja he, the Hoja, was never able to develop any sense of critical thinking or independence. All he has been able to do is continually ask the Venetian for all he knew so that he could become more and more like the exotic foreigner that he looked up to so dearly. Over all those years the Venetian’s knowledge never seemed to cease or develop. He wasn’t portrayed as being caught unprepared for a subject or unlearned in any area.
The Middle East is stuck in a state of infancy in the East’s eyes, even though throughout history they have proven to be the leading charge in all the fields described throughout the novel.
Reference:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evliya_%C3%87elebi
ReplyDeleteGod, Forgive Me: The Garden
Slowly trying to figure out this novel, I’m looking for repeated images and clues that the narrator swears he dropped. After thinking the narrator might have schizophrenia, a twin, or just completely be making everything up, I ended up at a [admittedly] strange conclusion about what may have possibly happened early on in the novel. The last image of the novel may be one of the most helpful in beginning to decipher some confusing aspects. (Of course, we have to wonder if we’re even meant to try to unravel Pamuk’s tangles, but I’m going to at least try, just in case.)
The novel ends with the visitor looking out the window into the garden, where the narrator knows that he sees that “Peaches and cherries lay on a tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl upon a table […]”. This may jolt some neurons: this is the same scene, the same description that the Venetian visualizes before he is to be beheaded (30). Not only does the garden come up there, but again before the alleged “switch” at the end of chapter ten. The narrator tells Hoja more tiny details about his past, remembering the “things [he] had seen from the window overlooking the garden behind our house” (144). Next, in the final chapter, the narrator recalls how the sultan would press him to write about “the view through the window…of His house that He recalled when he was about to be beheaded” (151).
Not only do we see this specific image repeated, but the narrator shares that when he had his current home built, he “landscaped the back garden” as he wanted, “according to inner impulses” (152). Meanwhile, the “He” in the last chapter had returned home and returned that garden to its former state (158).
So, I’m taking this garden image and running with it because I think that the page the visitor searches for frantically in the last chapter is that one on which the Venetian first visualizes the garden (my page 30). Before this realization of the visitor, the narrator states that he watched his blank gaze become focused, saying that he “was looking at the scene through the frame of the window” (160). This felt like a metafictional moment to me, so I realized that perhaps the author was suggesting that we as readers needed to be looking through the correct frame of narrative in order to understand at least part of this story. Since the literal frame is the window, I went back to that beheading scene and, forgive me,
I think that there’s a possibility that our narrator has been dead for the majority of this story. (At the risk of sounding really stupid, I just want to say I haven’t exactly seen how that would function in the entire novel, but there seems to be valid support.)
First, the garden scene at the close now says, “I was sitting there, nearly seventy now” (161). While I don’t know if people still keep track of age in the afterlife, I think that the garden could easily be a representation of a sort of heaven, or at least limbo. If you examine the garden scene the first time it appears (now that you think someone might be dead), it can be read as if the beheading was a successful one.
There definitely seem to be more moments where a deceased narrator would hold up and make sense of symbols, but I’m not sure if everything makes sense in that frame.
(Now that I’m about to post, I’m really concerned that this sounds a lot worse than I originally thought it might…)
According to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, true love is impossible because love occurs when you identify strongly with another person. You can never identify with someone completely because you do not share a consciousness with that person, so you can never fully love him or her. Deep down, Sartre argues, we are all aware of this fact and it causes us great anxiety. It would be interesting to apply this philosophy to the relationships between Hoja and the Venetian, and, consequently, between the East and the West.
ReplyDeleteThere are certainly elements of homoeroticism between Hoja and the Venetian, particularly on the part of the Hoja. Like we discussed in class, Hoja rejects marriage prospects and is at once obsessed and extremely frustrated with the Venetian. Hoja sees the Venetian as an “other” that he is determined not just to learn from, but to become him. The reason that two people cannot experience true love is that each has had unique life experiences that prevent him or her from completely knowing the other. However, by forcing the Venetian to recount the intimate details of his past life to the Hoja through his writing, the Hoja is essentially closing the gap between the two men’s realities, thus approaching Sartre’s definition of love. The narration itself is a meshing of the Venetian’s consciousness and Hoja’s consciousness. At the end, we learn there is a chance that the novel’s narrator is actually Hoja, which would indicate further communion between the two men. However, the fact that the narration, no matter whose perspective it comes from, is factually distorted shows that the transformation of identity was not seamless.
Part of the reason love, or rather the inability to completely achieve it, causes us anxiety is that we need to know other people in order to define ourselves. Hoja is stressed partly because he needs the Venetian to reveal the master’s own identity. Similarly, the West requires an “other” in order to define itself as separate from it. Therefore, the West creates its own, more comprehensible version of the East to compare itself to. The East must do the same to the West, and stereotypes are born. Like Hoja expresses his frustration over not understanding the Venetian by beating him, the “West” and the “East” exert violence over the “other” because if the other cannot be accurately known, it must be forced into an artificial definition of itself that pleases the master. This concept is evidenced by issues we have discussed in class, such as the Spanish Inquisition and Islamist terrorism. To ratify yourself or your culture as existent and distinct, you must know the “other.” Ironically, though, in completely knowing the other you cease to be yourself. This paradox is explored throughout The White Castle through the relationship between the Venetian and the Hoja.
At first, I was completely unsurprised by the ending of The White Castle. From the first time that Hoja and the Venetian met, I had guessed that they would switch places at some point during the novel. The author placed so much emphasis on their physical similarities that it seemed like a red flag. As the novel progressed, the hints became more frequent and more obvious; the Venetian has nightmares about switching roles with Hoja, and in the mirror scene where Hoja has the potential plague bubo on his chest (page 84), the narrator says directly “He was going to take my place.” When I finished reading I had drawn the conclusion that Hoja and the Venetian had switched places, each gotten married and had children, and continued living as each other until they died.
ReplyDeleteReading the last pages again, however, has completely muddled up my understanding of the book. At some points, it seems that Hoja and the Venetian did not switch places. On page 147, the narrator says that the sultan told him not to be “ashamed to have been influenced by him.” The reader may assume that the “him” is the Venetian, forcing the speaker to be Hoja; but then the question remains, is the speaker actually the character of Hoja, or is it the Venetian sticking to his new role? Page 148 offers “when they learned the infidel escaped, they wanted my head…” In this case the narrator would have to be Hoja because the infidel is the Venetian; but by only referring to him as “the infidel” and not by name, the narrator removes all identifiers from the equation, leaving it again open-ended.
Conversely, on page 149 the narrator is asked about his identity, and his response is that “the important thing is what we have done and will do,” meaning that it is possible to be someone else; the focus should be on how that person chooses to live in the new identity. On page 153, there is a paragraph in which the narrator tells of men that had exchanged lives, presumably Hoja and the Venetian.
I believe there is another option; that Hoja and the Venetian are in fact the same person. On page 144, the narrator says “these stories have seemed to me mere reflections of my fantasies”; the fantasies would be that the narrator can live two different lives, that of Hoja’s and that of the Venetians. Another supporting detail is that neither character actually has a name; it is the Venetian, or the slave, and Hoja; although we use the term “Hoja” as a name, it really just means “Master.”