Orhan Pamuk'un Kar Romanında Doğu ve Batı Kimlikleri Arasındaki Etkileşime Analitik Bakış

Because Orhan Pamuk comes from a wealthy family, raised in the westernized district of Nişantaşı and graduated from the American Robert College in Istanbul, he is seen as a member of the secular elite by religious and nationalist groups in Turkey who ignore the literal content of his work. At the same time however, because of his critical attitude to the military and to the secularisation project of the early Republic, Pamuk is criticised by the secular elite for sympathising with religious groups. In response, he has responded in works such as Snow which act as a dual critique of both militant secularism and politicised Islam. Pamuk‟s works generally, and Snow in particular, argue there is a broad range of ideologies and perspectives in (re)constructing modern Turkish identity, and that individuals mostly do not wholly submit to one ideology exclusively. As Azade Seyhan observes, Pamuk‟s work gives no credence to “those who see him as a champion of modern Islam or who condemn him as an agent provocateur against the Kemalist reforms of the Republic.” In this work, I will demonstrate that Pamuk uses double-edged locations and characters, to both highlight oppositional dualisms, but also more importantly to show their entanglement, how they work in relation to one another. To do this I will first establish the attitudes within Turkey to the „old‟ East and the „new‟ West and how they have changed from the early 19th century to the modern era. I will then examine Pamuk‟s locating of Snow within Kars and how its architecture and environment are representative of the two-faces of Janus. Finally, I will closely analyse the character of Ka and his struggle to reconcile his default secularism and his emotional draw to faith. In doing so, a range of works from philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, literary theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, and on contemporary social commentators such as Meltem Ahiska, Zafer Şenocak, Azade Seyhan, and Fredric Jameson are considered.