To be, or not to be, oneself

No one in this country can ever be himself. To live in an oppressed, defeated country is to be someone else. I am someone else, therefore I am! But what if this person I want to become is himself someone else? This is the crux, the heart of the deception!
-- Orhan Pamuk; The Black Book

How can a man be himself in Istanbul, a traditionally Eastern city in traditionally Eastern Turkey, after Atatürk’s modernising (read: Westernising) regime in 1923? How can a man be himself when the “garden of [his] memory” has been shorn and foreign plants have been implanted instead? How does an individual be himself when all those around him expect him to be someone else, and he almost is this person but not quite? These questions concerning identity are central to our existence, and Pamuk discusses answers in a very different type of mystery.

The plot is simple: Galip’s wife Rüya disappears, and for Galip this disappearance is linked inextricably with the disappearance of Celâl, his uncle and a famous journalist; Galip thus tries to find both the missing people. But we are told early in the novel that The Black Book is not your typical whodunit: “Galip had once told Rüya that the only detective book he’d ever want to read would be the one in which not even the author knew the murder’s identity. Instead […] the author would be forced to come to grips with his characters and his subject, and his characters would have a chance to become people in a book instead of just figments of their author’s imagination.” In other words Galip’s quest for Rüya (the word means dream in Turkish) and Celâl is the Sufi quest for “‘absolute union with God’ (or dissolving into the absolute)”.

The structure of Pamuk’s novel is fascinating. One chapter advances the plot and the next is one of Celâl’s columns from the newspaper Milliyet; The Black Book continues in this fashion alternating between the two. Galip thinks that in order to find Celâl’s whereabouts, he must try to understand the man. He does this by immersing himself in Celâl’s writings, and actually becoming his uncle. He gets the notion in the middle of the book that he can only be himself by becoming Celâl, and gradually begins to write his columns for him. At the beginning of the novel, the plot remains distinct from the columns, but as the text progresses the line blurs between them because the reader can no longer clearly distinguish between Galip and Celâl. The last column is especially enigmatic: we don’t know if Celâl wrote it or Galip did in his place; Pamuk leaves the point unanswered to show that the two are the same. Thus Pamuk’s use of structure complements the central theme of Galip’s identity.

Films are an important motif in The Black Book. Turkish people go into the cinema to watch actors act as other people, and the viewers get sucked into the story and feel as if they are actually the characters on the screen. In one memorable passage, a hyperbole of a socialist explains that this is an imperialist conspiracy. The issue of national identity is left hanging open as the novel ends with the death of Celâl (and Rüya too, tragically) and a vague notion of a bloody coup to follow. Furthermore, Celâl has influenced Turkey for over 30 years and the notion of his column left out in the Milliyet is a frightening prospect.

Personal identity is not solved either, but there is a moment of hope as Galip cries, “Yes, yes, I am myself!” Firstly Pamuk suggests that a man is himself only because he yearns to emulate another person. At the end the story of the Crown Prince shows that a man is himself only when he finds his own voice and tells stories. There is no easy answer to the complex issue of identity, Pamuk holds.

Some faults of The Black Book: there are too many middle pages, where the story drags and could have been condensed; some of the references in Celâl’s columns are too opaque for the Western reader; and some readers will undoubtedly be put off by the stories in stories in stories. But Pamuk always comes back with a twist even after a few boring pages (like that horrible six-pages long paragraph of Mehmet’s), and above all his style of writing (postmodern yet distinctively and mystically Eastern) makes The Black Book as one of the best books I’ve read ever.