Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book (post 2): Its theme of the double—literary metaphor for multiple personality—probably reflects the author’s own psychology.

According to the novel, the gist of its plot is as follows:

“Just before his wife left him, he’d written a novel (his readers called it ‘historical’) about a man who changed places with his double. Later, after his wife left him and he forced himself to become the man he’d once been so as to sleep in peace, he became the man who had written that novel, and when he became the man he’d once been, he was blind both to his future and his own, and he found himself writing his novel about the doubles all over again! It was not long before this world—where everything was a copy of something else, where people were at once themselves and their own imitations, and all stories opened out into other stories—grew to look so real that the writer, thinking no one would want to read a story in a place this ‘realistic,’ decided to invent another, surreal world that might be more fun to write about, and that his readers might enjoy even more…And because everyone can remember being ‘abandoned for no reason.’ Galip imagined they were all curious to know why this particular writer’s wife had left him” (1, p. 165).

Is this psychologically autobiographical, a reflection of the author’s own mind, beginning in childhood (when multiple personality starts)?

The protagonist’s identity-switching (and perhaps the author’s own) did, indeed, start in childhood:

“As a child he’d often imagined himself shedding his body and his soul to become someone new…” (1, p. 224).

However, the author never mentions multiple personality, per se, which, after all, is the psychological condition that corresponds to the theme of the double and to personality-switching since childhood.

And, according to Multiple Identity Literary Theory, when a novel has unacknowledged multiple personality, it probably reflects the author’s own psychology, which would put Orhan Pamuk in the company of many other writers, including other Nobel Prize winners previously discussed in this blog.

1. Orhan Pamuk. The Black Book [1990]. Translated by Maureen Freely. New York, Vintage/Random House, 2006.