Abstract
Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2002) presents the politically and culturally divided city of Kars as a space in which secularism, Islamism, nationalism, modernity, tradition, art, and personal desire collide. The novel’s most striking feature is its transformation of political conflict into theatrical performance. This paper examines Snow through Mikhail Bakhtin’s traditional literary theory of the carnivalesque, particularly the concepts of carnival, inversion, heteroglossia, and the temporary suspension of established hierarchies. Bakhtin’s theory is especially useful for interpreting the military coup staged inside Kars’s National Theatre, where political authority is literally performed as theatre and theatre becomes a means of exercising political authority. The paper also considers the headscarf controversy, the competing voices of Ka, Blue, Kadife, and Sunay Zaim, and the snowbound isolation of Kars as conditions that intensify ideological confrontation. The analysis argues that Pamuk creates a carnivalesque political space in which conventional distinctions between actor and ruler, art and politics, reality and performance, believer and secularist, and victim and participant become unstable. Yet the novel also demonstrates the limits of carnival: temporary inversion does not necessarily produce liberation. Through Snow, Pamuk exposes the instability of ideological authority and shows how competing groups attempt to control public space, language, and individual identity.
Pamuk’s Snow
References
1. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky, Indiana UP, 1984. 2. Gökberk, Ülker. “Beyond Secularism: Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, and the Contestation of ‘Turkish Identity’ in the Borderland.” Konturen, vol. 1, 2008, pp. 1–25. 3. Hartle, Jane Eden. “Snowfall on Orhan Pamuk’s Literary Canvas.” Anthós, vol. 9, no. 1, 2020, article 4, doi:10.15760/anthos.2020.9.1.4. 4. Kietzman, Mary Jo. “Speaking ‘to All Humanity’: Renaissance Drama in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 52, no. 3, 2010, pp. 324–353, doi:10.1353/tsl.2010.0000. 5. Pamuk, Orhan. Snow. Translated by Maureen Freely, Vintage International, 2005.
Author information
A. Praveen Samuel
2421316021003 Research Scholar, Department of English, Scott Christian College, Nagercoil, TamilNadu, India.