PAMUK’S BATTLES
Partha Chatterjee
Frontline, India
Oct 24 2006
Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a master
at mixing known genres and styles.
ORHAN PAMUK’s winning the Nobel Prize this year for literature will
neither enhance nor diminish his reputation. The sales of his novels
shall increase a bit in his native Turkey and, of course, in the
occidental world where his works are well known.
His eight novels, the most famous amongst them, My Name is Red, The
Black Book, The New Life, The White Castle and Istanbul are available
in English translation and reveal palpably his evolution as a writer.
He is, to be sure, a product of the modern and not unsurprisingly,
postmodern world. That he is Turkish is no surprise.
Turkey has been a bone of contention between Europe and Asia in
the last 100 years or more. While being Islamic it has drawn freely
from Europe and adapted this knowledge to suit its requirement both
political and social. It has struggled heroically with the clergy
and the military after the Second World War for nearly 40 years and
it has always had a rich cultural life.
Pamuk the writer is the outcome of this domestic tussle for power
between religion and naked military force both of which have tried,
for entirely tenuous reasons, to chain the cultural worker. Among
the prime victims were poet Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963) and film-maker
and actor Yilmaz Gunney (1934-1983). Of them later. Pamuk, at 54,
finds himself hugely popular amongst the Turkish literati despite his
critical opinion of the governments’ handling of the Kurdish problem
and the massacres that took place to rout out the separatist movements
of the ethnic minority groups. Moreover, his refusal to forget the
killings of tens of thousands of Armenians in 1912 at the hands of
the Turks, while not exactly endearing him to the establishment, has
not affected his popularity even with the conservatives, who admire
his books but not his opinions.
Official Turkey while struggling with an increasingly raucous clergy
is also keen to project itself as a tourist paradise. The mullahs
there are by far more liberal than their counterparts in Iran or
worse still, Saudi Arabia, although they cannot take criticism from
Pamuk who they regard as a man with radical views.
His projection of the self in an individual has created problems for
the conservatives, who despite a fair exposure to European ideas
of liberalism, seem to believe that salvation lies in service to
the community, albeit without a critical understanding of what it
entails. Pamuk’s understanding of his world and the role of the
individual in it is poetic.
"In one of Uncle Rifki’s stories for children, there is an intrepid
hero, who, like myself, takes to the disconsolate streets of his
own childhood in search of the land of gold, harkening to the call
of obscure venues, the clamour of far away countries; and the roaring
sound in trees that remained invisible. Wearing on my back the overcoat
my dead father who retired from the state railroads left me, I walked
into the heart of darkness" (The New Life)
In this one virtuoso passage where time and space overlap effortlessly
linking past and present traditions of storytelling, Pamuk makes clear
his aesthetic, and dare one say, political predilections. There are
echoes in this paragraph of Joseph Conrad, strangely enough, William
Saroyan, an American-Armenian raconteur, and that treasure trove of
stories, A Thousand and One Nights.
Mixing genres and styles
He is a master at mixing known genres and styles. He arrives almost
by accident at illuminating moments. Dr. Fine, the half mythical half
real figure speaks of himself, a certain type of Turkish male and,
inadvertently of shifting values within a seemingly static cultural
tradition.
"Others observe nature, Dr. Fine said, "only to see their own
limitations, their own inadequacies, their own fears. Then, fearful of
their own frailties, they ascribe their fear to nature’s boundlessness,
its grandness. As for me, I observe in nature a powerful statement
which speaks to me, reminding me of my own will power that I must
sustain; I see there a rich manuscript which I read resolutely,
mercilessly, fearlessly."
Dr. Fine goes on in the same vein, "… when history gets rewritten,
this great power moves as pitilessly and decisively as the great
man who has been mobilised. Then fate is also set mercilessly into
motion. On that great day, no quarter shall be given to public
opinion, to newspapers, or to current ideas, none to petty morality
and insignificant consumer products like their bottled gas and Lux
soap, their Coca Cola and Marlboros with which the West has duped
our pitiful compatriots."
Literary journey
Pamuk’s deft, sly putdown comes immediately when Dr. Fine calls
himself a genius. Every megalomaniac in history has felt the same.
His literary journey has also been facilitated by the relative
political freedom that Turkey has had to offer. There is room now
for an individual and his dilemmas.
Not very long ago before Pamuk began writing Nazim Hikmet,
a considerable people’s poet, dismissed as a pamphleteer by his
adversaries in the Army and the government – the former ran the latter
– spent 13 years in prison intermittently for criticising the decadent
Turkish way of life and its politics.
In this age of globalisation poets such as Hikmet are easily, unjustly
forgotten. Then there is the famous case of Ilmaz Gunney, senior by
many years to Pamuk, a popular actor-turned political activist who
opposed the junta at every step and found himself in prison ever so
frequently. That he became a director of rare sensitivity and made
films like Herd and Yol amongst others from prison through his faithful
assistants outside, most gifted among them Sheriff Goren, is a feat
unparalleled in cinema. Gunney died of cancer in exile in France.
Pamuk was lucky to come at a time when Turkey was changing for the
better and was thus spared the psychological, and sometimes physical
battering that Hikmet and Gunney had been subjected to in their times.
Post-modern credentials
In The New Life the following passage signals Pamuk’s post-modern
credentials. Here he teeters between Khalil Gibran and Eric Segal.
"Love is submitting. Love is the cause of love. Love is
understanding. Love is a kind of music. Love and the gentle heart
are identical. Love is the poetry of sorrow. Love is the tender soul
looking into the mirror. Love is evanescent… Love is a process of
crystallisation. Love is giving. Love is sharing a stick of gum."
Gibran, no matter what the lost-it-all Western existentialists say,
was a genuine lyric poet more in tune with the yearnings of the
human heart than most and Segal, despite being the king of schmaltz,
to use an American Jewish colloquialism for high sentimentality,
may possibly have had something to say about human relations.
Pamuk’s sly wit comes into play here. Ingredients: glucose, sugar,
vegetable oil, butter, milk, and vanilla.
New Life Caramels are a product of Angel Candy and Chewing Gum, Inc.
18 Bloomingdale St. Eskisehir.
It is a pleasure to see him put down the American fetish of providing
the consumer with accurate information on the product sold without
necessarily saying anything as in this case, truthful about its
"health giving qualities".
If The New Life is a metaphysical thriller about the art of living,
then My Name is Red is at least to this writer an artist’s testament
of faith and has a poignance akin to Umberto Eco’s Name Of the Rose,
which also has the quest for knowledge as its theme despite being a
whodunit in a medieval setting.
Pamuk extends the art of the daasthan, storytelling, by attributing
to the narrator certain transformative qualities that impinge upon
the consciousness of the reader. "I appeared in Ghazni when Book of
Kings poet Firdusi completed the final line of a quatrain with the
most intricate of rhymes besting the court poets of Shah Mahmud,
who ridiculed him as being nothing but a peasant… I became the
blood that spewed forth when he cut the notorious ogre in half with
his wondrous sword; and I was in the folds of the quilt upon which
he made furious love with the beautiful daughter of the king who
received him as a guest."
His vision of a socially conscious writer comes to the fore while
relating to the present by quoting from the past. This quote from
My Name is Red for example does duty both to illustrate the conflict
between the artist and the patron and the citizen and the state.
"Why did Shah Tahmasp send this terrifying needle with the book he
presented to Sultan Selim? Was it because this Shah who as a child
was a student of Bihzad’s and a patron of artists in his youth, had
changed in his old age, distancing poets and artists from his inner
circle and giving himself over entirely to faith and worship? Was this
the reason he was willing to relinquish this exquisite book, which
the greatest masters had laboured over for 10 years? Had he sent this
needle so all would know that the great artist was blinded of his own
volition or, as was rumoured for a time, to make the statement that
whosoever beheld the pages of this book even once would no longer
wish to see anything else in the world?"
Ibne Sena, said to be the father of medicine, a doctor, philosopher,
was reviled during his lifetime for his ideas. It took several
centuries before Ibne Rashd came along to vindicate him. Today both
are forgotten by the West or at best regarded as oriental curiosities
despite having contributed in no small way towards the evolution
of medicine.
But Orhan Pamuk has made a place for himself as a writer in a world
where both information and knowledge are much more easy to access
and preserve.
Photo: A RIGHT-WING protester holds a poster outside the French
Consulate in Istanbul on October 14. The poster, which reads, "Nobel
for the person who says there was genocide, prison for the person
who says no genocide", protests against a Bill approved by the French
Lower House of Parliament and criticises Pamuk, who was tried at home
in January for commenting on the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks.
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