Parameters of Orhan Pamuk's Metafictional Novel

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk's "Black Book" is a metafictional novel, which describes the history of the creation of the book. This text, which is based on the model of the postmodern labyrinth, tells the story of becoming a writer. However, against the background of the semantic relativity of discourses and creative strategies, when stable hierarchies are not deliberately built, the “root category” of the creative process is hidden in the depths of the novel. The Black Book in postmodernist typology shows the process of formation of the artist, which defines all the elements of the novel: Genre and thematic characteristics; The paradigm of time and space; The complex multi-layered structure of the text;; The fragmentation; Hyperlinking levels of textual semiotic structures; The `mise-en-abyme` technique. The Black Book is deeply related to the doppelgenger motif of the double. The characteristic feature of the novel of Orhan Pamuk is to represent the diversity of "truths" against the linear, deternemist perception of anthropocentric characteristic of traditional thinking. The basic paradigm of postmodernism philosophy lies in the fact, that the endlessness of the universe imparts its infinite interpretations, while "the mind is not the source of the power and uniqueness of man".

The Black Book is one of the most intertextual works of Orhan Pamuk. In the Black Book there are the allusions on other novels of Pamuk, his favorite works. Pamuk creates a special artistic reality, the world of books. In this hypertext, the narrative codes of classical Sufi works are compared with the characteristics of the Western novel and modern visions. As a result, the text becomes a meta-novel - a novel, where the object of artistic modeling is not life, but the space of texts. The construction of different discourses and paradigmatic chains can be considered the most productive feature of the novel. Essays and journalism, esoteric doctrines of Sufism, mystical and theological discourses, movie industry, politics are embedded in the artistic narrative of the novel. The issue of identity is strongly expressed. A polylogue of discourses, i.e. a dialogue of many participants develops in different parts of the novel. The apocalyptic image is saturated with the aesthetics of Hurufism and aims at the eschatological dramatization of the narrative. The intra-layer connections of many fragmented discourses included in the frame narrative of the novel form its unique whole, which is revealed in the paradigms organized by these fragments, the syntagmatic perception of the novel creates the impression of postmodernist "ordered chaos".

Orhan Pamuk's novel is not hierarchically built on one axis as monolithic system, it has rhizomatic nature and is transformed as the fragmentation principle in multi-level narrative. Orhan Pamuk refuses to idealize a man, shows his hidden sides, the psychological weaknesses and decentralizes a man. In postmodernism the unique, individual, authentic is condemned. Pamuk also shows that every "I" has at least one double. The Black Book clearly illustrates the parody and game principle characteristic of postmodern writing. In the novel coexists the polar origins: philosophical and satirical, tragic and fascinating, fantastic and realistic. It is based on the socio-religious parameters of the East-West overlap of the "unity of the confrontation" for fuming stylistics of Pamuk. The need to frame the story as a detective creates the category of the "metaphysical detective" with its illustrative thematic organization, namely: search for a missing person; "embedded" text; The meaninglessness of complaints; duplicate, lost, stolen or changed identities; failure to complete the investigation; A defeated detective. In the complex, multi-layered structure of the work, The Black Book can be considered a metaphysical detective story, a Künstlerroman, a philosophical work based on epistemological research.