The Red and the Black, and the Other Colours (Colour Value in Orhan Pamuk’s Novels)
The Red and the Black, and the Other Colours (Colour Value in Orhan Pamuk’s Novels)

Summary/Abstract: Several books written by the best known contemporary Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk, make use of colour symbolism in a way that might well illustrate the literary pilgrim’s progress at the beginning of the 21st century. My Name Is Red, The Black Book, The White Castle, together with Other Colours and several chapters in Istanbul, Memories and the City orchestrate colour motifs into a secret language that encodes the questions, perplexities and dilemmas of the Eastern world venturing to cope with modernity and post-modernity clichés. Colour is the expressive means of another art – explicitly so with Orhan Pamuk, whose early experience as an “apprentice” painter pervades his identity as a writer – but the difficulty is still increased by the fact that colour is, meanwhile, the expressive means of another’s art – the art of the other, the man of a culture different from mine, who might appeal to chromatic effects in order to assert cultural difference itself. Wandering between East and West and able to feel at home in both Eastern and Western cultures (as he declares himself to be), Orhan Pamuk is one of those entitled to set the difference, because he simply knows where the difference lies. The author of My Name is Red and The Black Book invites the reader to break a two-lock cipher, requiring from his/her part a preliminary initiation; to fully taste the complexity of the colour symbolism, the reader must be fully aware of its cultural weight.

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