Pandemic and authority in Orhan Pamuk’s nights of plague

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2586140_(Table of contents)

This thesis examines how the plague pandemic in Orhan Pamuk’s eleventh novel, Nights of Plague, engages with questions pertaining to political, epistemological, and literary authority. As a central structural element, plot device, and thematic, the plague makes its mark on the novel in various ways, initiating different kinds of transformations for the characters and the novel itself. Socially, the pandemic facilitates a shift to nationhood, parallels the spread of social movements and the communication of authority, and becomes a way for the author to express his politics. In terms of the authority of knowledge, it proves the futility of a search for purity in thinking, foils dreams of the mind’s total domination over nature, and indicates the need for necessarily “impure” artistic knowledge. Aesthetically, the plague molds the text in its own image, posing the author as an agent for disease and health, and allows for a safe expression of anxieties provoked by the changing cityscape. In all three intermingling spheres, the plague serves as both a leveler and a force for change. Ultimately, reflecting on the role of the pandemic in Nights of Plague serves as a fruitful entry into the novel and one of its main themes, authority.