Writing About Oneself and the Difficulty of Telling Nothing But the Truth

                The failure of memory is common to all people, but it presents a special difficulty to the memoirists--to those whose purpose is to catalogue the happenings of their lives and the lives of those around them. It is this particular task Orhan Pamuk intends to complete in his own memoir Istanbul and that Pamuk’s character Hoja intends to complete in the novel The White Castle. While others’ stories and influences shape the writers’ memories, the task of the memoirist persists. Perhaps this serves to prove that the primary intention of the memoirist and the writer is not to communicate facts but to capture life as it is experienced in an attempt to connect to readers.

                In the first chapter of his memoir, Pamuk admits the challenge of distinguishing between what has been constructed as “memories” in our own minds and what has actually happened. Pamuk writes of the possibility of reconstructed memories resembling the hagiographies of the saints: “[O]ur cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, [become] stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale of some other person” (8). But he does not attempt to combat this phenomenon. In fact, Pamuk confesses to framing his own story in this way: “I’d have liked to write my entire story this way--as if my life were something that happened to someone else, as if it were a dream in which I felt my voice fading and my will succumbing to enchantment” (8). Perhaps, Pamuk asserts, the “memories” offered by others become more influential than our own memories: “Once imprinted in our minds, other people’s report of what we’ve done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember” (8). Even more, it is not just the stories told by our parents and families that inform the “reinvention” of our childhoods: “In later years, when I was reinventing the Istanbul of my childhood with the black-and-white pictures in my mind, elements of these writers’ Istanbul blended together, and it became impossible to think about the city, even my own city, without thinking of them all” (108). Given the nature of our memories and their vulnerability to various influences, the task of relaying an objective account of one’s life nears impossible.

                Ultimately, these supplementary influences on “memories” lead to Pamuk’s explicit warning and confession: “So anyone reading these pages should bear in mind that I am prone to exaggeration” (295). At the same time, however, Pamuk argues that the actual factuality of the elements of the writing is not the absolute intention. Instead, a memoir’s “symmetry” may be prioritized above its “factual accuracy,” just as “shape” is more important than “reality” in painting and the “ordering” of events supersedes “the course of events” in novels (295). Pamuk’s goal in his writing is not to inform his readers of the exact happenings of his life, but rather to “put these images into written words, find the language to express this dark spirit, this tired and mysterious confusion” (360). He realizes that “there is a difference between facts and stories” while at the same time seeing a necessity for a “hierarchical logic that gives some things more importance than others” (166). Recognizing the differences between “fact” and “story” may be an important practice for the reader, but making the exact distinctions among the details of the text may in fact detract from the experience of the text.

                Interestingly, this struggle between capturing one’s life accurately and the tricks played on the mind and memory continues in Pamuk’s intentionally fictional work. Pamuk’s created characters Hoja and his slave in the novel The White Castle embark on a mission to write a treatise entitled “Why I Am What I Am” (64). The writer was to “work out who [he] was and write it down” (60). However, Hoja’s anxiety about what others will think of his work paralyzes his honesty. Though he sets out to write the truths about himself, he ends up writing “nothing but reasons why ‘they’ [i.e., the Westerners] were so inferior and stupid” (64). At the same time, Hoja finds himself unable “to write without first hearing [his slave’s] opinion of his ideas” (54). Hoja’s obsession with the judgment of his readers keeps him from being unashamedly honest in his writing.

The treatise “Why I Am What I Am” was also to include the details of the author’s life so far. Hoja is prone to the same exaggeration to which Pamuk admits in his memoir Istanbul, as Hoja’s slave points out: “I learned that he also had been the most intelligent, cleverest, most diligent, and the strongest of his brothers; he had also been the most honest” (63). But Hoja’s slave, too, affirms that some manipulation may be necessary to create a captivating story: “I remembered I’d once planned to write my memoirs when I returned to my country: when I said I might one day make a good story of his adventures, he looked at me in disgust” (85). The theme of somehow enhancing the characters of a story to make the reading more enjoyable continues as The White Castle’s narrator claims, “For the sake of my readers in that terrible world to come, I did all I could to make both myself and Him, who I could not separate from myself, come alive in the story” (155). Again, the speaker of the novel argues that this manipulation of the characters and events does the readers a favor, saying that his task is to “dream up something my reader would find believable and try to make the details enjoyable” (61). Some amount of invention seems inextricable from the act of writing about the past.

                Between his memoir Istanbul and his novel The White Castle, Orhan Pamuk offers a strong argument that writing about oneself is a process plagued by a relativity of truth. Still, this process is worth the struggle; the speaker of The White Castle “believe[s] in [his] story” (157). Though Istanbul and the works produced by the characters in The White Castle may not achieve factual accuracy, they do succeed in the task of creating stories with which readers can connect and glean from. According to Pamuk, the latter is priority.