Classes Transcending Their Boundaries

It seems almost as if I can never escape my class on metafiction this semester. As I was researching some of my additional texts for my paper, I came across a passage in Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book that as much as I wanted to, I just could not seem to fit it into my paper. However, I was really compelled by the ideas it presented and their connections with oral traditions.


"'Once upon a time,' began Galip, 'there lived in our city a Prince who discovered that the most important question in life was whether to be, or not to be, oneself.' As he spoke, he felt the Prince's anger rise up in him and transport him to some other body. Who was this other person? As he described the Prince's childhood, he was returned to the Galip he had been during his own childhood. When he went on to describe how the Prince had struggled with his books, he felt as if he were the authors of those books. When he spoke of the days the Prince spent alone in his hunting lodge, he saw himself as the hero in the Prince's own stories. When he described how the Prince dictated his thoughts to his Scribe, he felt himself the author of those thoughts. Because he was telling the Prince's story in the same way he told Celal's stories, he felt himself to be one of Celal's heroes. As he described the Prince's last months, he told himself, This is just how Celal would have told this story - and he hated the others in the room for not knowing this, His fury was eloquent, for the English film crew seemed to understand what he was saying before Iskender translated it. After describing the Prince's end, he went straight back to the beginning: 'Once upon a time, there lived in our city a Prince who discovered that the most important question in life was whether to be, or not to be, oneself.' His voice has lost none of its conviction.

It was only four hours later, when he was back in the City-of-Hearts Apartments, that he realized what set the two tellings apart: The first time he'd told the Prince's story, Celal had still been alive; the second time he'd told it, Celal was lying dead on the floor of the Tesvikiye police station, just a little way down the road from Alaaddin's shop, under a blanket of newsprint. When he was telling the story the second time, he stressed sections he had failed to notice the first time; when he told the story for the third time, it became clear to him that he could be a different person each time he told it. Like the Prince, I tell stories to become myself. Furiously angry at all those who had prevented him from being himself, and certain that it was only by telling stories that he would come to know the mystery of the city and the mystery of life itself, he brought the story to a close for the third and final time, to be met with a white silence that spoke to him of death." p. 416-7