Journal of Arts, Culture, Philosophy, Religion, Language and Literature
e-ISSN: 2457-0346, Volume-1, Issue-3, September-December, 2017; pp. 96-100
© Kavita Publishers and Distributors under Dr. Govind Chandra Mishra Educational Foundation
http://www.gcmishraedu.com/Publications.html
‘Humanity at Large?’: The Contesting Tropes of
Patriotism and Cosmopolitan in Orhan Pamuk’s
The Silent House, The White Castle and Snow
Nasir Faried Butt
Department of English Central University Jammu, J&K-181143
E-mail: nasirbutt010@gmail.com
Abstract—In today’s world, when no nation or culture can remain
isolated and pure, it is imperative to expand the concentric circles of
belonging to the global level. Cosmopolitanism, as Nussbaum
believes means to expand one’s allegiance from local, ethnic and
expand it from national through international. This is the possible
way to hormonise the world under one “global village.” The paper
analyses three novels of Orhan Pamuk—The White Castle, Snow and
The Silent House—through the perspective of “cosmopolitanism” as
propagated by Martha C Nussbaum. The paper works on the
proposition that Orhan Pamuk deals with the cultural tropes that
zero down to the cosmopolitan worldview as a solution to the
conflicts and chaos in the Turkish Post-Kemalist socio-political
scenario. Pamuk’s characters are complex, representing different
concentric circles of allegiance and ideologies, yet there are many
characters in his novels who are embodiment of international
belongingness as well as rootedness in one’s national identity.
Turkish nationalism, as is evident from her modern history, is a
matter of multiple ideologies, such as, Islamist nationalism, Left-wing
nationalism, Extreme Right wing nationalism, Modernist nationalism
and many other subnational identities and ideologies like Armenian
and Kurdish ones. In this paper, it will be an andeavour to analyse
the nationalism in Turkey and trace out the ‘international’ and
‘cosmopolitan’ to see how far Pamuk’s novels take such ideas that
contest against one another; and how far does Pamuk make his
characters to “imagine others” that would expand their imaginations
to “humanity at large” as propounded by the thinkers right from the
Stoic philosophy of the ancient Greeks through the enlightenment
thinkers to the modern ones like Nussbaum and others.
Keywords: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, Ambivalence, Turkish
Culture, Orhan Pamuk.
Cosmopolitanism is a concept that originated during the
ancient classical period in the Stoic philosophyi of Diogenes.
The idea was renewed and reinvented by Martha C Nussbaum,
in her essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” It was
Diogenes the Cynic who initially proposed all men of wisdom
belonged to a single moral community that he optimistically
described as a city of the worldii. Nussbaum develops her
concept of cosmopolitanism by taking a cue from Tagore’s
character Nikhil in The Home and the Worldiii
“I am willing," he said, "to serve my country; but my
worship I reserve for right which is far greater than my
country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse
upon it." (qtd. in Nussbaum 3)
Nussbaum believes that the “emphasis on patriotic pride
is both morally dangerous and subversive of the goal
patriotism sets out to serve—for example . . . the ideals of
justice and equality” (4). These goals, Nussbaum argues,
“would be better served by an ideal that is in any case more
adequate to our situation in the contemporary world, namely
the very old ideal of the cosmopolitan, the person whose
allegiance is to the worldwide community of human beings”
(4). Nussbaum criticizes the notion of “extreme nationalism”
and believes that nationalism and “ethnocentric particularism
are not alien to one another, but akin . . .” (5). This entails
loyalty to more narrow spheres culminating in the excessive
belonging to a small group, say family, and rejection of
loyalty to the outer spheres, say, society or nation.
Cosmopolitanism demands recognition of all the nations and
peoples of the world as basically identical and equal. It
demands a vision that transcends the local allegiances within
national border and seeks allegiance to the humanity at large
which makes the essence of international identity. Nussbaum’s
idea of Cosmopolitanism is although criticized on the grounds
that nationality and patriotism cannot be substituted by
universalism and that it is difficult to imagine others.iv
However Amartya Sen supports Nussbaum’s stand: “The
importance of Nussbaum's focus on world citizenship lies in
correcting a serious neglect—that of the interest of people who
are not related to us through, say, kinship or community or
nationality. The assertion that one's fundamental allegiance is
to humanity at large brings every other person into the domain
of concern, without eliminating anyone” (Sen 114). Robert
Finev believes that the emergence of cosmopolitan right is
necessary and possible because of growing inter-societal
relationship in the modern world. Fine impresses on the role
of imagining other to attain mutual recognition of different
cultures and societies as equals:
‘Humanity at Large?’: The Contesting Tropes of Patriotism and Cosmopolitan in Orhan Pamuk’s The Silent House,
The White Castle and Snow
Subjectively, cosmopolitanism is a form of consciousness
that involves an understanding of the concept of
cosmopolitanism and a capacity to deploy this concept in
imaginative and reflective ways. The ‘objective’ and
‘subjective’ aspects of cosmopolitanism belong closely
together. The concept is nothing without its uses. It is the
social form in which human beings struggle for mutual
recognition as equals in the context of our multiple
differences. (Fine xiii)
The ‘new cosmopolitanism’ is the revival of the ideals of
“universal history, perpetual peace and cosmopolitan justice”
developed by Kant during the Enlightenment period around
the time of French Revolution (Naseem and Margison 40).vi
Universal identity, reason, “imagining of other” and ever
expanding “concentric circles” of alliance are the basic tenets
of Cosmopolitanism. To be cosmopolitan is to be free from
excessive national bondage of loyalty—however not
completely negating the local and national alliance. It is to be
free from the prejudices and skepticism to diversity and
difference on international level.
Making the above key terms a matrix for analysis, the
paper analyses the clash and interaction of different cultures
broadly underlined as the East and the West focusing on
Pamuk’s Pamuk’s novels, The Silemt House and Snow.
Pamuk crosses national boundaries and writes about the
situations and characters that belong not to a particular nation
but are taken from different cultures across the borders.
Dealing with such international cultural encounters, Pamuk is
well known as a cosmopolitan novelist. In his novel, Snow,
Pamuk details the political and religious turmoil in Turkey
during the initial years of Turkish Republic when the state
sponsored Westernization project was in its full force in the
country. The whole plot of this novel revolves around political
rivalries, murders, plots and espionage. Snow details a
journalistic account of a freelance poet and journalist named
Ka who actually travels to snowclad town of Kars to track
down and reunite with his beloved whom he could not have
married. He poses as a journalist and develops contacts with
all sorts of ideologically opposing organisations: extremist
militant groups, spies, headscarf political women, Islamist
preachers as well as the government officials and press
agencies. He witnesses a political stage performance that
triggers the coup and hence political killings and tortures. He
is finally forced to leave the country, yet is murdered by
political militants abroad for being suspected as a government
agent. The plot of the novel revolves around confusion and
unending turmoil, yet the solution as suggested by Pamuk is
Cosmopolitanism as the only way of life that can possibly
make the multifaceted chaos simmer down. The protagonist
interacts and makes close contacts with all the political and
social organisations as well as with extremist gangs; yet he
does not betray any group nor is he loyal to any of them. In
fact, he has regard to every organisation having due
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e-ISSN: 2457-0346, Volume-1, Issue-3, September-December, 2017
97
consideration to them respectively. His cosmopolitan
worldview allows him to feel affiliations and allegiance to all
such organisation which he comes in contact with. He
participates in the political discussions of the religious groups
who are against Westernization; he comes close to the militant
organization’s hero, named Blue whose head is wanted by the
Government. On the other hand, he has contacts with those
government representatives who are headlong diving into the
waves of Westernisation; but Ka is also critical of the extreme
nationalism which has caught the country to boil in a cauldron
of rivalries and ploys.
In an interview with NPQ, Pamuk talks about the
“antinational” and “cosmopolitan” perspective on the part of
Europe and Islamic countries, which is the central idea of his
novel Snow:
If people resent going down this path of Westernization,
you should not bomb them or kill them. You should not feel
contempt for them and call them stupid. You have to
understand the resentment and the anger and engage it. You
have to have compassion for their fear and insecurity. If you
want to globalize the world, you have to do this. . .. As
immigrants from Muslim countries become large minorities
throughout Europe, and if Turkey joins the European Union,
Europe will have ‘two souls,’ like the ambivalent characters in
Snow.” (Pamuk, “Two Souls” 11)
In Pamuk’s novels, the diverse cultural interaction
highlights the cosmopolitanism as the only way out of the
sectarian allegiances. He examines this ambiguous cross-
national relation from a cosmopolitan perspective and tries to
find a synthesis from this interaction. In the last chapter of The
White Castle, Pamuk, through the character of the Sultan asks
some rhetorical questions which have answers in the
Cosmopolitan vision of the world where there is no difference
among cultures and peoples around the world; and that the
basic human essence is same everywhere:
“. . . must one be a sultan to understand that men, in the
four corners and seven climes of the world, all resembled one
another? . . . Was it not the best proof that men everywhere
were identical with one another that they could take each
other’s place? (Pamuk, White Castle 136).
Orhan Pamuk seeks a synthesis between the ‘national’
and ‘transnational’ and enlarges the “concentric circles” of
allegiance from local to universal (Nussbaum 9)vii akin to what
Robert Fine calls “new cosmopolitanism.” Robert Fine
suggests that cosmopolitanism seeks to find a synthesis
between national and transnational:
“The new cosmopolitanism is not so much about the
displacement of the national by the transnational and thence
the international but rather about the ‘fit’ between these levels
of political community. It is about the necessity of enlarging
our political imagination so as to be able to break from the
98
fetters of nationalism politically and methodologically. (Fine
56)
Endeavoring to materialize the ‘fit between these levels of
political community’ Pamuk challenges the “legacies of
Turkism”, the ideology of Turkish nationalism that rejected
the “Istanbul cosmopolitanism” and committed “the
denigration of Ottoman Islamic past” (Goknar, “Secular” 305).
In The Silent House, the grandfather Dr. Salahettin goes
against the extreme nationalism and is therefore sent on exile
to Paris by Ziya Pashaviii. Salahettin blurts out, “these
Unionists are going off the deep end, they can’t stand
freedom, how are they different from Abdulhamit?” ix (20).
Salahettin’s grandchildren are more or less Cosmopolitan who
have nothing to do with the Idealist nationalism which Hasan
[their second cousin] is a member of. Nilgun is a left wingx
activist; she believes in the ideas of class equality and hates
the Idealist nationalists and calls Hasan a “crazy fascist”
(275).
Pamuk’s characters are diverse—ranging from the
extreme fundamentalists, islamists, leftists, modernists to
extreme Kemalists as evident from most of his novels as
mentioned above. Majority of his characters live in what
Bhabha calls the “moment of scattering that in other times and
other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of
gathering . . . of other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the
past in a ritual revival . . .” (Bhabha, Location of Culture 199).
In the midst of these gatherings, as Bhabha maintains, “there
emerges a historical fact of single importance” (200). Pamuk’s
characters live in the “third space” both within and without the
national boundary. The retroactivity of the characters in
Pamuk’s novels attests their historical belongingness to the
nation and Turkish identity,xi. Fatima, in The Silent House,
serves a link between the old traditional past and the
conflicting modernized Turkey. She lives in an old mansion,
alone and abandoned. Her grandchildren visit her only in
vacations and that also for a week a year. She visits the
cemetery for prayers where her husband, Salahettin, her son
Dogan and his wife lay at rest. She is a witness to the socio-
cultural and political transformations that she has experienced
through ninety years of her age. She recounts the impact of
these social and cultural transformations on her husband:
Salahettin, her dead husband, was a doctor by profession who
believed that “atheism and secularism will do the whole
country good.” Fatima is deeply religious and does not want to
live with the sin of her dead husband Salahettin who was a
secularist and believed that God does not exist. After
Salahettin died, Fatima wanted to get rid of all the sins he had
collected in all his writings and papers which he had worked
on to tell his countrymen that there exists no God. She burned
all the papers and books which Salahettin had made a library
of. For Salahettin, the ideas that he collected spending “years
shifting through French books” were the pearls that he wrote
“in a language my people can understand” (Pamuk, Silent
House 218). Their grandchildren Metin, Faruk and Nilgun are
more westernized and bear the legacy of their secular, atheist
Journal of Arts, Culture, Philosophy, Religion, Language and Literature
e-ISSN: 2457-0346, Volume-1, Issue-3, September-December, 2017
Nasir Faried Butt
grandfather. They represent the generations that are affected
by the secularization and westernization process engineered by
Mustafa Kemal in 1920’s and 1930’s. On the other hand,
Hasan represents the unprivileged class of people who bears
anger and disgust for the well-to-do westernized and secular
groups. He dreams of washing his country of Communists and
hopes that he will someday rise to power. He is caught in
Turkish Islamist nationalism and dreams of renovation of
Ottoman-like power. The novel portrays tensions and
insecurities of modern Turkey caught between two worlds:
Europe and the Middle East.
However, Pamuk’s novels generally deal with the
conflicts ranging from East-West tussle, through multivalent
political rivalry in the region, yet his faith on cross-cultural
and cross-ideological understanding by means of
Cosmopolitan worldview is also suggestive in the texts. His
The White Castle, is highly suggestive of such perspective and
solution. The novel The White Castle details the cross-cultural
relationship between a Venetian slave and his Turkish master
hoja, who are the representatives of the Western and Ottoman
cultures respectively. The postmodern plot and narration of the
novel helps us to a great deal to understand what Pamuk tries
to highlight. The two characters, however, are poles apart, yet
they are lookalikes and moreover they exchange their
identities by the end of the story. The Venetian takes hoja’s
place as the master and the hoja in turn is “freed” by the
Venetian after they exchange their places. This literal
exchange between the two characters’ identity is highly
metaphorical in that it refers to idea of cosmopolitan
worldview wherein cultural exchange entails to uniformity of
the world citizens beyond any cultural barrier.
Pamuk’s assertion of Turkishness, in spite of his
transnational and cosmopolitan position, manifests itself in his
characters. Noticing the ambivalence in Pamuk’s
cosmopolitan position, Ian Almond notes:
Pamuk admits to two selves: A Western, secular, pro-
Enlightenment rationalist, and an alternative self, implicitly
Eastern, more closely linked with feelings and pleasure.
Pamuk's attitude towards Islam in The Black Book will reflect
this precarious dualism: on the one hand, the secular
Orientalist and cynical nonbeliever will expose the myths of
various Islamic traditions . . .. On the other hand, the
vanquishing of such traditions, and implicitly the larger
narrative which sustained them, will leave a sadness and sense
of regret in Pamuk's more sensitive, unrational (Eastern) self.
(78)
From the above discussion, it can be discerned that the
dilemma of establishing “self” does not permit Pamuk’s
characters to have affinity to “Others” in true sense. This
challenges the cosmopolitan position and its tenets. Again,
most of Pamuk’s characters are more or less the product of
social engineering of Kemalist nationalism that gives rise to
affinity towards the West and other “modernized” [my
emphasis] cultures, and at the same time binds them to the
‘Humanity at Large?’: The Contesting Tropes of Patriotism and Cosmopolitan in Orhan Pamuk’s The Silent House,
The White Castle and Snow
roots of nationalism and exclusive Turkishness. Pamuk, no
doubt, looks at his nation “through the lens of other” in order
to “see what in our practices is local and nonessential, what is
more broadly shared,” but his concern and allegiance to his
home is also strong (Nussbaum 11). This goes perfectly in line
with Sissela Bok’s criticism of Nussbaum’s idea of
“concentric circles” of allegiance that is the basic tenet if
cosmopolitanism. Sissela argues that “for whatever
perspectives we view the image of concentric circles, it
conveys our ambivalence about the conflicting calls on our
concern and sense of responsibility” (Bok 40). This conflicting
call on sense of responsibility can be very well discerned in
Orhan Pamuk. In his 2006 Nobel Prize lecture, Pamuk
himself asserts his claim of Istanbul and his strong affiliation
to the native city which he loves:
What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child
and a young man: for me the center of the world is Istanbul.
This is not just because I have lived there all my life, but
because, for the last thirty-three years I, have been narrating
its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its
mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous
characters, its dark spots, its days and its nights, making them
part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this
world I had made with my hands, this world that existed only
in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I
actually lived. (Pamuk, “My Father’s Suitcase” 11)
The above reading of the three novels boils down to the
conclusion that amidst the confusion and conflicts that marred
the Turkish identity and politics during the turn of the 21st
Century, Pamuk as a new age writer, enjoys the ambivalence
in identity that is scattered and yet rooted; westernized yet
quintessentially Turkish; modernized yet sticking to history
and culture—in short, cosmopolitan; its concentric circles
expanding and encircling local allegiance and culminating in
international and inter-sectarian understanding and unity. He
sees Istanbul from a third space and through the lens of the
“other;” impresses upon distinct and shared values which he
considers both local as well as universal; but his concern and
allegiance to his own culture and nation is also strong. His
novels delineate identities that are as complex as the conflicts
in the region. The above novels depict the conflicts among the
youth of the same generation but different ideologies that
encompass East-West tussle, religious versus secular,
traditional versus modern and so on. The cosmopolitan
perspective which the author envisions and professes is not
free from ambivalence, yet a possible and relatively effective
mode to be a solution to all cultural and political questions.
Bibliography
[1] Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry of Man: Ambivalence in
Colonial Discourse,” The Location of Culture, 95-121.
[2] Introduction. Location of Culture, 1-27.
[3] The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.
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[4] Bok, Sissela. “From Part to Whole.” Cohen 38-44. Cohen,
Joshua, ed. For Love of Country? Martha C Nussbaum. 2nd ed.
Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. Print.
[5] Goknar, Erdag. “Orhan Pamuk and the Ottoman Theme.” World
Literature Today 80. 6 (2006): 34-38. JSTOR. Web, 20 Nov.
2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40159242>.
[6] Fine, Robert. Cosmopolitanism. London: Routledge, 2007. Print.
[7] Naseem, M. Ayaz and Emery J Hyslop-Margison, “Nussbaum’s
Concept of Cosmopolitanism: Practical Possibility or Academic
Delusion?” Paideusis, 15.2 (2006): 51-60. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.
<http://journals.sfu.ca/paideusis/index.php/paideusis/article/dow
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[8] Nussbaum, Martha C. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.”
Cohen 3-20
[9] Sen, Amartya. “Humanity and Citizenship.” Cohen 111-118.
[10] Pamuk, Orhan. Snow. Trans. Maureen Freely. 2002. New York:
Faber and Faber, 2004. Print.
[11] Interview. “Two Souls of Turkey,” New Perspectives Quarterly
24.3 (2007): 9-11. Wiley Online Library. Wiley Web. 7 Nov.
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[13] Silent House. Trans. Robert Finn. 2012. London: Penguin
Books, 2013. Print. Trans. of Sessiz Ev. Istanbul: Iletisim
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Notes
i
Stoic philosophy was a moral philosophy and propounded theories
of mind. Stoicism has its roots in classical Greek and Roman
times. The stoics believed that the states of mind and the acts were
states of corporeal soul. Diogenes was one of the Stoic Cosmo
polites, who believed in universal citizenship. See “Stoic
Philosophy of Mind” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
ii
See Nussbaum’s “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” pp.20.
iii
Nussbaum refers to Tagore’s Novel Home and the World in which
Bimla complains that “her husband the cosmopolitan Hindu
landlord Nikhil, is cool in his devotion to the cause” of the
Swadeshi movement (Nussbaum 3 and that he has not been able
wholeheartedly to accept the spirit of Bande Mataram.” Here
Nussbaum impresses on the idea that extreme nationalism and
blind patriotism limits one’s vision of universal humanity.
iv
See Gertrude Himmlefarb in her essay Illusions of Cosmopolitanism
argues that the basic tenets of Cosmopolitanism justice, reason and
right are the western values and not accepted by many other
nations. For Love of Country? (pp. 72-77). Elaine Scarry in her
essay The Difficulty if imagining the other argues that the one
cannot imagine others with their full weight; and that solving the
problems of relation with foreign people should be tackled by
international constitutional measures (ibid 99-110)
v
See Fine, Robert. Preface. Cosmopolitanism
vi
For further detail of the rise of cosmopolitanism during
Enlightenment, see Naseem and Margison 52
100 Nasir Faried Butt

vii
Nussbaum maintains that we are surrounded by concentric circles
of allegiance. These circles start from self and increase their
diameters including family, then in order, neighbours and society,
“fellow city dwellers and fellow countrymen” and so on. Outside
these circles is a largest one, humanity as a whole.”
viii
Talat Pasha was the Grand Vizir of the Ottoman Empire from
1913 to 1918 who later on with other members of nationalist
Committee for Union and Progress ruled de facto during the First
World War.
ix
Abdulhamit was the last Ottoman monarch who abdicated in 1918
on account of the political instability and the loss of majority of
Ottoman provinces.
x
Nilgun’s left wing affinity is based on universal/international
equality. Marxism according to Fine was grounded on international
issues of inequality. He argues that “Karl Marx wrote of capitalism
as a world system deeply disintegrative of nation-states and saw
worldwide capitalism as the base on which the project of human
emancipation and a science of human association could be built
up.” (Fine, Preface Cosmopolitanism, pp. ix)
xi
Here by “Turkish identity” I mean not the Turkishness imported by
Kemalists but the historical identity of Turkish people irrespective
of social revolution or cultural transformation put forward by the
process of westernization and modernization during and after the
birth of Turkish republic.

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