PAMUK’S PRIZE
Maria Margaronis
The Nation, NY
Oct 16 2006
"Pamuk’s Nobel: Deciphering the Code of Silence in Ankara," read the
headline in the Turkish tabloid Hurriyet–a title that could refer
equally to a postmodernist reading of Orhan Pamuk’s work, an account
of intrigues among Ottoman pashas or a news story about the Turkish
president’s failure to congratulate the laureate. Since the Turkish
novelist won the Nobel Prize for Literature, life has strangely come
to resemble one of his fictions. On the day the prize was announced
the French national assembly passed a bill making it an offense to
deny the Armenian genocide, so that a person can now be prosecuted
in France for denying something that it is a crime to assert in Turkey.
In Snow, Pamuk’s most recent novel, a woman tells the hero about a
museum in the eastern town of Kars meant to commemorate "the Armenian
massacre": "Naturally, she said, some tourists came expecting to learn
of a Turkish massacre of Armenians, so it was always a jolt for them
to discover that in this museum the story was the other way around."
Pamuk was indicted in Turkey last year for telling a Swiss newspaper
that "thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in
these lands," and although the charges were dropped, he is seen by many
Turkish nationalists as an opportunistic traitor who has sold out his
country to win the Nobel Prize. The indictment was part of a broader,
ongoing crackdown on writers, intellectuals and political activists,
which is itself related to the right’s reaction against Turkey’s
bid to join the European Union. By attacking an internationally
known writer, Turkish conservatives hoped to score a double victory:
to frighten dissenters at home and to undermine the accession talks
by offending Europe’s liberal elite. Unfortunately, the new French
law–which also reflects France’s failure to integrate its large
Muslim minority–plays directly into their hands.
And so, like one of the heroes of his intricate novels, Pamuk finds
himself caught up in events whose causes lie mysteriously both outside
and inside his own work. Applauded in Europe for the way his work
combines "Eastern" and "Western" culture, reviled by some in Turkey
for using Western literary forms, he seems impaled on the horns of a
dilemma whose very existence his books question and undermine. Pamuk
has been praised for exploring "the clash of civilizations," for
building in his novels a bridge between East and West. But he describes
his work differently. In his memoir Istanbul, he writes about four
older Turkish writers "who drew their strength from the tensions
between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to
call the East and the West." It’s a subtle distinction but an important
one: the interpenetrating layers of history lived from within, warped
and curved like the strata of sedimentary rock, against the stand-off
of geography as seen from the outside.