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.
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.
