Abstract
Digging a Pit for Power in the Novel “Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın”
The East-West issue, which constituted the main thematic agenda of the Turkish novel from the 1970s to the 1940s, when class conflicts began to be discussed, has been a subject that Orhan Pamuk has emphasized in almost all of his novels since his first novel. Orhan Pamuk, who deals with the reality of the Turkish society, which experiences the conditions of being in a position between East and West geographically and culturally, in his novels, constructs the novel “Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın”on the basis of two texts, one of the East and the other of the West. In addition, he designs the fiction of the novel in the axis of the meaning that Eastern and Western thought ascribe to the relationship between competence and subject and their attitudes towards these two phenomena. The relationship between competence and the subject, which is handled through the symbols of father/son, master/apprentice in the novel, is made the subject of discussion and comparison through texts/narratives built by Eastern and Western societies and reflecting the collective subconscious. In the novel, which focuses on the conflict between the father, who is the representative figure of competence, and the son who tries to be himself against him, the cultures of obedience to power and rebellion are examined in the context of the narratives of King Oedipus and Rüstem and Sührab, in which the subject novel has an intense intertextual relationship. In this study, the relationship between authority/competence and the subject in the novel “Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın” and the son's effort to realize himself in the face of authority were emphasized.
Keywords
Orhan Pamuk, Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın, competence, East-West.