Mind the Gap
Turkey is everyone’s idea of a “successful” modern Muslim state
A new novel will make you think twice
The Atlantic Monthly
October 2004
Books
“A Bit On The Side,” by William Trevor (Viking)
“Snow,” by Orhan Pamuk (Knopf)
By Christopher Hitchens
Well before the fall of 2001 a search was in progress, on the part
of Western readers and critics, for a novelist in the Muslim world
who could act the part of dragoman, an interpretive guide to the
East. In part this was and remains a quest for reassurance. The hope
was (and is) that an apparently “answering” voice, attuned to irony
and rationality and to the quotidian rather than the supernatural,
would pick up the signals sent by self-critical Americans and Europeans
and remit them in an intelligible form. Hence the popularity of the
Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, who seemed in his Cairo café-society mode to
be potentially “one of us”-even more so when he had the misfortune
to be stabbed in the neck by a demented fundamentalist. There was
a much lesser vogue for spikier secular writers, such as the late
Abdelrahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet, and the late
Israeli Arab Emil Habibi, whose novel Saeed the Pessoptimist is the
favorite narrative of many Palestinians (and who also had the grace
to win Israel’s national prize for the best writing in Hebrew). In
some ways those two were not quite “Muslim” enough for the purposes
of authenticity.
Orhan Pamuk, a thoughtful native of Istanbul who lived for three
years in New York, has for some time been in contention for the post
of mutual or reciprocal fictional interpreter. Turkey is, physically
and historically, the “bridge” between East and West, and I have
yet to read a Western newspaper report from the country that fails
to employ that cheering metaphor. (I cannot be certain how many
“Eastern” articles and broadcasts are similarly affirmative.) With
his previous novel, My Name Is Red, Pamuk himself became a kind of
register of this position, dwelling on the interpenetration of Islamic
and Western styles and doing so in a “postmodern” fashion that laid
due emphasis on texts, figures, and representations. After 9/11 he
was the natural choice for The New York Review of Books, to which
he contributed a decent if unoriginal essay that expressed horror
at the atrocities while admonishing Westerners not to overlook the
wretched of the earth. In Turkey he spoke up for Kurdish rights and
once refused a state literary award. Some of his fellow secularists,
however, felt that he was too ready to “balance” his views with
criticism of the Kemalist and military forces that act as guarantors
of Turkey’s secularism.
In a Bush speech to the new membership of NATO, delivered in Istanbul
last June, one of the President’s handlers was astute enough to insert
a quotation from Pamuk, to the effect that the finest view of the
city was not from its European or its Asian shores but from-yes-the
“bridge that unites them.” The important thing, as the President went
on to intone from Pamuk, “is not the clash of parties, civilizations,
cultures, East and West.” No; what is important is to recognize
“that other peoples in other continents and civilizations” are
“exactly like you.” De te fabula narratur.
Human beings are of course essentially the same, if not exactly
identical. But somehow this evolutionary fact does not prevent
clashes of varying intensity from being the norm rather than the
exception. “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest,” Albert
Einstein is supposed to have said. This already questionable call
to amnesia translates badly in cultures that regard Einstein himself
as a Satanic imp spawned from the hideous loins of Jewish degeneration.
In his new novel Pamuk gives us every reason to suppose that he is far
more ambivalent about this facile “bridge-building” stuff than he has
so far let on. The plot is complex yet susceptible of summary. Narrated
by Pamuk, with the advantages of both foresight and hindsight, it
shows an anomic young Turk named Kerim Alakusoglu, a poet with a bad
case of literary sterility and sexual drought, as he negotiates a
moment of personal and political crisis in the city of Kars, on the
Turkish-Armenian frontier. Disliking his given name, the man prefers
to go under the acronym formed by his initials: “Ka.” Having taken
part in the violent and futile Marxist-Leninist student movement that
was eventually obliterated by the military coup of 1980, and having
followed so many of his ex-comrades into exile in Germany, Ka is a
burned-out case. Pretending to seek a journalistic assignment in this
remote town, which has recently witnessed an epidemic of suicide
by young girls thwarted in their desire to take the Muslim veil,
he is in fact magnetized by the possibility of seeing Ipek, the lost
flame of his youth. As he arrives, a blizzard isolates the city and
almost buries it in snow-for which the Turkish word is kar. One might
therefore deploy a cliché and say that the action is frozen in time.
When frozen in the present, the mise-en-scène discloses a community
of miserably underemployed people, caught among a ramshackle state
machine, a nascent Islamism, and the claims of competing nationalist
minorities. A troupe of quasi-Brechtian traveling players is in town,
and it enacts a “play within a play,” in which the bitter violence
of the region is translated with shocking effect directly onto the
stage. Drawn into the social and religious conflict, Ka seems to
alternate between visions of “snow” in its macrocosmic form-the chilly
and hostile masses-and its microcosmic: the individual beauty and
uniqueness of each flake. Along the scrutinized axes that every flake
manifests he rediscovers his vocation and inspiration as a poet and
arranges a cycle of verses. This collection is lost when, on his return
to Frankfurt, he is shot down in a street of the red-light district.
In terms of characterization the novel is disappointing,
precisely because its figures lack the crystalline integrity of
individuals. Ipek, for example, appears on almost every page yet
is barely allowed any quality other than her allegedly wondrous
beauty. The protagonists speak their lines as Islamists, secularists,
conformists, and opportunists. And the author leaves no room for doubt
that he finds the Islamists the most persuasive and courageous. This is
true in spite of the utter nonsense that he makes them spout. A couple
of Muslim boys corner Ka and demand that he answer this question,
about a dead girl he never met:
Now we’d like to know if you could do us both a favor. The thing is,
we can both accept that Teslime might have been driven to the sin of
suicide by the pressures from her parents and the state. It’s very
painful; Fazil can’t stop thinking that the girl he loved committed
the sin of suicide. But if Teslime was a secret atheist like the one
in the story, if she was one of those unlucky souls who don’t even
know that they are atheists, or if she committed suicide because she
was an atheist, for Fazil this is a catastrophe: It means he was in
love with an atheist.
I should caution the potential reader that a great deal of the
dialogue is as lengthy and stilted as that, even if in this
instance the self-imposed predicaments of the pious, along with
their awful self-pitying solipsism, are captured fairly well. So is
the superiority/inferiority complex of many provincial Turks-almost
masochistic when it comes to detailing their own woes, yet intensely
resentful of any “outside” sympathy. Most faithfully rendered, however,
is the pervading sense that secularism has been, or is being, rapidly
nullified by diminishing returns. The acting troupe is run by a vain
old Kemalist mountebank named Sunay Zaim, who once fancied himself
an Atatürk look-alike, and his equally decrepit and posturing lady
friend. The army and the police use torture as a matter of course to
hang on to power.
Their few civilian supporters are represented as diseased old
ex-Stalinists whose leader-one Z. Demirkol, not further named-could
have leapt from the pages of Soviet agitprop. These forces take
advantage of the snowstorm to mount a coup in Kars and impose
their own arbitrary will, though it is never explained why they do
this or how they can hope to get away with it. In contrast, the
Muslim fanatics are generally presented in a favorable or lenient
light. A shadowy “insurgent” leader, incongruously named “Blue,”
is a man of bravery and charm, who may or may not have played a
heroic role in the fighting in Chechnya and Bosnia. (Among these
and many other contemporary references, the Taliban and al-Qaeda
are never mentioned.) The girls who immolate themselves for the
right to wear head-covering are shown as if they had been pushed
by the pitiless state, or by their gruesome menfolk, to the limits
of endurance. They are, in other words, veiled quasi-feminists. The
militant boys of their age are tormented souls seeking the good life
in the spiritual sense. The Islamist ranks have their share of fools
and knaves, but these tend to be ex-leftists who have switched sides
in an ingratiating manner. Ka himself is boiling with guilt, about
the “European” character that he has acquired in exile in Frankfurt,
and about the realization that the Istanbul bourgeoisie, from which
he originates, generally welcomes military coups without asking too
many questions. The posturing Sunay at least phrases this well.
No one who’s even slightly westernized can breathe free in this
country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one
needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they’re better
than everyone else and look down on other people. If it weren’t for
the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the
lot of them and their painted women and chopping them all into little
pieces. But what do these upstarts do in return? They cling to their
little European ways and turn up their affected little noses at the
very soldiers who guarantee their freedom.
A continuous theme of the novel, indeed, is the rancor felt by the
local inhabitants against anyone who has bettered himself-let alone
herself-by emigrating to an undifferentiated “Europe” or by aping
European manners and attitudes. A secondary version of this bitterness,
familiar to those who study small-town versus big-city attitudes the
world over, is the suspicion of those left behind that they are somehow
not good enough. But this mutates into the more consoling belief
that they are despised by the urbane. Only one character-unnamed-has
the nerve to point out that if free visas were distributed, every
hypocrite in town would leave right away and Kars would be deserted.
As for the past tense in which Kars is also frozen, I have to rely on
a certain amount of guesswork. Although Ka’s acronym could ostensibly
have been drawn from any pair of consonant/vowel first and last names,
I presume from Pamuk’s demonstrated interest in codes and texts that
K and A were chosen deliberately. There seem to be two possibilities
here: one is “Kemal Atatürk,” the military founder of modern secular
Turkey; the other is “Kurdistan and Armenia,” standing in for the
national subtexts of the tale.
Pamuk supplies no reason for his selection, but the setting of Kars
means that he might intend elements of both of the above. The city
was lost by Ottoman Turkey to Russia in 1878, regained in 1918, and
then briefly lost again to an alliance of Bolsheviks and Armenians
until, in late 1920, it became the scene of a Turkish nationalist
victory that fixed the boundary between Turkey and then-Soviet
Armenia that endures to the present day. (This event was among the
many negations of Woodrow Wilson’s postwar diplomacy, which had
“awarded” the region to the Armenians.) From Kars, also in 1920,
the legendary Turkish Communist leader Mustafa Suphi set out along
the frontier region, dotted with magically evocative place-names like
Erzurum and Trebizond, and was murdered with twelve of his comrades
by right-wing “Young Turks.” This killing was immortalized by Nazim
Hikmet in a poem that is still canonical in Turkey. (Hikmet himself,
the nation’s unofficial laureate, was to spend decades in jail and in
exile because of his Communist loyalties.) The outright victor in all
those discrepant struggles was Mustafa Kemal, who had helped defeat two
“Christian” invasions of Turkish soil in his capacity as a soldier,
and who went on to assume absolute political power and to supervise
and direct the only lasting secular revolution that a Muslim society
has ever undergone. His later change of name to Kemal Atatürk was only
part of his driving will to “Westernize” Turkey, Latinize its script,
abolish male and female religious headgear, adopt surnames, and in
general erase the Islamic caliphate that today’s fundamentalists hope
to restore.
Pamuk is at his best in depicting the layers of the past that are
still on view in Kars-in particular the Armenian houses and churches
and schools whose ghostly reminder of a scattered and desecrated
civilization is enhanced in its eeriness by the veil of snow. Nor
does he omit the sullen and disaffected Kurdish population. The price
of Kemalism was the imposition of a uniform national identity on
Turkey, where ethnic and religious variety was heavily repressed,
and where the standard-issue unsmiling bust of Atatürk-pervasive
in Pamuk’s account of the scenery and most often described as the
target of terrorism or vandalism-became the symbol of military rule.
(Atatürk was a lifelong admirer of the French Revolution, but Turkey,
as was once said of Prussia, is not so much a country that has an
army as an army that has a country.) In these circumstances it takes
a certain amount of courage for any Turkish citizen to challenge the
authorized version of modern statehood.
However, courage is an element that this novel lacks. Some important
Turkish scholarship has recently attempted an honest admission of the
Armenian genocide and a critique of the official rationalizations for
it. The principal author in this respect is Taner Akcam, who, as Pamuk
is certainly aware, was initially forced to publish his findings as
one of those despised leftist exiles in Germany-whereas from reading
Snow one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia
had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse, leaving
their ancestral properties for tourists to gawk at. As for the Kurds,
Pamuk tends to represent them as rather primitive objects of sympathy.
Ka’s poetic rebirth involves him, and us, in a comparable fatalism and
passivity. Early in the story he is quite baldly described as feeling
a predetermined poem coming on, and is prevented from completion of
the closing lines only by a sudden knock at the door. I managed to
assimilate the implied allusion to Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. But about
fifty pages later, when another poem was successfully delivered from
Ka’s subconscious, I was confronted with a full-out deadpan account of
the person from Porlock who had interrupted Coleridge at the critical
moment. Pamuk’s literalism and pedantry are probably his greatest
enemies as a writer of fiction; he doesn’t trust the reader until he
has hit him over the head with dialogue and explanation of the most
didactic kind. Throughout the remainder of the novel, though, we are
invited to believe in the miraculous rather than the mundane: Ka quite
simply sits himself down at odd moments and sets out near faultless
poems (never quoted) on whatever paper is handy. The necessary cliché
about “automatic writing” is eventually employed, somewhat heavily,
to account for this. But I was inevitably put in mind of the Koran,
or “recitation,” by which the Prophet Muhammad came to be the supposed
medium of the divine.
Ka is presented to us as a man who has assumed or affected his atheism
as a kind of protective epidermis. His unbelief is of a piece with his
attempt to deaden his emotions and decrease his vulnerability. His
psyche is on a knife edge, and he is always ready to be overwhelmed
by the last person he has spoken to. Yet he can watch an educator
being shot in cold blood by a Muslim zealot and feel nothing. Only
when in the company of beaming Dervishes and Sufis-those Islamic
sects that survived Atatürk’s dissolution of clerical power-does he
become moist and trusting and openhearted. Yet “rising up inside him
was that feeling he had always known as a child and as a young man at
moments of extraordinary happiness: a prospect of future misery and
hopelessness.” Like the Danish prince who had a version of the same
difficulty, Ka finds a form of cathartic relief in helping to produce
the violent stage play that expresses his own fears and dreads. Pamuk
drops in many loud references to Chekhov, and the gun that is on
the mantelpiece from the beginning of the action is at last duly and
lethally discharged. (It is described as a “Canakkale” rifle, Canakkale
being the Turkish name for the Dardanelle Straits and the site of
Gallipoli-the battle that was Atatürk’s baptism as a leader.) The
handgun that goes off later, and extinguishes Ka’s life, is heard
only offstage. But it is clear that Islamist revenge has followed
him to the heart of Europe and punished him for his ambivalence.
Prolix and often clumsy as it is, Pamuk’s new novel should be taken
as a cultural warning. So weighty was the impression of Atatürk that
ever since his death, in 1938, Western statecraft has been searching
for an emulator or successor. Nasser was thought for a while to be
the needful charismatic, secularizing strongman. So was Sadat. So,
for a while, was the Shah of Iran. And so was Saddam Hussein . Eager
above all to have a modern yet “Muslim” state within the tent, the
United States and the European Union have lately been taking Turkey’s
claims to modernity more and more at face value. The attentive reader
of Snow will not be so swift to embrace this consoling conclusion.
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