Orhan Pamuk'un Kar'ında epigrafik ilişkiler

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk’s political novel Snow’s multifaceted provocativeness is a conscious strategy of literary contrast designed to question all manner of prejudice. By attracting attention to the inaccuracy of stereotypical labels, the identity-related contradictions in the novel’s characters invite the reader to originality and individualism. The book’s illustration of opposites like white-black and heaven-hell using blurry shades of gray and pastels, as well as the snowflake diagram’s multidimensional symmetry, indicate the fundamental irreducibility of reality’s complexity. Within this context, the epigraphs quoted from Robert Browning’s “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”, Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma), Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (or The Demons or The Devils), and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes all bear significance for Snow. When the partly concrete, partly abstract similarities between Snow and its epigraphical sources are taken as the point of departure, several apparently significant structural contrasts stand out. Ultimately, this strategy of contrast can be evaluated as pluralist and antiOrientalist, as opposed to prejudiced and racist as widely supposed. Thus, more than mere deferential “tips of the hat” to the masters of the political novel genre, Snow’s epigraphs may be considered intertextual replies, parallels or parodies.