Negation of Negation: Father as a Vanishing Mediator in Orhan Pamuk’s The Red-Haired Woman

Abstract

The Red-Haired Woman is an atypical addition to the oeuvre of Orhan Pamuk as it deviates from the usual politico-historical thematic and puts myth at the forefront. The novel intersperses ancient myths and legends with personal history to weave a complex narrative in which characters are individuals as well as types. In this essay, the argument is built on the premise that the ‘father figure’ in Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Red-Haired Woman acts as a ‘vanishing mediator’ for the actualisation of the son as a ‘fully constituted capitalist individual.’ Cem, the protagonist, works as an apprentice to a well digger and in the process is transformed into something that is the very negation of his father’s ideals and, in turn, his own son has to go through the same transformation to return to the first movement of the dialectic. Frederic Jameson, apropos Max Weber, puts forward the notion of a ‘mediator’ that brings about a certain transformation and after that “it has no further reason for being and disappears from the historical scene” (78). In Weber’s view, the pervasiveness of Protestant ethicssushered in an ascetic attitude that perceived work as something sacred. This sanctity of labour led to surplus capital and thus a religious outlook brought in its antagonistic ideology. The movement is dialectical as the mediator is not an ‘other’ but an element of ‘pure difference’ arising out of the term itself (Žižek 181). The article uses textual analysis as a method to read the selected text. Keywords: Vanishing Mediator, Negation of Negation, Oedipus, Shahnameh, Myth