The black book (novel)

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The novel The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk was published in 1990 in Istanbul under the title Kara Kitap . The German translation by Ingrid Iren followed in 1994 by Hanser .

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The 33-year-old lawyer Galip is left by his wife and cousin Rüya at the beginning of the novel. His search for her leads him across the districts of Istanbul, through mosques and catacombs, bars, brothels and newspaper offices. Galip quickly suspects that Rüya is hiding with her half-brother Celâl, who has also disappeared 20 years older, a successful columnist and Galip's great role model, in one of the apartments he has kept secret. Celâl, as some of Galips' interlocutors suggest on the basis of his mysterious, cryptic newspaper articles, seems to be entangled in all sorts of dark machinations, with connections to the mafia, secret organizations, political groups and sects.

Since Galip cannot find Celâl, he looks for signs in his column, which repeatedly refers to the life of the family, but at the same time deals with the situation in Turkey, with its historical and current tension between Western Europe and the Orient, in a variety of ways grapples. In a text by Celâls about the drying up of the Bosporus, Galip thinks Celâl's secret invitation to Rüya to find her to leave Galip: “My life, my worry, my everything, the time of the visitation has begun, come to me wherever you are in a smoky office, in the acrid onion smell of a kitchen of a house full of clothes, or in the mess of a blue bedroom - no matter where you are, the time has come, come to me, because the time has come, one in silence and twilight Zimmer behind closed curtains to embrace each other with all their strength and to await death. ”(Part 1, Chapter 2) At the end of the novel, this message becomes recognizable as a premonition: Rüya and Celâl are murdered in front of Alaaddin's shop.

His search for Rüya and Celâl leads him across the districts of Istanbul: through mosques and catacombs with the Mars-Mannequins-Atelier of Master Bedii, a museum with life-size Turkish human dolls (2nd part, 6th chapter), bars in which the visitors tell their stories, a brothel in which a prostitute and her customers reproduce clichéd love scenes from well-known films in a Turkan Şoray imitation (Part 1, Chapter 13) and Celâl's newspaper office with research about his cousin.

These hikes also mean a search for the meaning of life, for personal identity and that of the country. The division into traditional ways of life and orientation in Western Europe can also be found in the protagonist's family: while he and his parents live in the old family unit, his uncle separated from his wife and son Celâl, lived in France and returned with a new wife and Daughter Rüya back. As a teenager, she sympathized with the inappropriate ideas of her half-brother and joined her first husband's socialist utopian ideas. Even after her disillusionment and return to the family, she seems to be indulging in previously unfulfilled dreams in her three-year marriage to Galip, reading crime novels and translating them into Turkish. Her husband notices her dissatisfaction with his lifestyle and is increasingly orienting himself towards his and Rüya's role model, Celâl. He hopes to win his wife's love if he becomes like her cousin. After Rüya's disappearance, reading Celâl's articles became his main occupation. He becomes increasingly entangled in the art of text interpretation, follows instructions from mystical interpreters of the Koran to decipher the secret symbols for the world hidden behind visible reality, searches for traces in Celâl's texts and finds literary and historical models. Galip processes this information on his hikes, gets to know people who are also in search of Celâl and the meaning of life like Mehmet and his wife Emine, who have a triangular relationship with the journalist similar to Galip and Rüya, and always slips more in his person: he lives in his apartment, sleeps in his bed, wears his clothes, reads his notes and with their help continues the column.

It is a search for identity in a world in which East and West intermingle, imitations and plagiarism pile up and in which nobody can “be themselves” anymore. The protagonist reflects two theories in literary fantasies and dreams: Prince Osman Celâlettin (Part 2, Chapter 16) tries to escape all external determinations by withdrawing from people into isolation, erasing his memories, burning all books and in the "great silence" in the "nothing" which seeks harmony and autonomy. However, the counter-model determines the main plot of the novel, the wanderings into the historical sediment layers in the fountain or labyrinthine shaft and tunnel underworld of the city (1st part, 18th chapter) or up to the minarets (1st part). Part, 17th chapter) with a view of the starry sky and the feeling of closeness to transcendence. Galip opts for the second path of complicated, nested life: in endless literary repetition and reshaping of ancient mythologies and histories, in their mixture between reality and fantasy, experienced history and the ever-increasing gaps in memory, he tries to find his own personality to become aware.

Literary form

Orhan Pamuk's book is a document of the turmoil, the vacillation of people between meaningless traditions, superstitions and Western models from great literature to film stars. When searching for the true sources of Turkish identity, he always comes across new mixes. These traces come together at the bottom of the Bosporus: crusaders and sultans, gangsters and hanged men, old coins and everyday objects form the soil on which Istanbul grows. In the old shafts you can find mystical texts, forgotten items of clothing, the bones of murdered people, a cabinet of wax figures that embody the people of Istanbul before the city lost its identity.

As in Vargas Llosa's novel Aunt Julia and the Art Writer, Pamuk mixes the narrative with contributions from the journalist, with the stories beginning to push their boundaries. Reality and column refer to each other, the characters from Celâl's stories appear in Galip's reality, become threatening, interpret Celâl's portrayal, and are also on the lookout for the lost author. In the end, the boundaries between identities fall. More and more Galip becomes Celâl, finally takes on his role, sits in one of Celâl's secret apartments and continues his columns.

The column contributions are small masterpieces that could also stand for themselves. In the parable “The Secret of Pictures” (14th chapter) a Beyoglu gangster commissions two pictures for the entrance hall of his establishment. In a competition for the most beautiful picture in Istanbul, two painters are to design the two side walls.

“... those present saw a wonderful picture of Istanbul on one wall, but on the other a mirror which, in the light of the silver candlesticks, rendered that picture more brilliant, more beautiful and more attractive than it actually was. The painter who hung the mirror got the prize, of course. "

The sophistication of this parable is not limited to the obvious preference for the mirror image, which is reminiscent of manifestos of European modern literature. The desire of the people to be shown in shiny, beautifying light is one aspect, another, that the gangsters as clients decide naturally for European forms of realistic painting and thus against the Muslim ban on images . The really fascinating thing, however, is the property of the mirror, not reproducing the real picture true to the original, but making small, malicious changes under the shiny surface. Even the original is not unimpressed by these forgeries, and when you look at it again, it also appears changed.

The reactions to the picture and its mirror can be understood as a parable for the text and the reader, as a “touchstone for the character”. If the mirror opens clues to a detective about a long-sought murderer, another finds his great love in the mirror, who in the painting was just "one of the bland, worried girls from some of his father's villages". While most of the guests rush past the paintings unimpressed, others find the images of their imagination here.

The black book also appears itself in paintings and mirrors, “in the mirror it had become a two-part, ambiguous, two-story book, but when you looked back at the first wall, the book turned out to be a whole from beginning to end, and the secret was gone inside him. "

This mirror parable is a key part of the novel and often recurs in various forms in the novel: z. For example, in the endless reflections of the young Rüya in a three-part dressing table mirror, in the "Key Story of the Great Mevlâna" (Part 2, Chapter 11) of labyrinthine suites of rooms, the doors of which open to ever new rooms, and the story of nesting when each other the children Rüya and Galip fall in love while reading a book together, in which the two main characters fall in love while reading a fairy tale, etc. etc. This mise-en-abyme technique is borrowed from the advertising of the picture in the picture quoted in the novel, in which the viewer is drawn into the scene. This is also where the “black book” described in the mirror cabinet gets its meaning. As in Gérard Genette's “narrative metalepse ” , the fictional plot crosses the boundaries of the reader's world: the author himself joins the fictional plot (2nd part, 17th chapter) and challenges his audience to become a writer himself and to fill the black pages of the novel, i.e. the gaps, with his imagination and thus to shape his “memory garden” and to become a different person, as Galip tries to do by continuing Celâl's column under his name, but him no longer imitated. Instead of working with his material collection and prop room, he writes his articles based on his own experiences. So he leads a "new life", at least when writing.

The peculiarity of this Pamuk novel is the self-reference, the self- reference, which multiplies the possible perspectives on the text. “Sham narratives. Art ornaments. Empty words. Many stories contain a paradox at the core, symbolizing the mystery and indecipherability of human existence . A game is addressed that the old Divan poets called tecahül-i arifane or 'pretending not to know any better'. "(9th chapter)

Celâl's columns reflect, reflect, interpret and change the events of the novel. At the same time, this duplication creates the desire in both the reader and the observer of the image and mirror to uncover the secret of the clues and changes. Restless like Galip, who reads the columns again and again in order to decipher them, the reader is inclined to leaf back through the book in order to follow the traces again. The world of the novel becomes a world of signs that refer to each other, but cannot be deciphered either by the characters or by the reader, since the statements of individual people offer different interpretations but are not led to a solution, e.g. B. who murdered Celâl and Rüya and for what motives, who Celâl really was and what political and personal relationships he had. Pamuk ties a Gordian knot that can only be undone by two murders that free Galip from his compulsion to imitate his cousin in order to win Rüya's love.

Literary sources

Orhan Pamuk covertly and openly processes diverse literary sources. Pamuk's novel appears as a manifesto of intertextuality , as a collage of European and Oriental texts and forms across the centuries. The names of the main characters already refer to Islamic mysticism, Celâl to Mevlâna Celâlettin Rumi , the master of Sufism and his verses of Masnawī , written in Persian in the 13th century , Galip to Sheikh Galip .

But it is not only these masters of oriental storytelling who fascinate Pamuk. Dostoyevsky's legend of the Grand Inquisitor in conversation with Jesus finds its ironic counterpart in the address of the Great Pasha to the arrested Mahdi. Like the Grand Inquisitor, the Pasha recognized the Redeemer, but successfully rejected his hopes: A military victory of the underdeveloped Orient over the West was out of the question. A war against internal enemies can only be waged with the help of "informers, executioners, policemen and torturers", one can present the guilty, but all of this has been done for 300 years. Should the Mahdi take the lead in such purges, sooner or later hope that something could be achieved would wane. But then at the latest the “belief in the book and the two worlds” will wane.

"When there is no longer a legend that they can believe in together, each of them will begin to believe their own story, each will have his own story, will want to tell his own story." (Part 1, Chapter 14)

Then, the great Pasha prophesies the Savior, the Mahdi Deccal, the devil, will be for the masses.

Edgar Allan Poe is quoted as the source of ideas on the subject of the beautiful woman who dies or disappears. Rilke's fascination with mirrors may be another source. But there are also everyday objects, puns (the revolutionary “Ali Wonderland”) and sentences (“Ingratitude is the West's reward.”) As well as parodies of the rainbow press (“an illegitimate daughter of the Shah of Persia and the English Queen”) in which East and West merge irredeemably. In a dream, one of the characters in the novel sees himself driving through Istanbul at night with the white-clad prophet Mohammed - in a 56 Chevrolet. Somebody is selling "magical tavla cubes ... which were carved from the thigh bone of the good millennial uncle called Santa Claus by the Europeans."

The tendency is clear: whether Ibn Arabis or Dante's pictures from the hereafter, whether Ibn Tufeyl's or Daniel Defoe's robinsonades , the question of who is the valid original leads to nothing but absurdities. For Pamuk, East and West are sources of equal value, with contrasts, aberrations, myths and ingenious writers. It is important to save them, the narrative art in the quality of the fairy tales from the Arabian Nights , to retain the humor in the inevitable penetration of cultures.