The Universality of Human Experience

               Orhan Pamuk’s novel The White Castle sets up a direct confrontation of east and west in the form of Hoja, a Turkish scholar, and his newly acquired slave from Venice. But just as the two men are set up for a juxtaposition--an examination of eastern culture and learning versus western culture and learning--their differences are erased. The sovereign could have predicted this; he asks: “[M]ust one be a sultan to understand that men, in the four corners and seven climes of the world, all resembled one another?” (151). But Hoja discovers this truth over time and after much testing. On the military campaign in the Christian territories of Poland, he embarks on an inquisition of Christian villagers, asking for their “greatest transgression” (132). He would like to find the difference between “us” and “them” (119). Instead, he finds that Muslims “[make] more or less the same confessions and [tell] the same stories as their Christian neighbors” (135). He wondered if anything would change if Istanbul was taken over by his slave’s western empire: “[D]id defeat mean that people would change and alter their beliefs without noticing it?” (109). And Hoja’s slave doubts that it “would make [any] difference whether I became a Muslim or not” (41). Even the elevated matter of religion cannot serve to distinguish and separate people. The characteristics that define an eastern person from a western person--dress, education, language, religion--are dismissed as subject to chance. These coincidental attributes shrink in comparison to uniting forces of shared human experience.

                I have found that this is mostly true--at least at the elemental level. I have had the privilege of sharing feelings of sadness, apprehension, and joy with people from countries far from this one. Even while I may be differentiated from a Maasai woman of Tanzania by continent, economic system, class, race, and religion, we hold hands and laugh at the dancing men.