History as mythology

Shelley Walia

Speaking on the challenge of writing a historical novel, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk argues that the idea is “not to render a perfect imitation of the past, but to relate history with something new, enrich and change it with imagination and sensuousness of personal experience.” A historical novel involves the art of combining details so as to recall tales from the past now forgotten, and to give some insight into the soul of one’s nation and the ever-present history. “If you try to repress memories, something always comes back,” reiterates Pamuk. “I’m what comes back.” Such is Pamuk’s confrontational carnival of storytelling.

It is this sense of the past that enables him to interweave the Oedipal and the Rustam-Sohrab myths into the history of his nation. People such as Pamuk, who value their freedom and stand up against any curb on independent thought and expression, care adequately for their rights as well as for those of others. Confrontational protest activities, political, cultural, and philosophical conflicts, tradition as opposed to modernity, have always played an important role in the struggle for social justice in his novels. 

The Red-Haired Woman, a tale of obsession, is a reiteration of these motives in his fiction, rising above mere academic debate, to challenge with passion the ‘father’ that symbolises the state power. To him injustice has to be exposed, which makes rational politics essential for challenging the status quo through classical allegories. Pamuk’s theory of liberatory politics is integral to his praxis and his fiction, a drive towards coming to grips with politics. This is not, in the words of Edward Said: “[O]pposition for opposition’s sake. But it does mean asking questions, making distinctions, restoring to memory all those things that tend to be overlooked or walked past in the rush to collective judgment and action.”

Using the two classic myths of patricide and filicide, Pamuk dexterously intertextualizes the dominating state in conflict with the individual or the marginalised, the overwhelming tradition in conflict with modernism, the East in confrontation with the West and religion versus secularism. The myths become underlying allegories of his novels, from Snow and My name is Red to The Red-Haired Woman where the spirit of the Islamic state or the father remains ever-haunting in a world moving into modernism and capitalism. The secular modern son remains perpetually in conflict with the capitalist state (the father). Pamuk takes all caution to ensure that his fictional creations remain imbued with the larger political and social conflicts of the secular and the religious elements in the Turkish culture. 

The first-person narrator, Çem, like Pamuk, understands the landscape around Istanbul, “sensing the lay of the land beneath” as he flies to various locations in Libya or Azerbaijan recalling the small town of Ongoren near Istanbul where he at the age of 16 worked as a well-digger and exchanged a glance with a mysterious red-haired woman, Gulchian: “A melancholy smile formed on her perfectly curved lips, as if she’d seen something unusual in me or [my] horse.” Facing poverty on the disappearance of his left-leaning dissident father, Çem chooses to work under Master Mahmut for a brief spell to get away from studies and have a rural experience. The job turns into the reincarnation of his father in the substitute figure of Mahmut who “took much more of an interest in my life than my father ever had: he told me stories and taught me lessons; he never forgot to ask if I was all right, if I was hungry, whether I was tired.” The relationship turns Oedipal with Çem finding both love and anger for Mahmut during his work at the digging of the well: “I’d see that accusing, disdainful, maybe even slightly suspicious look frozen on Master Mahmut’s face. It made me angry at myself but also at him.”  

During his stay in the semi-idyllic barren countryside, Çem becomes obsessed with the 33-year-old woman about whom he begins to dream. The sudden accidental dropping of the bucket into the wall comes as a shock to Çem who imagines he has killed Mahmut, compelling him to flee to Istanbul where he pursues his profession of a geologist. He marries, is without a child, and progresses financially in his business, setting up a construction company by the name of Sohrab. Sohrab, ironically lives on in the form of the never-dying capitalism in a world of socialism represented by Çem’s father and the red-haired woman who, too, is a Marxist revolutionary once in love with his father.

The voiceless woman finds a significant place in a patriarchal world of conservative religious and secular dominance in the activism of Gulchian, an actress with left leanings who captures the  attention of Çem and finally seduces him: “‘In those years, if an attractive woman in her thirties who was made-up and wearing a pretty navy blue skirt (even if for the sake of theatre) were to say to a man at ten thirty at night, “Let’s walk down the street some more,’” for most men, unfortunately, this could mean only one thing.” 

Years later Çem discovers he has a son by the red-haired woman. He returns to Ongoren and dies fighting his son Enver on the edge of the well that he had helped to dig in his youth. Gulcihan, the mother, encourages her son to write a novel as a witness to his innocence. Circumstances, however, lead to the revelation that both mother and son stand to inherit two-thirds of Çem’s fortune thus throwing light, not only upon the world of conspiracy and intrigue, but the coming of age of women in an unacceptably masculine world.