ORHAN PAMUK: A NOVELIST WHERE THE CURRENTS CROSS
by Peter Byrne
Swans, CA
July 3 2006
(Swans – July 3, 2006) Sisli is an Istanbul neighborhood close to
the water on the European side of the Bosphorus. It has all the
smudged and outdated modern appurtenances you might find in a Balkan
capital. But it differs in the zest of its dominant population, the
brash new Turkish middle class. On December 16, 2005 there was more
excitement in the air than that thrown up by the tangled, honking
traffic. A noisy crowd had gathered in the rain to see a tall, boyish
figure in a dark suit being escorted into the Sisli district criminal
court. To judge by the jeering, his crime must have been a vile one.
Inside the court he remained on his feet for forty-five minutes
while the judge strove to keep order. It wasn’t easy despite the
great number of riot police in full regalia that stood about. The
lawyers of the accused man argued that the case should be dropped;
those of the prosecution that it should be pursued forthwith. The
besieged judge finally got a word in and postponed the case until
February 7, 2006. More important, he referred the decision whether
to prosecute to the Minister of Justice in Ankara.
A lawyer had punched the pink face of an elderly man who accompanied
the accused. The same man, leaving the court, was kicked by an excited
spectator who had been shouting "traitor." The presumed criminal was
then set upon by a woman who struck him with a rolled-up folder. The
crowd surged as he stumbled toward a waiting car. But the police
stood back. Some of their number in plainclothes were busy inciting
the crowd. A banner called the accused "a missionary child," an
insult meaning foreign-bred, impure Turk. Shouts came of "Get out of
Turkey." Stones were thrown. Eggs splattered the car windows as it
pulled away.
The man in the now-crumpled dark suit had just time to look out at
the building opposite the court. It was a five-story block built in
1951 and marked Pamuk Apartments. He had lived most of his fifty-three
years there amongst family and relations. His name was Orhan Pamuk,
and he was Turkey’s most famous living writer. The former British
Minister for Europe, Denis McShane — he of the pink face — had come
to lend support with other campaigners for human rights.
There’s a short explanation of why Pamuk had to appear in court. He
was quoted in the Swiss periodical Tages-Anzeiger of February 6,
2005 as saying, "thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were
killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." This
brought a charge in Turkey of "publicly denigrating Turkishness,"
which could cost him from six months to three years in prison.
Turkish laws enforce Turkish taboos.
There’s also just as short an explanation of why the judge could
send the case to the Minister of Justice and how that cabinet member
could avoid a prosecution. Article 159 of the old penal code was in
effect when Pamuk made his statement. But by September 2005 when the
district prosecutor filed an action against the writer, a revised
penal code had been in force for several months. It was the new
code’s Article 301 that would cover the case. The old code, but not
the new one, stipulated that the Minister of Justice must approve a
similar charge. The Sisli judge therefore felt justified in asking
the Minister for clarification. The response came on January 22,
2006. The Minister of Justice said he was unable to consider a case
concerning the former penal code, and the Sisli court was able to
drop the case. Pamuk was acquitted, but on a technicality.
However, short explanations can miss the point. At the moment a
pro-European Islamist government rules in Turkey. It has staked
its future on getting the country into the European Union. But
overriding power in modern Turkey resides in the military establishment
flanked by old-guard secularists, Kemalist authoritarians, enriched
bureaucrats and small-time zealots who foam at the mouth outside of
courtrooms. Nothing has changed in that respect since Mustafa Kemal,
afterwards Ataturk, founded the Republic. This nationalist force
suspended parliamentary government in 1960, 1971, and 1980, when
things were not going its way. It would like to be free to intervene
when it pleased in the future. Turkey’s membership of the European
Union would make such interference difficult. It would also endanger
a vast system of special interests and privilege built up by this
new elite since the 1920s.
Enter the somewhat ingenuous figure of Orhan Pamuk. As a Turkish
novelist he has attained unprecedented international fame. His last
novel, Snow, had an initial printing of one hundred thousand copies,
an unheard-of figure in Turkey. It goes without saying that both the
moderate Islamists in power and the nationalists ready to pounce on
them have always considered Pamuk suspect. He may have shied away
from politics, but being a novelist in Turkey is quite enough to
present a danger to men of power. Novelists at their best plumb their
feelings and those of their countrymen to reveal what’s really going
on around them. Can there be a greater public peril? Imagine how the
politicians of both sides were flummoxed by Pamuk’s statement about
Snow: "I’m not writing a political novel to make propaganda for some
cause. I want to describe the condition of people’s souls in a city."
Nevertheless, Pamuk’s renown abroad made him untouchable. The move to
incriminate him over the Swiss interview came when the nationalists
found that it would better serve their ends for Turkey to be seen
as incapable of meeting Europe’s standards on human rights. They
hoped the indecision in Brussels on Turkey’s entry would tip over
into outright rejection and the nationalists could continue to run
the Republic from behind the scenes as they always have. The ruling
moderate Islamist Party of Justice and Development saw its interest
in the opposite direction. Europe had to be convinced of Turkey’s
respect for human rights. That’s why Prime Minister Erodgan’s cabinet
put an end to Pamuk’s case before he was scheduled to appear in court
again on February 7th.
Pamuk was left on slippery ground. He’d experienced nationalist
rage up close. There had been library purges, burning of his books,
intimidation of booksellers, ritual destruction of his photograph,
ostracism in the streets, goofy death threats, and other rites
of voodoo fascism. At the same time he also felt uncomfortable in
having been spared because of his fame while his colleagues suffered
official persecution unnoticed by the world at large. But if he
whooped up the abuse of free speech in Turkey — as Salman Rushdie
was doing from a perch in Manhattan — it could well bar Turkey’s
way into the European Union. That’s doubtless why at the time of his
December 16th ordeal Pamuk had only said meekly: "It is not good for
Turkey, for our democracy, for such freedom of expression cases to
be prolonged." With the nationalists free of external restraint and
bolstered by a backlash against Europe’s rejection, they could easily
resume the more brutal censorship of the past.
Pamuk has often spoken more boldly. In 1999 he refused the honor of
Turkish State Artist: "For years I have been criticizing the state
for putting authors in jail, for only trying to solve the Kurdish
problem by force, and for its narrow-minded nationalism. I don’t
know why they tried to give me the prize." He was the first writer
from a Muslim country to support Salman Rushdie when Khomeni called
for his death. Immediately after 9/11, Pamuk wrote in the New York
Review of Books:
We should try to understand why millions of people in poor countries
that have been pushed to one side, and deprived of the right to decide
their own histories, feel such anger at America.
A foot in both worlds, Pamuk could set up no facile us-and-them
dichotomies. He added:
To debate America’s role in the world in the shadow of terrorism that
is based on hatred of the "West" and brutally kills innocent people
is both extremely difficult and perhaps morally questionable. But
in the heat of righteous anger at vicious acts of terror, and in
nationalistic rage, some will find it easy to speak words that might
lead to the slaughter of other innocent people. In view of this,
one wants to say something.
In accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at the Frankfurt
Book Fair of 2005, Pamuk waxed Dostoevskyan on the hatred generated
by Turkey’s 20th century modernization. The nationalists made the
annihilation of tradition the gauge of progress. They attempted to
create something from nothing by fiat. When the results inevitably
fell short of Western norms, their pride suffered. Full of shame,
they turned spitefully against their country’s past and their hapless
countrymen who embodied it.
Pamuk delivered the inaugural PEN American Center Arthur Miller
Memorial Lecture in April 2006. He recalled a visit of Miller and
Harold Pinter to Istanbul after the military coup of 1980 that threw
countless writers into jail. At that time most of the persecuted were
leftists. He noted that at present half of these people are aligned
with authoritarian nationalism, and remarked:
Living as I do where, in a very short time, someone who has been
a victim of tyranny and oppression can suddenly become one of the
oppressors, I know also that holding strong beliefs about the nature
of things and people is itself a difficult enterprise.
Official attacks on free speech have diminished but by no means
disappeared since Turkey has tried to measure up to the European
Union. There are fifty writers, editors, and publishers now being
prosecuted for what are nothing more than thought crimes. Pamuk
hasn’t failed to make use of his international prestige to defend
them. In the London Guardian of June 3 he took up the case of
Perihan Magden, an incriminated newspaper columnist. She irked the
military by writing a column called simply "Conscientious Objection
is a Human Right." (Conscription is obligatory in Turkey and there
is no conscientious objection.) Magden considered the predicament
of Mehmet Tarhan, a homosexual who faced conscription. His sexual
orientation alone would have kept him out of the army since it
considers homosexuality a grave physical disability. But Tarhan would
not submit to the degrading physical examination required. He was
consequently sent to a military prison for four years.
Pamuk’s midstream viewpoint came out in his comments. Ataturk had
promised that the republic would give birth to a new independent
woman of which Magden is certainly an example. But the same army that
claims to guard Ataturk’s heritage has done nothing but persecute
the columnist. A dirty tricks campaign snooped on her private life
and insinuated that as a divorced woman she couldn’t be trusted. As
a matter of fact, without male protection in a difficult country for
women and on her paltry salary as a Turkish journalist, she managed
to raise another independent woman, her daughter. Magden also writes
novels, two of which have been translated: The Messenger Boy Murders,
2004, and Two Girls, 2005. Her first hearing took place on place June
7, with the usual group of jeering nationalists in attendance. The
case was then adjourned to July 17 "to allow prosecutors to collect
more evidence."
There’s irony in Pamuk’s discomfort in a public role and his refrain
about wishing only to get back to his novelist’s desk. He did in
fact begin writing twenty-five years ago with a definite bias against
"social realism" and didacticism. He found the generation of Turkish
writers who preceded him, which included the giants Nazim Hikmet
and Yashar Kemal, to be excessively concerned with putting across
political and moral doctrines. The emphasis on "social commentary"
hurt their art. His idols were Henry James, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf,
and Proust. He sojourned at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and eventually
adopted an approach to the novel that fluently mixed the modern and
the post modern.
In a word, he was not going to be an early Dos Passos, populist
Steinbeck, or the Malraux of La Condition humaine. From his first
novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982, but finished eight years before,
unpublished in translation) his perspective is clear. Turkey is ever
on the move from East to West. It will probably never complete the
voyage, but blotting out the starting point won’t help.
"That Turkey has two souls is not a sickness." This saga of three
generations of an Istanbul bourgeois family much like his own will
be Pamuk’s only novel in the classical mode.
The Silent House (1983, unpublished in translation) is a novel in five
voices reminiscent of Virginia Woolf. In the 1970s-’80s, three siblings
spend a summer at their dying grandmother’s home outside Istanbul while
leftists and rightists join battle in the city’s streets. One tale
within the novel goes back to the reign of the last Ottoman Sultan. A
scholar-physician prepared an encyclopedia in forty-eight volumes that
would at a stroke bring the ignorant peasant nation in line with the
West. But the abrupt suppression of Ottoman script in 1928 — "the
Alphabet Revolution" — rendered his work useless. Artist-scholars
working on the edges where cultures meet risk futility.
The White Castle (1985, translation 1990) plunged into the history of
Turkish westernizing in a freewheeling postmodern way. Two 17th-century
scholars, one an Ottoman Hoja or master, the other a captured Venetian,
strive to prove the superiority of their respective civilizations. Both
are ominously concerned with the science of warfare. But instead of
East and West looming up as distinct realities, a gradual intermingling
takes place in the characters of the two men. At the end, one has
become the other.
The Black Book (1990, a poor translation came out in 1994, but a new
one will appear in the course of 2006) has only an intermittent story
line. A young lawyer searches for his wife who has run off with a
renowned journalist he idolized as a boy. The runaway couple perishes
in an accident and the lawyer assumes the journalist’s identity,
his youthful dream realized. We read insertions of his writing and
contributions by innumerable others. A fantastic Istanbul takes over
as the lawyer questions who exactly he is and what it means to be
a writer.
The New Life (1995, translation 1997) tells how a student observes a
girl engrossed in reading and falls in love with the reader and her
book. It’s that singular, momentous volume that when read changes
both a life and the world. The two embark on a random tour of their
country, everywhere scared by a gimcrack modernity and uprooted
tradition. The young man ends by embracing the novel as an artistic
form, "the greatest invention of Western culture," and will seek the
New Life in the past of his country, which is "suffering from amnesia."
My Name is Red (1998, translation 2001), for many the author’s
masterpiece, sees him enter into a larger dimension, and yet continue
to portray the march toward the West. At the Sultan’s Court in the
16th century the introduction of Renaissance painting threatens the
thriving miniaturist tradition come from Persia. The Italian painters
bring perspective, realism, and personality, all of which challenge
the role of Allah as unique creator. The traditionalists, validated by
religion, do not yield easily and this is a story of murder, lust and,
once more, the intense life of Istanbul.
Snow (2002, translation 2004) for the first time looks closely
at present day domestic politics. The scene is remote Kars, a city
between two empires that the Russians occupied for forty years till
1918. That may be why Pamuk here recalls Dostoyevski. Conflict rages
between the secular nationalists and political Islam. A visiting poet,
who has taken on a Western veneer, finds that a Turkish artist may feel
a deep connection to both sides, but can give allegiance to neither. As
Richard Eder (New York Times, September 2, 2001) has said of Pamuk:
"He is not an ideologue or a politician or a journalist. He is a
novelist and a great one. . . . . His job is not to denounce reality
but to be haunted by it, as a medium is haunted."
Turkey’s greatest living writer can be said to be so close to the
reality of his country that both bickering adversaries who claim to
own it must denounce him. For one side he blasphemes against Ataturk
and the authoritarian state in refusing to throw six centuries of
Ottoman culture on the scrap heap. For the other he dares to speak
without solemnity of religion, respecting it mainly as a social and
cultural fact. Islamist intellectuals also accuse him of exploiting
Turkish history and tradition for purely literary ends of a western
stripe. For both sides he’s "self-absorbed" and "obscure" because he
doesn’t peddle their doctrines or mouth their witless slogans. No
wonder that harassed by government lawyers and the wagging fingers
of the pious, Pamuk stopped writing fiction for a while to reassure
himself he still had Turkish ground to stand on. In Istanbul: Memories
and the City (2003, translation 2005) he tells us all about himself
and his affection for his native place. It’s as if he’s shooing off
the bluebottles of state and religion to be alone with his beloved.
The post-modern stagger through Pamuk’s novels furnishes breathless
twists, turns and sudden startling vistas. But the reader can’t be
blamed for feeling relief that this book of very personal memories
unfolds as straightforward and replete as a Sunday dinner down home.
The numerous atmospheric black and white photographs encourage time
travel and a contemplative mood. In Pamuk’s boyhood, Istanbul was at
its crumbling worst, and he had to scramble to find consolations. The
stone mansions built by the pashas were derelict. When the distinctive
old wooden houses of the city, or the magnificent yalis along the
Bosphorus went up in flames, people stood stolidly by as if they were
being relieved of shame. They seemed more concerned to cast off past
failure than to welcome something in its place.
The author points out that his differs from other worse-for-wear
cities, like Delhi or São Paulo, in that the remains of a glorious past
are everywhere amid the degradation. For him the history of the city
after the destruction of the Ottoman Empire is the key to its mystery
and the core of his book. For one thing, it begins to explain huzun,
the peculiar melancholy of Istanbul, a communal black mood not only
"conveying worldly failure, listlessness and spiritual suffering"
but also "a state of mind that is ultimately as life affirming as it
is negating."
The boy Orhan was not immune to huzun or insensitive to the civic
shambles around him. It couldn’t have helped that his family was
in no better shape than the city. His grandfather made a fortune
in the first years of the Republic and afterwards his descendants
worked full-time at frittering it away. His father’s bankruptcies
occurred as regularly as the family’s stay each summer on an island
in the Marmara Sea. His parents’ marriage was a series of memorable
battles with the belligerents regularly disappearing on their own,
doubtless to replenish their forces. The five stories of the Pamuk
Apartments, inhabited exclusively by family members, shook constantly
with squabbles over property and nervous breakdowns induced by
diminishing income.
Orhan early found consolation in the Bosphorus. Looking out on it,
he would one day write his novels. It was Istanbul’s inbuilt aid to
shouldering the weight of the ambient gloom. "If the city speaks
of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy, and poverty, the
Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure and happiness." The thrill of this
strip of open sea running through the middle of the city has never left
him. He would soon be working hard to make himself into a painter, his
early choice of vocation that would render all his writing arrestingly
visual. For the moment he was passionate to know what other artists had
made of Istanbul. This led him to the work of Antoine-Ignace Melling,
an 18th century German artist "who saw the city like an Istanbullu,
but painted it like a clear-eyed Westerner."
It also led him to a discovery. Ottoman artists had neither the
technique nor interest in depicting their city.
In a similar way, when he turned to writing, Pamuk would search for
forerunners that shared his obsession with the city. Four earlier
Turkish writers had been entranced by Istanbul life: Yahya Kemal,
Kocu, Tanpinar, and A.S. Hisar. They had lived through the demise of
empire and been left with a strong sense of the transitory nature of
all civilizations. "What unites these four writers is the poetry they
made of this knowledge and the melancholy attending to it."
But when he looked closer it was the Melling phenomenon all over
again. The four had taken their idea of literature from French
writers. Their belief in pure poetry came from Verlaine, Mallarme,
and Valery. Gautier taught them how to do verbal cityscapes. Though
aware that this foreign view of Istanbul was not enough to make them
original Turkish writers, the four found no other available at home.
The contradiction hurt. But living in "a city littered with the ruins
of the great fall" they had to settle for making its expression
by western means their parcel of authenticity. "They are the ones
who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and Western
literature with the culture of the city in which I lived."
One wonders how the late Edward Said would have sorted out this tangled
episode of Orientalism. Had the natives of Istanbul waited for one
of theirs, untainted by foreignness, to portray the city, they might
still be waiting. (The technique in painting they possessed had come
from Persia in compass-reversing Orientalism.) Republican France
stepped in to help put imperial values in relief.
Surely Said would have had to admit that each situation of cultural
creation has its own rules and that these defy facile theorizing.
Early 20th century Istanbul at the time Pamuk’s four precursors wrote
was a singular place. Tradition encountered Western culture, long
established ethnic groups had their separate quarters and immigrants
poured in from all sides. Orthodox Christians went undisturbed and
there was a presence of their Roman brethren. Foreign Protestants
pioneered higher education. Synagogues abounded. Sufi lodges dotted
the city and the imperial mosques held sway over all. The variety was
such that Pamuk finds "for the past hundred and fifty years, no one
has been able to feel completely at home." But he wasn’t complaining.
The great joy of his boyhood was to accompany his mother to the shoe
stores and pastry shops of Beyoglu still run by the descendants of
the Byzantines who had lost out in the conquest of 1453 but were still
hanging around. To see Istanbul from the different viewpoints of the
variegated humanity who had contemplated it — even the Orientalists —
was for Pamuk to keep his connection to the place vital and vibrant.
The book proceeds like an old-time provincial museum or, rather,
cabinet de curiosites. The exhibits are short quick chapters. We might
confront the author’s grandmother who smoked ferociously and played
afternoon poker with her cronies, one of whom had been a resident
of the last sultan’s harem. Or we could suddenly come up against
Gustave Flaubert writing letters from the Bosphorus to his mother
about the sorry state of his penis, syphilitic after five weeks in
Beirut. A pile of old newspapers gets in the way and lets us guess
at the contribution of columnists to smooth the city’s manners.
One of them counsels: "Don’t walk down the street with your mouth
open."
And all the time the post-modernist on sabbatical gazes inward at
his young self in rapture before the coming and going of the world’s
great ships that pass, as it were, at the bottom of his garden. He
ransacks the past. If the republican regime has claimed the right
to erase pre-1922 Turkey, why shouldn’t a novelist have the right
to recreate it? After all, to mention the deaths of Armenians and
Kurds only writes in again what’s been rubbed out. A friendly word of
advice to the Humpty Dumpties on the high wall: Sic your regime book
reviewers on a novelist if you like, but don’t demean yourselves with
threats of courts and prison.
–Boundary_(ID_spUWSds/pw3Z3WowimngXg)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
