In his book Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, Girard looks at literary texts in accordance with how desire is positioned in a specific work. To make my case more credible I need to formulate it into a schematic representation and I’ll do that with some help from René Girard, who came up with the most effective formula about this matter. The top vertex of this triangular structure changes throughout the novel. The story of the father-and-son relationship revolves around that centerpiece. The novel’s fictional structure in the style of a helix that goes deeper as the story progresses has the Red-Haired Woman at its center. This incident, while keeping Cem’s thoughts busy all through his life, apparently was also meant to destroy him eventually. Let me explain: The novel revolves around a situation faced by a fifteen-year-old Cem, who dreams of becoming a writer but ends up an engineer, during his time digging wells in the town of Öngören to make money for his education after his father walks out on them. Certainly I do not oppose these arguments but I retain my right to think they are incomplete. What is The Red-Haired Woman’s point? After the book’s release, topics of debate surrounding the novel included the father-son dynamic and the East-West divide. The text gets clad in all kinds of colors, and in the meantime it does give a bit away… Let me explain my point. In The Red-Haired Woman, ( Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın) the point is entirely about not revealing much. He gave an account of his reasons for writing in his Nobel Literature Prize acceptance speech “My Father’s Suitcase” - “revealing one’s true color” was the sum of all those reasons, remember?

However, I believe readers can follow his trail as the author also gets clad in his very own color while “not revealing his true color despite getting clad in all kinds of colors,” and this way see Pamuk’s possible true colors. Let us recall the epigraph of Öteki Renkler( Other Colors), the book of essays billed by the author Orhan Pamuk as the one in which he “reveals the most” about himself: The epigraph is a line from Şeyh Galip, or Galip Dede, which reads, “Get clad in any color, but don’t reveal your color.” This epigraph is “actually” the golden rule that governs Orhan Pamuk’s writing.

Until drowns.”Īhmet Hamdi Tanpınar, “Yaz Gecesi” (Summer Night) “ Something resembling a well… Once you’re in it, you’ll only go deeper and deeper… But in the meantime I’ll listen.

Manzaradan Parçalar by Orhan Pamuk