Undoing “East” and “West” in Orhan Pamuk’s Novels: “A Novelist’s Politics” and the Idea of Europe

Abstract: Contemporary scholarship interprets the novels of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk as subverting the binary logic of ‘East’ and ‘West’ and the secular idea of Turkishness. I argue in my paper that Pamuk’s undoing of ‘East’ and ‘West’ and his criticism of the Turkish secular imaginary are part of a larger enterprise. Pamuk calls it “a novelist’s politics” (2007a, 229). This denotes the power of the writer’s imagination to create spaces of reflection that enable resistance to “pointless divisions” and can expand the ability to think about and understand “this other in whom everyone sees his opposite” (186). I contend that, particularly in The White Castle and in Istanbul: Memories and the City , Pamuk’s politics as a novelist is to make a compelling case for the power of border and contact zones, such as Istanbul and the Balkans to open the idea of Europe to processes of contestation, transformation, and reimagination.