The White Castle, The Theologians, and The Bear

(Kamianets-Podilskyi Castle in Ukraine, which I have never seen, but which may indirectly have something to do with Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle)

 We read Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle for class this week. My favorite Pamuk novel is My Name is Red, set among paranoid and murderous miniaturists in sixteenth century Istanbul. But My Name is Red is far too long for assigning as one week's reading, so I opted for the relatively economical White Castle, set among paranoid and self-destructive astronomers in seventeenth-century Istanbul. 

The narrator is a Venetian nobleman captured and enslaved by a content pasha, then paired off with and ultimately given to a spiteful, insecure would-be scientist referred to only as Hoja, the teacher. The narrator and the Hoja share an uncanny resemblance and become obsessed with each other. Their identities become so confused that ultimately the reader cannot be sure who is speaking, or (spoiler alert) if they are the same person, or if one is the hallucination of the other, or something like that. 

As a doppelgänger tale, The White Castle has a noble lineage, descending from Norse mythology through A Tale of Two Cities right up to Enemy. 

As a tale of obsessive jealousy among sniping intellectuals, it has a shorter but no less noble lineage, one that stems from Jorge Luis Borges's short fiction "The Theologians" and passes at most through Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire on the way to The White Castle. Pamuk is an avowed admirer of both Borges and Nabokov—The White Castle seems to me more deeply indebted to the former, and it sent me back to re-read "The Theologians."

In "The Theologians," the petty, plodding Aurelian—a fictional Byzantine theologian—spends his futile career attempting to surpass his rival, John of Pannonia, in brilliance and influence. Incapable of besting the limpid Pannonia, Aurelian opts to destroy him by using Pannonia's own words. Early in his career, Pannonia had refuted the heresy of the Monotoni, who believed that the universe is an endless cycle and that all events are repeated eternally. In an elegant argument, Pannonia had proven—or appeared to prove—that each moment, like each person, is unique. 

Decades later, Aurelian uses Pannonia's argument as an example of the thinking that has led to another heresy, that of the Histrioni, who commit abominations in the belief that no act can be repeated (and therefore to murder now is to prevent a murder in the future). As Aurelian foresees, the argument leads irrevocably to the burning of Pannonia at the stake.

Destroying Pannonia by parroting his words, while inverting their meaning, Aurelian in effect becomes his rival—or the distorted reflection of his rival—and destroys himself. The clincher is that in the afterworld the two men are indistinguishable: "in paradise, Aurelian discovered that in the eyes of the unfathomable deity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox and the heretic, the abominator and the abominated, the accuser and the victim) were a single person."

"The Theologians" is eighteen pages long. The White Castle tells essentially the same story, with a few digressions and ambiguities, in 164 pages. This is something of a theme in Pamuk's career—as Elif Batuman put it in this review of Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, "Borges could have written a four-page story about the madman who builds a museum while writing a novel about building the museum, but Pamuk wrote the novel, built the museum, and then wrote a book-length catalogue about it."

Hey, more power to him. In this regard, Pamuk is uncannily similar—a Turkish double, perhaps?—to his fellow Nobelist José Saramago, another prolix descendant of the unbeatably concise Borges. (Not coincidentally, Saramago is the author of the novel on which Enemy is based.) Saramago and Pamuk are both products of the third generation of the slow migration of fantastical realism from the US South to the Global South, by way of Latin America. And if that garners new readers and prizes, so much the better. 

My real point, reached with Aurelian divagation rather than Pannonian concision, is about the passing of time. I first read "The Theologians" when I myself was in college. Somehow on that first reading I failed to grasp the uncompromising nature of the fiction's conclusion. I thought Aurelian was the bad guy and Pannonia the good guy, because Aurelian was the bad writer and Pannonia the good writer. But Borges was playing the long game, and in the long view contrasting style didn't make a difference—Aurelian and Pannonia were both competing to burn heretics at the stake. How did I miss that?

I happened to return from class and find that today's Poem of the Day, delivered unfailingly as ever to my inbox by Poetry Foundation, was Galway Kinnell's "The Bear," another work I first read, or misread, long ago in college. "The Bear" is itself a tale of doubling, where a bear hunter becomes the bear (not unlike the way Bill Murray becomes the gopher in Caddyshack, but with fewer divots). How did I misread it? First of all, I had somehow assumed it was autobiographical, and that Galway Kinnell had actually spent his autumns tracking bear spoor for days, then dressing himself in the carcass of the defeated animal to keep from freezing. This now strikes me as a dubious assumption about an Ivy League poet.

I also had somehow missed that the narrator of "The Bear" kills his prey by tricking him into a swallowing a blubber-coated wolf's rib, whittled to a point at both ends, which pierces the bear's organs from within. Gross! 

If I missed this basic element of the poem, right there in plain language, what else did I miss, and what am I missing now? Will I re-read "The Theologians" twenty years from now and find it new again? Probably. 

The eponymous castle in Pamuk's novel is in the vague, snowy north, perhaps somewhere in Podolia (roughly what is now the Transnistria/Moldova/Ukraine frontier) which the Ottomans struggled to capture and failed to control in the period in which the book is set. Hence the image at the top of the page. Metaphorically, the castle—called Doppio, a reference that might have seemed more abstruse before Starbuck's made doppio macchiato a global buzzphrase—is the imagined other who cannot be conquered, because he is a distorted reflection of ourselves. Like Pannonia to Aurelian, like the Venetian to the Hoja.  

After wandering through the book and confronting the strange reflections of my youthful readings of related texts, I feel that same sense of watching the imagined destination retreat along snowy roads, out of reach. It turns out the real doubling that happens in life is not that of shadowy doppelgängers but the doubling of older and younger selves. That young reader of "The Theologians" and "The Bear" is immediately identifiable but already beyond my grasp. That future self is waiting, not so patiently, around the corner. And there goes the bear, always just over the next hill, staggering on.