NOVEL MIRRORS TURKEY’S TORN SOUL
by M.J. Andersen
Providence Journal , RI
Oct 14 2005
IN ORHAN Pamuk’s latest novel, Snow, events foretold in the local
paper have a way of coming true. In life, lately, it seems that
“events” from the novel continue in the real world.
Turkish officials recently charged Pamuk with insulting his country,
a charge that could land him in jail for three years. The author’s
offense was to speak candidly about the Turkish slaughter of Armenians
around the time of World War I, and about the more recent slayings
of thousands of Kurds.
“Nobody but me dares to talk about it,” Pamuk told a Swiss daily,
which published his remarks last February.
In Snow, outspokenness leads to surveillance, torture, banishment and
worse. The protagonist, Ka, is a Turkish poet exiled to Germany for
activism in his student days. The narrator, a novelist named Orhan,
traces what becomes of Ka after he returns to a provincial Turkish
city as a journalist, to explore reports of suicide among young women.
So much of the novel concerns the political struggle between
Turkey’s secularists and Islamists that it almost reads as an act
of contemporary reportage. Pamuk’s earlier novels, though equally
obsessed with Turkish identity, are safely set in remote times. With
Snow, the 52-year-old Pamuk addresses the current moment — an act
of considerable courage.
The situation in Turkey is sensitive. For more than 40 years, Turkey
has been trying to join what is now the European Union. But some among
the 25 member nations have qualms. Turkey stands between Europe and
Asia, its identity an amalgam of secularist, modernizing tendencies,
rural customs, and, increasingly, Islamic fervor.
As part of its long campaign to join the E.U., Turkey has enacted
numerous suggested reforms: it abolished the death penalty, for
instance, and increased civilian control of the army.
Yet, since the September 11 attacks, Europeans have hesitated to
welcome a large Muslim nation (even a democracy) into the club.
Recent votes in France and the Netherlands against a proposed E.U.
constitution revealed misgivings about the E.U. enterprise as a
whole. (One of the E.U.’s functions is to bolster poorer areas with
aid; Turkey, with its large and fast-growing population, could turn
out to be a sponge.)
Nevertheless, last week, despite last-ditch resistance from Austria,
the E.U. agreed to begin talks that could formally end with Turkey’s
admission.
The charges against Pamuk thus come at an awkward time. He is accused
under a revised penal code, which permits denigration of the “Turkish
identity” to be held a crime.
Naturally, this is the sort of maneuver that leaves Western champions
of free speech aghast. But more is at stake. For hundreds of years,
Europeans have held talented novelists in special esteem.
Turkey has rarely produced such figures. Yet Pamuk has gradually
established himself as a world-class author. To attack such a writer
for speaking out is not just undemocratic; it is the opposite of
European.
E.U. Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn called the timing of Pamuk’s
case “provocative,” and expressed concern that prosecutors were
interpreting their penal code in a way that violated the European
Convention of Human Rights — thereby weakening Turkey’s bid for E.U.
membership.
The clash in values symbolized by Turkey’s quest to enter the E.U.
mirrors the larger one that afflicts the world. It is not just
a question of Islamic societies versus societies born of the
Enlightenment. It is where precisely to place God in the whole
business.
In Pamuk’s novel, snow becomes a metaphor for God. Ka’s inspiration
has run dry during his German exile. But during his brief stay in
the city of Kars, where God is a frequent and even urgent topic,
poem after poem comes to him.
Ka stands for the modern, educated reader as he enters the farcical
and ultimately tragic events of the novel. By the end, he embodies
the divided souls of many Turks. Snow’s characters want a route out
of poverty and stagnation but without the immorality they associate
with the West.
Throughout Pamuk’s work, internal contradictions take the form of
twoness. His fiction is stuffed with twin figures, who continually
blend and collide. Master and slave swap identities. In Snow, believers
fear their own unbelief, and atheists are stalked by the holy spirit.
No wonder Pamuk has landed in the thick of our discord. The same
unresolvable dualities haunt the global stage. One side yearns for
a sacred community; the other fears that God’s authority will be
usurped by the power-hungry. The divide is as great in Kansas as it
is in Anatolia.
We have arrived at a historical moment in which tolerance seems beside
the point — and novels can find no ending. What else is there to
do, then, but delay the aspirations of nations? What else but arrest
the novelists?
M.J. Andersen is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.