Tales From Byzantium: Old and Retold - Review of Orhan Pamuk's Red-Haired Woman

The Red Haired Woman (Penguin Random House, India 2017)

Tales From Byzantium, Old & Retold
 
The story centres on the competing tensions of love and the urge for individuation in father/son relationships spanning three generations, drawn together by the bonds these old and young men all had, unknown to each other, with the woman in the title, a charismatic theatre actress from a travelling troupe. The woman herself speaks only at the end of the 3 part narrative, which is the shortest part of the story. I thought on first reading the story that this truncated space allocated to the woman who is the im/moral centre of the narrative was a deliberate act of narrative showcasing, subverting tales of male heroes who are the subject of the great myths and legends of the world. Woman as reduced subject, relegated to the sexualised roles of lover, mistress and mother. On second and third reading, I still think so. But I am not certain if what is showcased is the sexism of patriarchal societies perpetuated throughout the ages, or a protest against it. Why is the woman in the title only allowed to put forward her perspective on the events at the end, and her explanatory narrative relegated to a post-script? Why is she mostly seen, and so relatively little heard?

Part 1 is told by a young man who works for a summer as an apprentice to a master well-maker.i in Turkey in the mid-1980s. Impatient, impulsive, distracted by his own aspirations and longings for love and success, the boy's adolescent energy clashes fundamentally with the older man's hopes to train him. Pamuk has said in an interview that he wove this story around his daily observations of two men who were working together on a well-digging project on a property close to where he himself lived.

This organic, natural affiliation, two people of different ages and from different backgrounds working together on a vital task, is the framework on which the narrative is built: the significances of their everyday contact, at the nexus of their lives. The master/apprentice dynamic is fraught with issues of loyalty, trust, gratitude and annoyance, suspicion, projection and partial misunderstanding.

The narrative is like a Byzantine mosaic. Creating a well in a dry land is both factual and allegorical: the imposition of a linear goal onto a cyclic, chaotic, karma-infused world.

    The master well-maker's acts of continuity show his wish to establish a legacy through imparting his wisdom to the young man, by day in the skilled creation of wells in a land where water is scarce, and at night through the telling of stories.

A master story teller can do this: take an everyday task and open it up, in a matter of fact way. Things get derailed, due to human ego and emotion. Sparks of other people's lives infiltrate the old stag/young stag primal mythology, the family romance. Time in this tale folds and creates its music like an accordion, and only in its opening and closing motions do we understand the apparent inevitability of the enactment of old patriarchal fables in the storyline.

    Pamuk creates a light, buzzy, first person sensory canvas for the young man's initial story, and  contrasts it with a telescoped, truncated summing up, devoid of poetry in the second part, as the young man turns into a middle-aged materialist, commercially successful, childless and cut off from his young man's dreams of becoming a writer.  A telling phrase associated with well-making can be used to unpack the freighted interlocked stories with their heavy allusions and ironies: 'We set to work inside the circles', says the young man, with fatigue and irony in his tone.

      The woman in the story, operating as mistress, wife, sexual awakener, lover, muse and mother, is important to the young narcissist only, as he says, because her gaze made him feel 'as if she'd seen something unusual in me'. He calls her 'the cause of his gladness', yet he fails to secure or sustain her. She falls through the hands of three generations of men, like a treasure they do not deserve, like water in a dry land.

      It is a tragic story, in the strict ancient sense: a human being throws away, and damages, with his own hands, what could liberate and fulfil him. He acts blindly, and angers and hurts and harms those around him. And much is lost, because the clear wisdom, the moral at the end of the Morality Tales are only partially listened to, and thus imperfectly understood.

    It is a pitiless story - there appears to be no redemption available to any of the protagonists. Their grapplings with each other, for love and ascendancy and mastery, end in irretrievable loss rather than gain, for all concerned. The central scene of confrontation between father and son, taking place at the end of the second part, and at the underground site of the accident which ends the first part, is the chthonic knot of the story. Unfinished business is completed, and as the primal Laws of Causality inexorably apply, the subterranean act that completes one thread of destiny initiates another through its impact.

     It is a maze, exemplified in words. And at the centre, is a monster, half man and half damaged boy.

 

Little Golden Books - Short Story

Little Golden Books                                   (C) Devika Brendon 2017 

I used to feel it a lot, when I was younger. The sense of bitumen, laid smoothly over something so much wilder, and more complex. The awareness of what exists, past the boundaries of the nature strip. 

It is a great country, you know. The imposition of imported demarcations. The controlled clearing, the pushing back of what was there before the projection and provision of what is convenient and effective has been successful, and efficient. 

But it is strange, to be so cut off: to find oneself continuously moving across this pre-arrayed sequence of neatened surfaces. The strangest thing is how normal it mostly all feels, here, in the present day. 

The settlers chose safety. They recreated what made them feel at home, and laid it down, with ordinances and sub clauses and admirably calm reliance on the Rule of Law. 

And everything is pretty clean. And everything works. 

But, at times, the neatness and convenience is repulsive. It shuts us out. As if the buildings are inaccessible, and the constructions have no aperture. 

In this country, the bins have liners. There are signs which prompt and alert us to the outlying hazards and dangers. 

I teach Higher School Certificate English, in Sydney, and one of the poems set for study this year is Robert Gray's 'Flames And Dangling Wire'. I think of its images today, as I look at the City through the filter of my mind's eye. As he noted, it all appears from a distance like stencilled shapes in a smoky haze. The sandstone, and the glass and steel towers, and the domes, sometimes seem as if they are all about to evaporate. 

The lightly muscled waters, sleek and tense and coiled, warily in wait. The layers of covering seem like a patina, and the modern discourses we engage in proliferate, like hastily scribbled annotations on an older, less legible manuscript. 

Have you heard the invocations of the original custodians of the land, at each public gathering? Do we know what we are collectively treading on? Under the carpet and the stone and the poured concrete? 

A few months ago, on a jewelled day in winter, I was at High Tea in Curzon Hall, where - years ago - my Anglican Girls' School had its Year 12 Formal. This occasion, sumptuous, replete and complete, with sandwiches and choux pastries and bubbly, was probably named 'The Heritage Afternoon Tea Package'. 

The soaring ceilings, the crystal fountain. The heritage. Well brought up, older Anglo Australians, so beautifully put together, so elegant and composed and refined and enclosed. Celebrating 200 years of the life of Jane Austen, in The Regency Room. 

 An avuncular older gentleman at my table, making conversation. Proffering platters of gourmet sandwiches, salmon slices and avocado. The refinements and courtesies. 

Every faux velvet chair with a cushion, each with its own cushion cover. 

And he was wondering what I was doing there. Politely, of course. 

Perhaps it is that generation. Modelling themselves on what they hold dear. One evening, at the Opera House, in the interval of a performance of 'Rigoletto', I think it was, my friend and I were sitting in the foyer with our charged glasses. And an elderly lady asked me, politely, where I was from. Did she mean, how long had I been in Australia? 

'I grew up here', I replied, with a smile. She seemed surprised. That I could speak English? That my Korean friend and I were enjoying the opera? An Italian opera, with English subtitles? I got the sense that she felt that we were invading her space. That she found it offensive that we were so much at ease. Strange though that seems. A brown skinned girl, and a golden boy, in faultless evening dress, observing the cultural codes, in a white building with its structures like sails, on a dark sea that predates all immigration. 

So I conversed, with this older gentleman, my High Tea companion, in Curzon Hall, in the acceptable way, of how long I had studied and taught English Literature. He seemed really interested, in what I had to say. 

And somehow it came up that I was born on Australia Day. Celebration of settlement. Tall ships, and fireworks and drunken outpourings of bonhomie. 

And he said, 'They are wanting to change the day of national celebration, you know. Change the name of it. To Invasion Day'. 

'They?', I courteously enquired, with all the color and heat of fireworks inside me, on interior display. 

What did he call them, amongst his own kind? Abos? Boongs? Coons? But to me, in The Regency Room, amidst the rituals of the 200 year Celebration High Tea, under the soaring ceilings, in the sandstone building wrought by Empire, of course, he uses proper names: Original Australians, Indigenous People. 

He does not use the word 'native', with me looking at him, with my big, dark eyes. Good choice. 

And stray sparks from the interior fireworks display lights up a little bit of the vast unexplored landscape, cut off inside. 

And so I say, 'Well, it's pretty easy to understand where they are coming from on this issue, isn't it? I mean, they were invaded, their culture destroyed, etc. etc. So many ways of erasing them have been tried. Why would they want to celebrate that? Seen in that way, to expect them to participate in celebrating that event, is to expect them to swallow a pretty unforgivable insult. Is it not?' 

He smiled, a little uneasily. I think he wanted to say, 'Come on, young lady, it's not that bad. No need to take that tone'. 

And so I say, 'It's a fact, isn't it? Generally agreed on? Universally acknowledged? It's happened a lot, all over the world. Thriving 21st century economies, First World nations, built fair and square - on genocide? And everything was founded on that, right from first contact.'

Rule of Law, built on fundamental beliefs and deeply venerated truths, of supremacy and hierarchy and assumptions, like his. Consensus. 

And when he took his leave, at the end of the occasion, he thanked me and said I was a breath of fresh air. 

He was not an unkind man. Just a person profoundly unaware of what lay beyond the pale.