Oedipus Red
Myths of fathers, sons and free will
It’s the summer of 1985. Mahmut, a master well-digger and his young apprentice, Cem, are 30 miles outside of Istanbul digging a well that will modernize a desolate area.
To pass the time, Mahmut tells Cem stories about fathers and sons from the Koran. He tells Cem that apprentices are like sons and protectors of their masters: an apprentice who mistakenly drops a single pebble from the surface of a well could kill the master who toils below.
Cem is moved by Mahmut’s tales, but is obsessed with the story of Oedipus Rex and a beautiful, older woman with red hair who is part of a traveling theater troupe that performs nightly near the well-digging site.
Drunk on raki, Cem indulges his desires with the red-haired woman who tells him, “I’m old enough to be your mother.” In a fog of exhaustion the next day, Cem fumbles with a bucket of rocks at the well’s surface, dropping them on Mahmut, who digs 25 meters below.
Believing Mahmut dead, Cem runs away, and doesn’t return to the site of the crime for another two decades. He believes, like Oedipus, that if he ignores what disturbs him, it may go away.
Can you predict where Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, “The RedHaired Woman,” is going?
At 50 pages in, I had this book pegged as nothing more than an adaptation of the Oedipus myth, a story governed by the Freudian idea that what you resist persists. Mr. Pamuk lured me in with heavy-handed geologic metaphors and hints that had as much subtlety as a cartoon hero hitting a villain over the head with a frying pan. It seemed obvious: Digging wells was a metaphor for excavating the unconscious. The water that suddenly sprang up was something long repressed that came to light.
That familiar older woman with red hair Cem was inexplicably drawn to: Was she his mother? Did Cem kill his father?
I won’t spoil the book by answering these questions, but suffice it to say that Mr. Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, does more than just adapt the Oedipus myth in this suspenseful, psychological parable.
“The Red-Haired Woman” explores the many myths and stories about father-son relationships ranging from the Old Testament and the Koran to Sophocles, Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex, “Hamlet,” and the 10thcentury Persian epic “Rostram and Sohrab.” In doing so, the novel contrasts Western and Eastern father-son relationships, while calling into question the very need for the strong, authoritarian father figure that seems both universally needed and reviled.
In Cem, Mr. Pamuk has created an anti-hero. He is an unlikable, unapologetic capitalist, a real estate baron who enjoys destroying old, historic Istanbul buildings during the heyday of the construction boom in the early 2000s. In an effort to ease his suspicions that he mistreated — and perhaps murdered — the one man who cared for him, Cem is compelled to erase as much of the old city as he can. He names his company Sohrab, after the neglectedson in the Persian epic.
Cem tears down old buildings and erects huge concrete monstrosities on top of the wreckage for profit because it’s a great business opportunity. But, in Cem’s view, “life follows myth.” Istanbul commits patricide, or erases its own historical past, in order to be modern.
That we come to understand, if not empathize, with the character who perpetrates this destruction is both unsettling and an indication of Orhan Pamuk’s masterful character development.
“The Red-Haired Woman” is a beautifully written parable, a thoughtful consideration of Western and Eastern myths of fathers and sons, and the limits of free will. The book asks: “Is the need for a father always there?” The answer: Fathers are necessary, if only to be killed by their sons. It’s the ultimate act of love and betrayal.