Pamuk's Snow and Gordimer's July's People

¶ … real-time moments when it is being made, can seem plodding and pedantic as easily as it can seem earth-shatteringly significant. Because the functioning of the body, the ruminations of the mind, and interactions with people both significant and insignificant can later come to have weighty import, however, it is important that we are aware of how we move through historical events. Literature often serves the purpose of helping to illuminate the meaning of those quiet moments in times of large events even better than a straightforward recounting of actual events. In its imaginative retelling of stories both large and small, literature helps us to find the kernel of truth in daily life that, though merely imagined, can be applied to our actual existence in powerful new ways.

Nadine Gordimer's July's People and Orhan Pamuk's Snow are two novels which imagine quiet moments that occur to people in the midst of large-scale changes in order to provide new lenses for viewing the world and the people around us. In this paper, the two novels will be summarized and analyzed in order to draw out meanings about the times and locales the novels address, in an effort to make sense of the historical events that would otherwise have been relegated to a dry account in a historical text.

July's People is about the interactions of a wealthy white architect and his wife, Maureen, and their (now, former) black servant named July during a time of chaotic upheaval in which revolution is occurring in the streets of apartheid South Africa. The imagined revolution is entirely fictional, but the relationships between the three main characters and the rethinking they each do around their former relationship, when the power distance between them was much different -- including an ongoing internal and external struggle over the control of an auto which serves as the white couple's only means of escape from the violence in the street -- seem real, indeed. In their new situation, one in which the white couple owe their safety to the protection of their former servant, small objects and common interactions which occur in present time, as well as remembrances of things that have occurred in the past take on new meanings. For example, the control over the keys to the car passes to July, who we find (as the novel opens) has taken the couple to his childhood home for hiding. When it comes out that in their previous lives together, July was only allowed to return to that home once every two years, the injustice of the relationship between servant and master begins to make a small appearance. Now that July has both control of and responsibility for the couple's safety, both his thinking about such power and the couples' thinking is challenged. The story is told largely from the perspective of Maureen who, while not an especially evil member of the white ruling class, was still a member of a class of people who profited from other people's miseries under apartheid. The reckoning she does about her life as she finds herself now powerless and in the care of someone she used to take for granted, is perhaps the major conflict played out in the novel. In the end it is this reckoning, manifested through her interactions with July, that drive the action in a story that is otherwise about very little occurring in the immediate environment, even while large struggles rage across the enveloping countryside.

Pamuk's Snow tells the story of Ka, a political exile from Turkey, who is making the journey back to his homeland, posing as a journalist who is looking into a story about young women who commit suicide because they have been forced to remove their headscarves. In a time of modernization preceding the current-day Islamic revolution, he is looked on as a dangerous stranger, an outsider, in the country of his origin. During the story, his interactions with everything from the architecture of the Ottoman Empire, to a former/current love interest, to police spies, to a local newspaper publisher become pregnant with meaning as he searches about for meaning in an otherwise mundane existence. Though, as an exile, his heart should be with the Muslim reactionaries -- particularly since he is being shadowed by the secularist regime -- in the end he feels rootless and dissatisfied with both the changes going on around him and the promise of a return to things as they used to be. His love for his former mistress drives him to write poetry and to perform a poem entitle "Snow" at a local theatre, and it is during this event that the secularist regime panics over a supposed rebellion regarding the headscarves, and fires into the crowd.

In both Gordimer's work and Pamuk's work, the characters are simple representations of societal biases. They serve, therefore, as psychological vehicles to work out, quietly and internally, the large events of the society's external roiling brutality. In doing so, both authors are able to bring to the forefront of the reader's mind the prejudices and preconceived notions of what the society means. Is Apartheid justified? The reader goes into the reading process already having some answer. Then the action of the novel, small and intimate, plays out against the backdrop of the larger society and the reader begins to ask new questions about how justified it may or may not be. Similarly, the tensions of the modernization movement in Turkey are juxtaposed against the little interactions in the street of a man who feels empty about the whole set of events, and the reader begins to view with a fresh perspective the events that have led to the Islamic revolution across the Middle East. In this way, literature become a force for analyzing history as something more than the recitation of facts and policies. Psychology and culture, personal desire, friendship and bias -- these are the things that drive the small characters found in the two novels, and the reader realizes, when reading their stories, that these things also drive the people in his own time and place, and in past times and places, when they were making history.