Appropriative Remembering: Pamuk's The Red-Haired Woman (original) (raw)
Literary appropriation can be seen as an act of cultural remembering when considering the dialogues inherent in it which link the past with the present and thus fulfill the mnemonic function. Nobel Prizewinner Turkish author Orhan Pamuk's novel titled The Red-Haired Woman is a suitable case for such a cultural remembering with its connective appropriations of Sophocles' King Oedipus, Ferdowsi's Rostam and Sohrab (part of the Persian epic Shahnameh) Koranic and Biblical stories such as the binding of Isaac and Joseph's well. Pamuk has skillfully used the elements of these stories to shape his novel's theme, plot, character development, and temporal and spatial dynamics. In this regard, the text exemplifies not only the postmodern afterlives, receptions, remediations, and rewritings of the stories in question but also the role of creative uses of an aesthetic form, such as the novel in generating memorability. Therefore, the text gives reasonable answers to questions such as how appropriative dialogues can function as a memory act; how the forms of memory overlap, intersect, and connect each other in the fictional context. The present study investigates how we can remember the past by the agency of a novel within a framework based on the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological perspectives of appropriation, dialogism, and memory in the case of The Red-Haired Woman.
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