Breadth, Depth, and the Effects of Form in "Omeros," "White Castle," "Istanbul," and "Echoes of an Autobiography"

While many of the works we’ve read this semester have dealt with similar themes, particularly questions of identity and characters’ struggle to find their place in the world, many of the books we’ve covered have done so using entirely different literary forms that portray these themes  through either vast and changing settings and plot events and extended narratives or smaller, more specific settings and a detailed discussions of specific characters and events.  Derek Walcott’s Omeros is an epic poem, Naguib Mafouz’ Echoes of an Autobiography is a collection of extremely short prose pieces, and Istanbul and White Castle, the two Orhan Pamuk books we’ve read,  tackle the issue of identity, for both individuals and societies, using a non-fiction, autobiographical form and fictional narrative, respectively.  Because these four pieces, in particular, contain similar themes throughout, it is particularly interesting to analyze the way in which form relates to function and changes the way in which the themes of identity come across to the reader.

Omeros was, debatably, the most unusual work covered this semester.  Modern epic poems certainly exist, but they are not particularly common, and even within the genre of epic poetry, Omeros is somewhat unusual.  Often shifting or ambiguous, the narration in Walcott’s epic is sometimes hard to follow as it changes between Seven Seas, an unnamed narrator, Omeros, and Walcott himself.  Changes in geographic location, though typical within the epic form, are also common, with the setting shifting from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia to Africa, the United States, and various parts of Europe.  The setting of Omeros, as well as the sheer number of plot events, is vast, and in many ways, Walcott uses the breadth and movement of the epic form to create a sense of aloneness and crisis, of a changing world in which characters and places are often left behind.   Walcott’s epic also takes place over a long period of time, adding to the vastness of not only the geographic setting but enlarging the setting in terms of the passage of time.

Orhan Pamuk’s White Castle, a novel that explores the idea of identity crisis and the individuality of human beings through two men, an unnamed narrator and a scholar known as Hoja, who are evidently so similar that one could replace the other without the general public taking any particular notice.  Like Omeros, Pamuk’s novel is an extended narrative and with a relatively large setting in terms of both time and place.  While the story takes place primarily in 17^th century Istanbul, the protagonists do travel throughout Europe, and the novel’s setting is extremely large in terms of time, with most of the unnamed narrator’s life contained in the narrative.  In some senses, White Castle is just as “vast” as Omeros, but in another sense, its lack of shifting narration and focus on one or two particular characters throughout make it a much more specific work, approaching the idea of identity crisis with more depth and less breadth.  If Omeros is a national or international survey with a vast test group, White Castle is something closer to a case study.

In Omeros and White Castle, the theme of a struggle to find one’s identity in the midst of a changing world is, clearly, convey through the medium of fiction.  The characters and events in these works, save the few instances where Walcott chooses to conspicuously insert himself into the narrative of Omeros, are imagined and created by the author, and though the settings are realistic, they are not intended to be entirely accurate and historically correct.  Pamuk’s Istanbul and Naguib Mafouz Echoes of an Autobiography, however, fall into the category of non-fiction, a genre which necessarily requires that the themes of a work be approached in a way that is generally more literal, straightforward, and specific.  

Istanbul  is, in many ways, about the same issues as Omeros and White Castle.  Pamuk potrays himself and his city lost, confused, and struggling to find identity in the face of change.  As an artist, Pamuk feels out of place and unaccepted by his family, and as a people group, Pamuk’s family and other members of the old aristocracy in Istanbul feel out of place in a city that is rapidly changing and leaving their way of life behind.  These struggles, along with the struggles of Walcott’s island characters and the protagonists in White Castle, are all the result of the same question, “where do I belong?”  In his memoir, however, Pamuk chooses to make these issues more specific and more personal, identifying the struggle for identity in his own life and narrowing down the affects of what seems like a universal struggle in order to discuss the ways in which this is not only the world’s struggle but the struggle of his city, his family, and himself.

Naguib Mafouz, also the author of the collection of short stories titled Arabian Nights and Days, apparently prefers to compile a number of shorter pieces in the effort to tell a larger story, and in he does this to the extreme in Echoes of an Autobiography.  This book, apparently non-fiction, is a collection of tiny narratives, some mere sentences, that share that generally address issues of life, death, the purpose of existence, and the ways in which we find our place in the world as human beings.  If those sound like enormous topics to cover using a serious of small vignettes, they are, yet somehow, the specificity of these tiny stories is what makes them so powerful.  Many of the “entries” in Echoes of an Autobiography are conversational in nature, though others are simply small narrative pieces, yet this series of small “case studies” come together  as a description of Mafouz’ own life experiences and the ideas that have shaped him.  Ideas like the inevitability of death and the importance or invisibility of the individual are common in Echoes, and the form manages to convey these ideas using both specificity and diversity that would never have been present to the same extent in a traditional autobiography or memoir.

Form, though sometimes overlooked, is an important aspect of any work of literature, and the diversity of form exhibited in these four books shows just how differently similar ideas and themes can be expressed.  In general, however, I appreciated the specificity and honesty of the two autobiographical works and found the vastness of Omeros’ plot and setting more of a hinderence to the successful conveyance of the poem’s major themes.  Still, the use of literary forms that contributed to either breadth and vastness or depth and specificity helped show the ways in which finding our place in the world, our identity, is a concern of both individuals and humankind as a whole, a constant question that is entwined with the human story.