THE FALLEN BRIDGE OVER THE BOSPORUS
By Spengler
Asia Times, Hong Kong
Oct 30 2006
Not since Boris Pasternak refused the Nobel Prize for literature
in 1958 has a Nobel laureate regarded the award with such mixed
feelings as Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. He set out to be a political
dilettante, as befits a postmodern European novelist, and to his
profound consternation has had to become a man of principle. That in
no way diminishes the poignancy of Pamuk’s position, but it makes him
more interesting than the average martyr, in a postmodern sort of way.
I reviewed his most important book Snow two years ago, [1] and
have just read it again, working through a box of oval Turkish
cigarettes. Unlike Austrian pornographer Elfriede Jelinek, 2004’s
winner, or last year’s laureate, the tedious Harold Pinter, Pamuk
richly deserves his award. British playwright and critic Simon
Gray produced the definitive critique of Pinter, who wrote gnomic
verses and sent them to various literati. Pinter sent a poem to Gray
that reads in its entirety: "I saw Len Hutton in his prime/Another
time/Another time." After some weeks he called Gray to ask his opinion;
Gray returned, "I am sorry, Harold, but I haven’t finished it yet."
Whatever the political motivations of the Swedish Academy might have
been, Snow is an indispensable tale of civilizational tragedy. The
pity is that Pamuk’s own case would have made an even better novel;
in the best self-referential fashion, he has become the protagonist
of his own fiction in the theater of the real. Jorge Luis Borges
would have been amused.
When Pamuk told a Swiss interviewer in February 2005 that Turkey had
massacred "a million Armenians" during World War I (the actual number
was more than twice that), he joined a number of Turkish academics who
broached the great taboo of Turkish history. But he underestimated
his country’s swing toward political Islam under Prime Minister
Recep Erdogan. The following June, Turkey enacted the notorious
Article 301 making it a crime to "insult Turkishness", and Pamuk was
charged retroactively. A storm of international protest persuaded
the Turkish government to drop the charges, but Pamuk now lives in
effective exile in New York, where Columbia University shelters him
with a visiting professorship.
During a June 2004 visit to Turkey, US President George W Bush
offered: The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has said that the finest view
of Istanbul is not from the shores of Europe, or from the shores of
Asia, but from a bridge that unites them, and lets you see both. His
work has been a bridge between cultures, and so is the Republic of
Turkey. The people of this land understand, as that great writer
has observed, that "what is important is not [a] clash of parties,
civilizations, cultures, East and West". What is important, he says,
is to realize "that other people in other continents and civilizations"
are "exactly like you".
The bridge has fallen, leaving Pamuk gasping for breath on the
Western shore. Turkey’s Western loyalties were founded upon a secular
nationalism that sought to bury Islam under modernizing reforms.
Pamuk’s theme in Snow is the horrible emptiness of secular Turkey,
with its poverty, inertia, bureaucratic sclerosis and official
brutality. Thoroughly secular in upbringing and outlook, Pamuk
nonetheless evinces profound sympathy for the Islamic loyalties of
the Turkish poor, as well as the terrible attraction that political
Islam holds for Turkey’s disappointed elite.
The poet Ka, the novel’s protagonist, has fled Turkey for Germany
after a military cracked down on left-wing intellectuals. His poetic
faculties dry up in Germany, but reawaken during a winter’s journey
to the eastern border city of Kars, where he has traveled to report
on a wave of suicides by young women. Depression lies as heavy upon
eastern Anatolia as the snow that isolates Kars from the rest of the
world. Dead-eyed, the jobless spend their days watching television
in tea-houses. Young women expelled from schools for refusing to
remove the Islamic headscarf in keeping with Turkey’s secular law
hang themselves in protest.
Kars, as I noted in my 2004 review, was an Armenian city when World
War I broke out. The Armenians were butchered, and their churches,
some a thousand years old, remain as a ghastly admonition to the
impoverished and largely idle Turkish inhabitants. "The Turks of Kars,"
I wrote, "live on foreign ground, buffeted by the Westernizing ideas
of Kemal Ataturk and the Arabic ideas of the Koran. Ultimately they
have nothing of their own, and dwell on the idea of suicide."
There is a museum of "Armenian massacres", Pamuk’s narrator notes
dryly, which surprises the odd foreign visitor, for it represents
the genocide as Armenian murder of Turks.
Ka has an ulterior motive, to seek out the beautiful Ipek, a schoolmate
who recently divorced and might be available. Her former husband
Muhtar has become the leader of the local Islamist party, and tells
Ka about his conversion from secular leftist to impassioned Muslim:
Years went by, the military took over and we all went to prison, and
like everyone else, when I was released I drifted like an idiot. The
people I had once tried to imitate had changed, those whose approval I
once wanted had disappeared, and none of my dreams had come true, not
in poetry or in life … It was as if I’d been erased from history,
banished from civilization. The civilized world seemed far away
[from Kars] and I couldn’t imitate it.
Muhtar resolves to die by freezing, but is interrupted by followers
of a Sufi sheikh whom he meets and resolves to follow. His poetic
faculty returns and he reverts to politics, but as an Islamist rather
than a Marxist.
Contact with people of Islamic faith rekindles Ka’s long-dead poetic
voice as well. He becomes embroiled in the vicious intrigues between
the Islamists and the local security forces, who use him to flush out
a notorious Islamist terrorist nicknamed "Blue". Blue, it emerges,
has dallied with Ka’s beloved Ipek. Wearing a tape recorder with
the police on his heels, Ka meets with Blue. He tells the terrorist,
"Before I got here, I hadn’t written a poem in years … But since
coming to Kars, all the roads on which poetry travels have reopened.
I attribute this to the love of God I’ve felt here."
Blue responds, "In a place like this, if you worship God as a European,
you’re bound to be a laughing-stock. Then you cannot even believe you
believe. You don’t belong to this country; you’re not even a Turk
anymore. First try to be like everyone else. Then try to believe
in God."
The security forces kill Blue in a night of grotesque violence. Ipek
abandons Ka in disgust. Ka returns to Germany distraught, where he
is gunned down in the street some time later. The cycle of poems Ka
has composed in Kars is lost forever. At first this struck me as an
irritating conceit: if poetry is the subject of the novel, one might
expect the author to provide some actual poems. But there is a deeper
and more disturbing point. There is no "there" in modern Turkey,
Pamuk seems to say. The Islamism of Muhtar and even Blue is not the
Islam of the past, but a vehicle for ex-Marxists who have lost their
intellectual compass. The Islam of the brutalized and brutal Anatolian
peasants is a protest against a world in which they have no place.
Blue, the doomed terrorist, demands that Ka "be like everyone else"
rather than masquerade as a Turk while his soul resides in Europe.
But Blue is as globalized as Ka, or indeed the author. He eschews the
cigarettes of his own country in favor of Marlboro Reds, an expression
of globalized American taste as insipid as California Zinfandels
or Ralph Lauren suits. Blue not only smokes them, but praises them
in panegyrics: "Ah, the best thing America ever gave the world were
these red Marlboros. I could smoke these Marlboros for the rest of
my life." That is as close to poetry as we get in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.
Note 1. In defense of Turkish cigarettes, August 24, 2004. Snow by
Orhan Pamuk. Faber and Faber Ltd, August 2004. ISBN: 057121830X. Price:
17 pounds (US$31.85), 448 pages.