Speaker
Description
Through a plague epidemic taking place in the early 20th century in an imaginary Ottoman island, Orhan Pamuk’s postmodern historical novel Nights of Plague envisions a moment of political, social, and ideational crisis. Undermining existing authority structures to create a vacuum in which new structures can arise, the plague epidemic is not just the driver of transformation in the novel, but also models, to an extent, the spread of new ideas and social movements. In the novel, quarantine, which presents itself as the only solution against the epidemic, is an unwieldy project that can only be implemented with an ideational leap in the social body and that requires social cohesion and notions of nationhood. But how can social cohesion be brought about? How does a community become a nation? How do movements like nationalism spread? These sorts of questions that the novel shines a light on pertain to language in that they have to do with the creation and dissemination of meaning. How does a signifier become loaded with signification? How does an image enter into circulation? How does an author ensure readers shut the outside world out and enter into the quarantine of the text? Drawing on literary scholarship on Pamuk’s works as well as ideas of theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and René Girard, this study attends to the conceptual projections of the epidemic motif in Nights of Plague to explore the semiotic dimension of the social phenomena staged in the novel. It argues that the work, which is filled with the anxiety of “reading” and interpreting plague symptoms, public opinion, and the intentions of those in power, as well as efforts to “write” history and author great changes, can be regarded as a kind of Künstlerroman through the lens of public health. It fleshes out how the author highlights both “artistic knowledge”, which he believes to be especially vital in times of crisis, and his own philosophy as a novelist.
| Keywords | literature, language, health, contagion, plague, public health, nationalism |
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