No, Not the Sliders White Castle

The White Castle – Orhan Pamuk

My ambition for the last year or so has been to read more modernist and post-modernist fiction so I was pleased when a used book sale coughed up this 1985 novel, the first that gained praise for the author of Snow and My Name is Red.

The setting is Istanbul in the 17^th century. Our narrator is a young Venetian scholar who was taken prisoner by Ottoman pirates and sold as chattel to a teacher and intellectual named Hoja (master). Our narrator and Hoja resemble each other physically and both are highly educated for their time. Lucky our narrator is a quick study and learns the devilishly hard Turkish language quickly. Conversing in a common language is a double-edged sword. They see how similar they are to each other – both having wide ranging intellectual interests in astronomy, the natural sciences, engineering, medicine and architecture – but also realize they have large personal and cultural differences.

The novel examines the master and slave relationship. Unsurprisingly, this unequal economic relationship between two people prevents understanding and sympathy. Furthermore since their relationship is so tilted to the master-owner’s side, they alienate each other and come to hate each other to the point where they want to kill each other. The novel mainly tells about the psychological cat and mouse between these two protagonists.

The novel also discusses the uneasy relationship of royalty and factions of influencers in a court. Hoja meets the very young sultan and impresses the youngster with pseudo-scientific gibberish and wondrous stories faraway places and fantastical beasts. Hoja’s learning and fluency are impressive enough that he is appointed chief astrologer. Pamuk helps us see the precarious place of science and Western knowledge versus an established state religion and folk superstition in a pre-modern empire.

Fortunetelling is based on the interpretations of dreams and daily events, and technology based on science is accepted only insofar as it delivers practical results, such as building siege engines and inventing an absurdly unwieldy weapon that sounds like a tank cannon.  Still even the most benighted soothsayer and bigoted sycophant seem to assume science comes from the West, that any genuine scientific work must be reviewed and approved by the West, and that this never-ending process of generating knowledge is one of the deep differences between East and West.

An epidemic of bubonic plague breaks out. While our two educated protagonists are trying to stem the progress of the pestilence, they are also conducting research on proto-cognitive psychology in order to identify mental processes like learning, memory, perception, and problem-solving. Hoja is too smart to understand why people are so damn dumb and bores the Venetian with rants stuck on the question “How can conservatives be so damn dumb and still manage to be so damn influential?”

In this novel the presence of the bubonic plague will eerily evoke memories and emotions associated with our three summers dealing with the virus. The sultan and his advisors set rules keeping strangers away from the palace. They debate messaging about social distancing in the general population. Factions have a familiar furious debate about lockdowns. One side claims closing down markets, shops, bathhouses and spectacles will slow the spread and save lives. The other side says the economic impact will be too severe. The two intellectuals in our story apply early epidemiological and statistical methods to understand the spread. They are also pressured by the sultan to predict when the epidemic will end. They work in fear of “idiot imams” who publicly warn it is going against God’s will to control the spread, that it is the intention of Heaven to take those fated to die of the plague and wrong to interfere with divine intentions.

The ending is contrived and unbelievable, making me suspicion that postmodernist writers don't know how to end novels. My other criticism would be that the tempo becomes markedly deliberate in the middle of the book. It felt for a time as if I were reading the same process over and over again, though one wonders if we readers were supposed to feel the frustration of the Venetian’s involuntary inertia and indolence, enslaved and passive, seeing no chance of seeing his native country or people ever again. Plus, I felt the perennial feeling that reading in translation I was missing intertextual elements. I know zilch about Turkish literature, nor do I have any sense of Pamuk’s risk-taking when criticizing, or being perceived to criticize, Turkish culture, in either 1985 or 2022.