Occulted Texts: Pamuk’s Untranslated Novels

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk’s mature fiction belongs to the post-1980 “Third Republic,” a period characterized by Turkey’s gradual neoliberal integration into global networks.¹ In terms of the Turkish novel, this was a profound period of literary innovation under the influence of international postmodernism. Nevertheless, Pamuk began writing in the early 1970s, in a Cold War era marked by social realism known as the “Second Republic” (between the 1960 and 1980 military coups). His novels consequently developed through layers of literary modernity, establishing a catalogue or a palimpsest of genres, techniques, and styles. Extraordinary in its breadth, Pamuk’s oeuvre moves from the social realism of Cevdet Bey and Sons to the multiperspectival modernism of the Silent House; from the Ottoman historical allegory of The White Castle to the cosmopolitan intertext of Eastern and Western forms in The Black Book; from the mystical Sufi metafiction of The New Life to the historiographic postmodernism of My Name is Red; and from the violent ideological conversions of Snow to the unrequited love and Istanbul material culture of The Museum of Innocence. His eight novels published between 1982 and 2008 (in Turkish) trace his development from national litterateur to global author, redefining dominant literary tropes in the process.²