Chapters 8-14

Chapters 8-14

I’ll just hit some highlights from certain chapters first. Then try to hit a major theme or three as clean up. This is hastily done… so it is longer that it should be and a bit sloppy… But oh, well. My apologies.

Ch. 8

The myth surrounding Blue is really wonderful. The way that the narrator—who is still unknown—tells it and then the way he questions it is nice. The way that he explains Blue’s own attitude towards his myth is interesting for me as well. He tried to neither confirm or deny anything so as to let the myth have a life of its own. This results in people taking what they want to believe as true in order to support their opinions about blue—if they like him they believe what they think is good, if the don’t like him they believe the parts that they think are bad.

I think this says a lot about public opinion and personality cults. It admits that interpretation and belief are more important than fact when it comes to the life and stories of public figures. I think that some American politicians (and political advisors) already know this all too well. I hope that the public starts to learn it. There are no real truths about public figures, it is all belief and interpretation. Oh, wait I kind of pinched that from someone didn’t I…

Related to that, we also see in this chapter how some people tend towards conspiracy interpretations of happenings. The suicides, it is suggested, are staged by the secularists to make the Islamists look bad. That is clever and not so far from what some people are actually saying in Turkey these days. Ex:

Hrant Dink, a writer and outspoken advocate for Armenians and Armenian causes in Turkey, was killed a few months ago. He was killed by a suspected nationalist who was upset with his views on the genocide among other things. However, some nationalists are saying that he was put up to it by the CIA in order to inflame tensions between the nationalist, Islamists and secularists. They say that by having Dink killed, and blaming it on the Nationalists, or Islamists it would cause problems which would lead to instability and evidence for the west to use when they argue against Turkey entering the EU. Others seem to think that it was a secularists conspiracy to make the nationalists mad so they would do something even more outrageous.

So it is not so far from reality to say that people are creating and believing these seemingly far fetched conspiracy theories.

I like how Ka is told to get up and leave when the conversation is over, not to linger. That is very amusing considering that it is actually Blue (and everyone else) that disappear first. What does that say about Blue and Ka’s meeting? Did Ka get the better of Blue, did he puzzle him? Or was Blue simply disappointed with Ka and give up on him? We will have to wait and see what happens if the meet again, or of Blue speaks or writes of Ka later.

Ka seems to be very naïve again when he says that ‘no one can be happy about getting a beating’ on page 74. (By the way AJ, I think we have books with different pagination.) That is a very Western (and I would say weak) way of thinking.

I do love what Blue has to say about his experience in Germany: that he realized that the westerners don’t belittle them but they belittle themselves by imagining what the westerners must be thinking. (This on page 73, or one page before Ka’s comment about beatings.) This ties in well with Blue’s ‘moral’ about the story he tells. The west has colonized the society and minds of the Turks so that even when they don’t westernize or believe in western things they can imagine how the westerns see and criticize them for resisting, for remaining ‘primitive.’ I think this is an important part or aspect of the tension between the west and the Muslim world—or the non-western world in general.

The comment that Blue leaves Ka with is brilliant: that the rest of the world has fallen under the spell of the west and has forsaken their own stories for the west’s. I think this is very true, and very sad. ‘Is that story worth killing for?’ It is a shame that that question even has to be asked.

Ch. 11

A lot happens in Ka’s mind (and soul) as he talks to the Sheikh. Much could be said but two things stick out for me.

First is the comment about modernizing and how that seems to be held up by religion. On page 96:

“’I’ve always wanted this country to prosper, to modernize… I’ve wanted freedom for its people,’ Ka said. ‘But it seemed to me that our religion was always against all this. Maybe I’m mistaken’… ‘I wanted to be like Europeans. I couldn’t see how I could reconcile my becoming European with a God who required women to wrap themselves in scarves, so I kept religion out of my life.’”

This of course leads to the Sheikh asking if they have a different God in Europe. That is a key point for me. I am a bit disappointed how it is brushed aside a bit in the rest of this chapter and hope it comes back later. This for me is a question of faith and revelation being put in contract with culture; more precisely the difficult question of where the line of enculturation is drawn.

What is the essence or kernel of the revelation, truth or belief and what are the cultural trappings that can be stripped away or modified? The question of Jesus’ gender seems to be a great example of this. Is it important that Jesus was male in some absolute sense? Or was it simply what had to happen given the time and place that he had to work in? I would love to debate this one… But that is another tangent.

I think issues like head scarves should be analyzed in terms of that distinction. And the question about having a different God in Europe or being western and still being a Muslim hinges on where you draw the line of enculturation. That is of course not an easy question to answer…

The second thing is the way that the Sheikh really seems to manipulate Ka, or tires. He tells him on one page that God understands his solitude. In the same breath he says that if Ka understood that he wouldn’t feel so alone. Then on the next page he implies that Ka’s solitude is really the result of pride and reminds him that the devil was cast of heaven because of his pride. This is clever, tricky and it sticks in my mind.

Ch. 13

Kadife’s proclamation that she will not discuss her faith with and atheist, or a secularist is both admirable and challenging. It is admirable because she seems to be admitting that there is no point because they will just not understand, that there is a fundamental disconnect between her and them. At the same time it is challenging and even scary because it may be that only a dialogue like that can bring about a respect that can lead to tolerance.

Hande is a very interesting character. I hope to hear more from her. It seems that she is scared of something because she knows that she will be obsessed with it, so she drives it completely away. There may be a wisdom in that…

Ch. 14
There is a lot here but one things sticks out… and I can’t even say much about it. I just need to quite it:

“Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in you own scent. The issue is the same for al real poets. If you’ve been happy too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you’ve been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic powers…. Happiness and poetry can only coexist for the briefest time.” (Ka, p 127)

This sounds so true, but it is also a bit difficult to accept….

The analysis of Ipek’s father in this chapter is also quite good.

Themes:

1)

Ka and Kafka’s K. Might there be a connection between these two characters? K is tossed and turned beyond his will in The Trial. Ka lets himself be lead and pushed.

2)

Imposition of their own faith systems on others in such a way that tells the others what they really believed. This really seems to start in Ch. 8 in the discussion about suicide and atheism. Because no one with faith would ever commit that sin people who do must really have been atheists all along.

This is hit again very hard in the next chapter, ch. 9, when Ka talks with Necip and his friends. And it comes up again from Necip when he tells Ka about his science fiction novel.

Ipek does this a bit, but not as forcefully or deeply, with Ka at the end of Ch. 10 when he is about to leave to see the Sheikh. She is telling him that he is unhappy and needs to find solace. Her recommendation seems to be that he needs to find religion.

It comes back again in other places, in smaller ways and I have a feeling that it will be a reoccurring theme throughout the book from here on out.

Returning to Freud: it seems that Freud insisting that only the analyst can uncover the things that your unconscious is making you do, and why, is a bit like this. And I don’t buy it in either case. It seems a bit too much like some of the crazy Protestant ideas about salvation and outward signs that one in saved…. But that is a tangent that I will cut off and set aside. It is available upon request.

Really, I think this is a good thing for Pamuk to stress here because it is realistic and common. I think people do this sort of thing quite often, especially when it comes to religion; they place their framework of meaning/belief onto others and project ideas, beliefs, etc. on to them.

Just to remind:

This week we are posting on Chapters 8-14, next week 15-21. Every week is will be 7 more chapters, leaving 36-44 for the last week.

8 thru 14

Chapter 8

Blue to some extent owes his reputation to the westernized Turkish media, delivering him from obscurity to the center of public attention, scrutiny, and admiration. He cuts a stark contrast to the other men we have met, whose self-pity and defeatism are dwelt upon at length by the author. Blue possesses tremendous self-confidence. The title and subtitle of this chapter are quite interesting, "Suicide is a Terrible Sin" and "Blue and Rustem," respectively. The first, in essence, might be a shallow moral drawn from Ka and Blue's conversation. The second represents the grit of this chapter. The moral of the story of Rustem and Suhrab is not what the content offers, but is its status as a forgotten tale in modern Turkey. Blue laments the systematic erasure of his culture by his own people, due in part to the self-alienating effects of juxtaposing the "backwards" East and the "fashionable" West. (Erasure as a theme in this novel must not be taken lightly.) So, perhaps, there might be a parallel between the story Blue tells and the story the narrator is telling. What is the subtextual message being offered in addition to the contextual?

Does the narrator mark Blue for death at the hands of the father figure by supplanting his name for Suhrab's?

General Thoughts

This span of chapters gave rise to several questions that remained unanswered. Ka escaped the beating, but not the interrogation:
"Is this story so beautiful that a man could kill for it" (85).
"Are you an atheist... And if you are an atheist, do you want to kill yourself?" (91)
"Do they have a different God in Europe?" and "Do you really want guidance from me?" (104)
"If God does not exist, how do you explain all the suffering of the poor?"
"How do you write poems?"

The narrator frequently employs texts within texts (the newspaper article and Necip's Sci Fi story) and storytelling (Blue's Rustem and Necip's story about the atheist). I think this will continue.

Teslime's suicide emerges as the central dilemma of the novel.

The way Ka creates poetry...

East/West divide and clash over religion and politics in light of class distinctions.

First Thoughts

Zo,

Some very strange thoughts have congealed in my mind regarding the first 7 chapters. Please understand that I have been reading a lot of Freud. Thus, I see Kars as the site of male impotency. Read on at your own peril. I promise that my future posts will stick to the text much more. I'll try to respond to your post tomorrow. I really enjoyed your thoughts.

AJ

Forgive the long list of quotations:

"These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world." (11)

"...Ka came to feel as if they had entered a shadow world." (14)

"As he listened to them, shouting and cursing and skidding in the snow, and gazed at the white sky and the pale yellow glow of streetlights, the desolation and remoteness of the place hit him with such force that he felt God inside him." (20)

"Outside, the snow was falling thicker and faster than ever; just the sight of it made Ka feel lonely." (28)

" 'But now I lived in utter silence. I wasn't speaking with any Germans, and my relations with the Turks weren't good either--they dismissed me as a half-crazed, effete intellectual. I wasn't seeing anyone, I wasn't talking to anyone, and I wasn't writing poems.' " (36)

"They had both inured themselves to defeat and to the pitiless unfairness of life." (57)

If Kars is the forgotten city, to whom does the disbanded memory belong?

Are the men impotent in Kars? Both Ka and Muhtar appear defeatist and self-pitying; Ka himself no longer produces poems, Muhtar cannot produce a child. The latter blamed his wife; the former his environs. Does KA do himself a great injustice by seeking to reclaim his potency in KArs? Why are the girls so unhappy that they kill themselves (remember: one of them is to be wed to an older man, another is shunned by her lover)? Why is the murderer concerned with unclad women (if not to remind him he is no longer manly)?

[I've been reading a lot of Freud.]

Getting away from sexuality...

Memory is afoot. All around the city are ghosts and shadows. The buildings mark the traces of history. Yet the silence of the snow washes away this important connection with the past. Instead, Kars is desolate, lonely, isolated, etc. I would wager that the collective unconscious is ever-present and manifests its repression in suicide, murder, and zealousness. [Yikes, Freud again.] To be sure, the city is none of these things. The common perception of Kars, as attributed to the characters by the narrator, belies a deep, more troublesome, hidden truth. Again, the shallowness of the despair will, I imagine, be shattered by the memory and life it suppresses.

TRAUMA causes impotency.

Ch. 1-7

The First Seven

The first thing that I want to mention is the general subject of this book as I see it, and as it is summed up in the review quoted on the cover (at least of my version): “[Pamuk is] narrating his country into being.”—Margaret Atwood NYTBR

Though, I am not sure that country is the right word for Atwood to use. It seems that the country, in terms of borders, laws and government, is there and has been for not quite a century. The word I would use is nation. This of course comes from the term nation-state—and I use state and country interchangeably here. The nation is the people and culture; the state or country is the legal, territorial and governmental. Turkey is a state that grew out of a multinational, predominantly Islamic empire. They are struggling to deal with that past in terms of the fragmentation and the tension between the vision put forward by their modern founder Ataturk and Islamist tendencies that hold a different vision of the future. Ataturk wanted the modern Turkey, which arose from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, to be a modern western country—nation-state. That means that it needs to be secular in many ways. The Islamists of course want something different.

I think the tension between the two is displayed quite well in chapter 5: the transcript from the assassination tape. The secularist insists that he is not doing anything negative or bad to the religious people and sees him self as fighting for freedom and human rights. The Islamist sees the secularist as an atheist who is forcing his godlessness on people of true faith—and as a result forcing them to kill and commit suicide. What is great is that these two characters talk AT each other in this chapter and not really to each other. They do listen but not really to understand just to find ‘sound bites’ to throw back at the other to try and prove their point. It is not a dialogue, nor is it an argument. Why I find it so great is that I think it shows the tone of much thought and dialogue between the ‘West’ and the Muslim world today. Much more can be said about this but I think it is a topic that will come up again later….

I find two things about the book weak or shallow at this point—though I hope they get worked-out later.

First, the way the story is being told. I am not sure what the benefit of the Third person narration is. Why is it Ka’s friend that tells the story to us and not Ka himself? There seems to be something awkward in that though I can’t put my finger on it. (It reminds me of the way Heart Of Darkness is narrated, the opening scene and all.) However, if the story ends up in a way that necessitates that—like if Ka gets killed—then it will be more understandable.

Second, Ka’s character seems very weak. (And I mean that both in the sense that he seems like a weak person and that the characterization Pamuk has done seems to be lacking in something.) This is another reason why I think it would be good to have the story told in the first person, because it would give more depth to the main character. The most interesting thing about him for me so far is the silence that he lives in. How this relates to him having lived in exile and to his writing are both things I hope get exposed more and more as the story goes on. And both of those things seem like they would be more central if Ka were telling the story. Then again, maybe that is exactly why Ka is not telling the story: Pamuk wants to focus not on the character but on the situation in Kars, in Turkey in general.

How Ka ends up in exile also seems weak and ends up adding to the weakness of his character. He was “tried for a hastily printed political article he had not even written [and] fled to Germany.” Not that I don’t buy that something like that could happen but it just seems to easy for this story. I know the main character ought to be neutral so that the tension in Kars can be better illuminated, in a more neutral way, but Ka seems to be a bit much. Couldn’t he have left for another reason and not as a political exile who is not even political? It just seems forced to me, too much fate and no will.

Then again as I write this it seems that Ka may need to be weak and a relative failure. (Twisted and turned by fate and not even acknowledging his own will.) This might be exactly what draws him to Kars. (And I can’t quite buy that he goes there just for the woman.) He is a failure and is drawn to a failing place that is filled with people like himself. Maybe Pamuk is trying to say that most Turks are failures because Turkey has not found its identity yet and so no one can be a successful Turk. If Turkey has not found itself then how can a Turk be a success? They would not know what to do, be or how to be… This could be promising.

And credit to AJ for picking a great place to make us stop reading. We end the week with suspense, waiting to meet the infamous Blue.

Other Highlights:

The Society of Animal Enthusiasts is the cockfighting club

Muhtar’s talk of his conversion and religion with out really a mention of God. This is curious and I want to watch it. Also Ka’s thoughts of a westerner with a individual faith in contrast to the necessarily communal faith of the Islamist.

Ka: “The thing that Saved me was not learning German. My body rejected the language, so I was able to preserve my purity and my soul.” This is funny and thought provoking at the same time.

Next up: Pamuk's Snow

Zo and I will read nobel prize winning author, Orhan Pamuk's, Snow. Our first posts should appear on Monday, July 16th on chapters 1-7. Please join us for discussion.