Open Democracy, UK
Oct 13 2006
Orhan Pamuk’s prize: for Turkey not against it
Anthony Barnett
13 – 10 – 2006
Orhan Pamuk forges a literature for the world from the intimacies of
his Istanbul, and in so doing gives Turkey’s experience universal
stature, says Anthony Barnett.
Orhan Pamuk gets the Nobel prize for literature. Most commentators
will take their cue from the politics of the award, Pamuk being among
the first writers to be put on trial for mentioning the Armenian
massacres of 1915. Others will discuss his novels. I’d like to
reflect on his compelling memoir Istanbul and how it illuminates his
distinction.
It presents itself as an early biographical reflection. It opens with
his strange sense of himself created by deeply feuding parents and
takes the reader through to the loss of his first love and his turn
from painting to writing – all woven through a careful mapping of his
fascination with his native city.
But Istanbul is also a justification for Pamuk’s profound decision to
become a writer who writes in the same family building in which he
grew up.
Ours is the age of migration. To stay or to leave is the question
that dominates adolescence. Often it expands to a choice of country –
or more often the dream of that choice. The pain, necessities and
consequences of migration have become one of the great themes of the
literature of our time. Never more explicitly than in The Satanic
Verses.
Alas, that novel is not famous for its commanding theme and Salman
Rushdie’s insistence on its long history. Should we back Lucretius or
Ovid, he has his characters ask. Do you break from yourself by
leaving the boundaries of your birth, or is moving a vital act of
freedom that leads to the discovery of who you are? To stay, or to
go, and what then happens?
Salman celebrates movement. Without the death of the old how can the
new be born, is his theme. His laureate doubtless awaits the time
when the old ceases to take mass offence at such apostasy.
Orhan Pamuk stayed. But what a way to remain! He reclaims one of the
world’s great cities for itself. His memoir is not an indulgence. It
records the loss of “old Istanbul” with just the right amount of
sentiment. At the same time it replaces its definition, taking it
from the hands of 19th-century literary travellers.
In a neat passage laced with subdued patriotism for Turkish women,
Pamuk gently turns the tables on Edward Said. In his pathbreaking
study Orientalism, Said makes much of Gustave Flaubert and notes
Flaubert’s description of an Egyptian doctor in Cairo ordering his
patients to show off their cases of syphilis to the visiting French
writer. It is presented as a vivid literary moment in the
19th-century projection of the orient as a combination of beastly
revulsion and sexual allure waiting to be “known” by the western
mind.
What a pity, Pamuk writes, that Said did not continue the story to
Istanbul where Flaubert, himself now suffering the genital
disfigurement of syphilis, manages to get into bed with the reluctant
young daughter of a brothel-owner who then, in Italian, demands that
he uncovers himself first so she can make sure he is not contagious.
Faced with humiliation, Flaubert wrote: “I acted the Monsieur and
jumped down from the bed, saying loudly that she was insulting me”.
She demanded to see him. She did not have the intellectual authority,
the network of interests or the external power to “define” Flaubert,
who ran away rather than expose himself before Turkish eyes. But the
story tells a lot about what Pamuk is doing with his own learning and
fluency. He reassesses the western painters and writers who “told the
world” about Ottoman Istanbul. He surpasses the Turkish westernisers
who were in thrall to them. Pamuk speaks with a world voice, not a
local or Istanbul one. Neither unduly modest nor overly boastful, he
says “we live here”.
To do this he makes much of hüzün, a word broadly translated as
melancholia. For Pamuk this state of feeling, between anguish and
resignation, inhabits the city and its inhabitants, including
himself. He suggests that its origins go back to the decline of the
Ottoman empire followed by its brutal replacement by a Turkey which
in the name of nation-building moved the capital to Ankara, depriving
the ancient heart of empire of its ruling functions.
The Turks I know do indeed share an exceptional, I can only say
civilised, sense of hüzün. Yet I have always found it strange,
because Istanbul fills me with energy and as I got to know it, a
feeling that Europe has a New York, a city of hope.
Orhan Pamuk’s achievement is considerably more than writing some
bestsellers followed by an interview about the massacres of the
Armenians. His Nobel prize is bound to be patronised as further
evidence of the need for solidarity with Turkey’s human-rights
movement, and thus as a sign of Turkish backwardness and its
problems, as if he were a Shirin Ebadi in Iran up against an
overwhelmingly fundamentalist regime.
In fact, he deserves to take the same pedestal as Toni Morrison. Her
government in Washington is undoubtedly parochial and in the hands of
nationalist zealots if not fundamentalists. But her achievement is
not defined by the obvious quality of her opposition to them. She
brought the black experience in America to universal stature. Pamuk
has helped make Turkey a world country, despite the hüzün-inducing
fleabites of rightwing jurists and nationalists. Oh yes, and Europe
should be proud.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress