The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

I First Learned about Russia from Dostoievski. Literature as an Imaginary Way of Understanding Another Country.

Rezzan Kocaöner Silkü (Ege University, Izmir, Turkey)
'Nation and Narration': Cultural Interactions in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red

Being one of the well known Turkish authors, Orhan Pamuk, in an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth, identifies himself with a "bridge... [since] a bridge doesn't belong to any continent,... [or] any civilization, [but it] has the unique opportunity to see both civilizations and be outside of it" ("Bridging Two Worlds," 2/ Nov 20, 2002). As Farnsworth says, Orhan Pamuk "works in a neighbourhood of Istanbul that lies on the edge of Bosphorus, the great waterway that divides Europe and Asia [and] knows East and West well, having lived most of his life in Turkey, and having also studied writing and literature in the United States" (1).

Catherine Hall, in "History as Cultural Politics", asserts, "Historians construct stories, stories which necessarily have a narrative shape but in which the tensions between the teller, the tropes of the discourse, and what are understood to have been the events, are consciously worked on" (Jordan and Weedon 116). Hence there is no difference between a historian and a writer who uses narrative strategies to express an idea in a text. In Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha also claims that nations are narrative constructions, arising from the 'hybrid' interaction of cultural constituencies. Bhabha believes that cultures and nations construct themselves through interactions with other cultures. Edward Said, in Orientalism, also states, "[S]uch locales, regions, geographical sectors as 'Orient' and 'Occident' are man-made...[;] therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality..." (quoted in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 89).

Orhan Pamuk, like a historian, weaves his novel, My Name is Red (2001), around the Ottoman history and the Turkish culture. Thus the text binds the two worlds, the East and the West, and "addresses the sort of timeless, universal issues that make superb literary fiction" (Farnsworth 1). As Farnsworth further argues, "Istanbul has been the centre of both Islam and Christianity, and Pamuk's work is often about the meeting of the two" (1).
Orhan Pamuk himself states in a conversation:

I tried to tell my story... [in] two distinctive ways of seeing the world and narrating stories [which] are of course related to our cultures, histories, and what is now popularly called identities. How much are they in conflict? In my novel they even kill each other because of this conflict between east and west. But, of course, the reader, I hope, realizes that I do not believe in this conflict. All good art comes from mixing things from different roots and cultures, and I hope My Name is Red illustrates just that. (Knopf 1)

Thus this paper aims to discuss Pamuk's My Name is Red in the light of the dialectics between the East and the West, and to re-read the text as a portrayal of the Ottoman history and the Turkish culture with reference to such postcolonial concepts as hybridity, in-betweenness, or double-consciousness, with regard to Bhabha's views about nation and narration, and Said's arguments on the Orient and the Occident.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES